'The Fight of the Century': How Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries inflamed a nation 115 years ago today

They called it “The Fight Of The Century” — and they actually meant it. A stadium was constructed solely to host the event, then it was torn down, moved from San Francisco to Reno, Nevada, and rebuilt in a frantic hurry with sticky pitch still seeping through the raw boards in the hot afternoon sun.

In Times Square, huge crowds gathered for round-by-round updates posted on bulletin boards put up by The New York Times. In San Francisco, another newspaper went even further, setting up a ring with two boxers hired to act out the fight as reports of the action came in over the telegraph wire. According to “Unforgivable Blackness,” Geoffrey C. Ward’s excellent biography of Jack Johnson, a tanker ship in the Atlantic Ocean drew close to a passenger vessel with emergency flags flying all so it could signal an urgent question: “Who won the fight?”

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The celebrated American writer Jack London traveled to Reno to cover the spectacle, and spent the days ahead of it gripped by an anxiety familiar to many fight fans.

“I am so keenly interested, so overwhelmingly desirous of witnessing this contest, that there are moments when sudden fears assail me, such as that the fight will not come off, that it may be prevented by some great earthquake or terrific cataclysm of Nature,” London wrote. “Why, I want to see that fight so bad that it hurts.”

When it ended, the result sparked some of the worst racial violence America had seen since the end of the Civil War. The New York Tribune wrote that “rioting broke out like prickly heat all over the country.” Dozens were killed, hundreds more wounded badly. The iconic jazz musician Louis Armstrong was just a kid selling newspapers on the street in New Orleans, but he was warned to run for his life.

“Jack Johnson has knocked out Jim Jeffries,” another boy explained. “The white boys are sore about it and they’re going to take it out on us.”

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It’s not an exaggeration to call the Johnson vs. Jeffries heavyweight title fight on July 4, 1910, one of the most important boxing matches in American history. For sheer cultural significance, nothing would even come close to matching it until the 1971 heavyweight title bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier — also billed as the fight of the century.

The actual contest in the ring, fought 115 years ago today, was not particularly competitive. The aftermath would be far bloodier and, in many ways, crueler than anything that happened between the ropes. The loser went home in disgrace, never to return to the ring. The winner would eventually go to prison on an unprecedented use of the Mann Act, but he knew this was merely the official legal justification.

“My real crime,” Johnson reflected later, “was beating Jim Jeffries.”

By the time he showed up in Reno, Jack Johnson was one of the most famous — and in many circles, one of the most hated — men in America. Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, the third child of former slaves, he had risen through the boxing ranks to become heavyweight champion in an era when it was unthinkable for a Black man to even be considered a full human being with equal rights under American law, much less granted a shot at the most illustrious title in sports.

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He didn’t get there by polite acquiescence, either. He did it by becoming arguably the best technical boxer that the world had ever seen, and then hounding champion Tommy Burns from London to Paris to Sydney until he got the fight he wanted.

This was a fraught time for the heavyweight championship, which was itself still a somewhat informal but profoundly important title. The famed Boston slugger John L. Sullivan had presided over the sport’s transition from bare-knuckle brawls to supposedly more civilized (and much more profitable) gloved contests in the early 1890s. After he surrendered the title in a knockout loss to “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, it would go on to pass through several hands before it landed with James J. Jeffries.

“One of the strongest men who ever entered the ring, Jeff at 21 stood 6 feet, 2 inches, weighed 220 pounds, and was huge all over,” boxing historian John Durant wrote in “The Heavyweight Champions,” his book chronicling the lineage of the heavyweight title from the London Prize Ring to Ali-Frazier. “He had pillar-like legs, an enormous shaggy chest, and the muscles of a weight lifter. … When he was 15 he was holding a man’s job, swinging a sledge in a factory as a boilermaker. At 17 he worked alongside men in the copper mines at Temecula, California, and it was there he had his first real fight.”

Legend had it that Jeffries refused to submit to a hazing ritual for new workers in the mine, and offered instead to fight the biggest miner on the job. The two were said to have fought in an anything-goes, no-holds-barred match for nearly an hour. It was the teenager Jeffries who was still standing at the end.

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Jeffries was regarded at the time as perhaps the best pure athlete among all of boxing’s big men. He could supposedly high jump five feet, 10 inches, and sprint 100 yards in 11 seconds. If true, these would have been Olympic-level feats for the early 1900s.

Jeffries was never known as an excellent technical boxer, but his power, speed and incredible toughness (he was reported to have taken Bob Fitzsimmons’ famed solar plexus punch — the body shot that won Fitzsimmons the title — and then just stood there blinking) made him the king of the heavyweights from the end of the 19th century through his final title defense in 1904. He beat all the notable heavyweights of his era and then retired undefeated as champion.

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“I’ve got all the money I want,” Jeffries told a friend, according to Ward's biography of Johnson. “There’s nobody to fight me. To hell with all this business — and the championship too! What’s the championship? A lot of yaps run after me to pound me on the back. They don’t give a damn about me. I’m nobody. They’re yelling for the champ. Well, I’m sick of it.”

This was a first for boxing. The heavyweight champion had never before retired with the title still in his possession. What did it mean? Did the title retire with him? The next notable heavyweight contest to be scheduled — between white men — was the July 3, 1905 contest between Marvin Hart and Jack Root. Jeffries was asked to serve as guest referee so he could declare the winner to be the new heavyweight champion. He agreed, but without any special enthusiasm for the idea.

“I will never go back into the ring, so you may do as you please,” Jeffries said. “If the winner wants to call himself champion, it is all right with me.”

It was not all right with boxing fans. Many felt that Jeffries, as great a fighter as he’d been, had no right to simply transfer the title this way. Boxing writer W. W. Naughton wrote that, no matter whether Hart or Root won, “he will still remain Marvin Hart or Jack Root,” rather than champion.

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“The glories of the top notch division have departed and the championship has become largely a county fair proposition,” Naughton wrote.

Hart won the title, though many never thought of him as champion. He vowed to defend it against “any man in the world in a fair fight.” But he also added that the challenge “does not apply to colored people.”

To much of the fight-viewing public at the time, this addendum probably seemed unnecessary. Many of the heavyweight champions of the period had fought black opponents, but never in a title fight. Jeffries himself had fought and defeated Peter Jackson, a well-known Black heavyweight from Australia, on his way to the title.

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But when it came to the heavyweight championship, that top prize in boxing, everyone from John L. Sullivan onward “drew the color line.” To be the heavyweight champion of the world was to lay claim to a certain brand of masculine superiority. How could white America abide the faintest risk of a Black man winning that title and claiming that superiority? Even worse, what if a white man never got it back again?

Hart would hold the title for less than a year before losing it to the Canadian-born Tommy Burns, a former middleweight who’d grown up amid extreme, crushing poverty and never made any secret of the fact that it was the “prize” aspect of “prizefighting” that motivated him. Burns was in no hurry to fight Johnson, who’d been following him all over the globe and haranguing him as a fake champion, but the color that mattered most to Burns was green.

“I am not madly in love with the [sport of boxing],” Burns once said. “We are out for the money, you know.”

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Burns eventually agreed to fight Johnson for a flat fee of $30,000 (around $1 million in today’s money), which seemed to some like a clever way of avoiding a tough fight by pricing himself out of it.

“Surely he cannot sincerely believe that any promoter will give him such an unheard of sum,” wrote the Police Gazette. “… No one wants to accuse Burns of placing insurmountable obstacles in the way of a meeting with the big negro, but unless he shifts his position quickly he will be charged with fearing to face the issue.”

But there was one promoter who would meet his price, and that was Hugh D. “Huge Deal” McIntosh, who set the fight for Sydney, Australia, in December 1908. The timing and location was meant to capitalize on an American naval armada dispatched to the friendly country of Australia as an unspoken warning to the government of Japan, which, it was feared, might have military expansion on its mind.

Burns was no match for Johnson. He was too small, too slow, and too limited in his art. Johnson easily dismantled him, though a police superintendent climbed the ring apron and ordered that the fight be stopped before a conclusive knockout, perhaps fearing a violent white mob’s reaction to seeing Johnson put Burns down for good.

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Johnson was now the first Black heavyweight champion in boxing history. And over the next few years he would do his best to make sure everyone on the planet knew it.

Maybe the most incredible thing about Johnson’s life outside the ring is the extent to which, faced with an early 20th century America that was virulently and violently racist, he remained committed to living his life as if none of it applied to him.

He was, as he once wrote, a “pure-blooded American” whose ancestors had been in this country since “before the United States was dreamed of.” He saw no reason to accept a lower place in society, or even acknowledge that others expected him to.

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Growing up in the port city of Galveston, where the divide between races did not seem quite so stark or severe, he had close friends who were both white and Black. He ate at their homes and knew their families, he said. He would later credit this experience for giving him the foundation he needed to live so authentically and boldly in a country that was constantly trying to get him to accept the status of a permanent underclass.

“No one ever taught me that white men were superior to me, and when I started fighting I fought just as enthusiastically against them…” Johnson once wrote. He also insisted that other Black American fighters who had grown up in the deeply segregated southern states during the Jim Crow era would never achieve what he had in the ring solely because they “grew up with the thought implanted in their minds, through generations of tradition, that the COLORED man was not equal to the WHITE. The inferiority complex which was planted in their grandfather and his father has never been shaken off and never will be shaken off.”

Johnson’s refusal to bow to the accepted white supremacy of the time had long irked white sportswriters, who causally referred to him in print as the “big dinge” or “big smoke” — or worse. When he initially came home from Australia with the heavyweight title, it was an affront to the established order that many could hardly stand. One writer opined that, even if Johnson soon lost the title to a white man, thus restoring white people to "something like our old position," they would "never quite regain it, because the recollection of our temporary disposition will always remain to inspire the coloured peoples with hope."

This was meant as a sorrowful lament, as well as a warning.

The one saving grace was that, Burns, the man he’d beaten in order to claim the title, was himself only ever regarded as half a champion. Many still insisted on referring to Johnson as the “colored heavyweight champion,” since the real champion — Jeffries — had never lost his title in the ring.

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Still, many white fight fans longed to see Johnson humbled. It was simply a question of finding someone who was up to the task. Jeffries still insisted he was retired and content to stay that way. He had a small ranch in California, where he grew alfalfa. He’d also ballooned up to north of 300 pounds, and was a long way from fighting shape.

In 1909, Johnson agreed to defend his heavyweight title against Stanley Ketchel, the popular middleweight champ known for his ferocious aggression and knockout power. The fight was mostly a cash grab for Johnson. He knew he was far too big and too skilled for Ketchel, who was never much a tactician or technical wonder even against men his own size.

But many white fans were able to talk themselves into thinking Ketchel could win, in part because they believed in an innate white superiority. But it was also because they had internalized the message relayed by so many newspapers that Johnson was a coward with a “yellow streak,” a man whose fighting style was built around avoiding the fight, and he would shrink under the force of Ketchel’s aggression.

Instead, Johnson toyed with the smaller man, pawing at him and at times picking him up off his feet and walking around the ring with him while talking to the crowd. Things briefly threatened to get serious for Johnson when he was dropped by a Ketchel blow in Round 12. But Johnson rose almost immediately and flattened Ketchel, knocking him out cold and removing several of his teeth in the process. The promised “yellow streak” had never materialized.

In reality, Johnson was one of boxing’s early defensive geniuses. His footwork and ability to manage distance were far ahead of anyone in the sport at the time. He learned at least some of this craft from former opponent Joe Choynski, who knocked out a young Johnson in his hometown of Galveston early on in Johnson’s career. The fight was raided by Texas Rangers for violating a state law against prizefighting, and the two were thrown into the same jail cell while a grand jury considered possible indictments against them.

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Johnson and Choynski were free to spend each night at home in their own beds, but were expected to return to the jail each morning. Mostly to pass the time, Choynski began giving Johnson boxing lessons. “Chrysanthemum Joe” was an undersized heavyweight who’d had to learn the finer points of boxing technique just to survive in the ring. In Johnson he found an eager pupil overflowing with raw ability and impressive speed.

“A man who can move like you should never have to take a punch,” Choynski is said to have told Johnson in that jail cell. Johnson seemed to take that literally.

His skill at avoiding punches was one of his greatest strengths, and so his many detractors attempted to paint it as a weakness. His unwillingness to wade into brawls was a sign that he had no stomach for a real fight, they said. All they needed was a white fighter who could prove it in the ring.

After Johnson’s knockout of Ketchel, the public pleas for a Jeffries return grew to a roar. It wasn’t just the anguish of seeing Johnson destroy a white champion that irked people, it was also his personal behavior, now more public than ever under the microscope of fame.

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The San Francisco Examiner reported that Johnson was “running wild” after the Ketchel victory. He was openly traveling with multiple white women with whom he had romantic relationships. He flaunted his wealth in the form of expensive clothes and cars. The latter got him fined and arrested several times, including one incident when he drove his roadster through a parade route, waving and smiling at the assembled crowd.

There was also great concern about the effect he was having on other Black people in America. A story from the Associated Press reported that, during the Ketchel fight, steamboat traffic on the Mississippi River had come to a halt in Memphis, because the Black deckhands had insisted on staying ashore until they learned the result of the fight via telegraph dispatches. When they learned Jackson had won, traffic was delayed still further by their celebrations.

The consensus among American newspapers was that there was only one man who could put a stop to this, and it was Jeffries. The famed writer Jack London, who spilled many barrels of ink on the subject of boxing as both a journalist and novelist, did as much as anyone to fan these racially motivated flames in the aftermath of the Ketchel fight.

“A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson’s,” London wrote after the bout, referring to the gold fillings in Johnson’s teeth. “But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.”

Jeffries did not accept the challenge happily. He was content in his retirement. He was also a long way from his former physical condition. But at a certain point, refusing this assignment that had been heaped on him against his will began to seem unthinkable.

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Then there was also the question of money. Promoter George “Tex” Rickard promised the fighters the largest purse in boxing history — more than $3,000,000 in today’s money. He was also willing to give them the bulk of the proceeds from films of the fight, which promised to be lucrative — especially if Jeffries won. Both fighters agreed, and the bout was set for San Francisco, with a new stadium to be built solely for the purpose of hosting the event.

Johnson’s only stipulation for the location was that it take place anywhere but the American South. As fearless as he appeared in the face of the frothing racism of the time, he also wasn’t stupid. The possibility that he would be murdered either before or after the fight was very real, and Johnson knew it.

The lead-up to the bout was fraught with challenges. For one, there was the question of whether Johnson could stay out of jail. After signing on for the fight, both Johnson and Jeffries had embarked on vaudeville tours meant to drum up publicity and cash in on anticipation of the bout. Jeffries earned more than $2 million in today’s money for his tour, which he went through with through gritted teeth. Johnson’s tour was marked with arrests and lawsuits and more accusations of vehicular menace, not to mention increasing public outrage over his shifting retinue of white female companions.

“Johnson has become reckless and foolish,” sportswriter C. E. Van Loan wrote. “If he ever knew his place he has forgotten it. An ordinary day-laboring negro charged with some of the offenses he committed would have spent a long time in jail. … It took a long time to get a white man — the only white man who has a chance to beat the black champion — out of his comfortable retirement, and having got Jeff hooked in, it would be a shame if anything should happen to call the whole thing off indefinitely. Please be good, Johnson! After July Fourth you can go as far as you like — get 10 years if you like — but at the present time three or four months in the Bastille would be fatal.”

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There was also mounting pressure on various elected officials in California to call the fight off. Some were concerned about what it might do to race relations in America if Johnson beat the practically godlike Jeffries. Others, still suspicious after widespread rumors of a fix in the Johnson vs. Ketchel bout, refused to believe that the fight would be genuine.

California governor J.N. Gillette had come out against it, saying the fight was sure to be a fix meant to bilk a gullible public out of their money.

“Anybody with the least sense knows the whites of this country won’t allow Johnson or any other negro to win the world’s championship from Jeffries. … Johnson knows that. He’s no fool. He knows that to win that fight he would have to whip every white man at the ringside. So he has agreed to lay down for the money.”

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Jeffries was indignant at the suggestion that he’d be involved in a sham fight, whether on the winning or the losing end.

“I have never faked the public, nor am I starting now,” Jeffries told reporters. “… Johnson knows that I hate the ground he walks on, that I consider him an accident in the championship class, and that I promise to give him the worst beating ever given any man in the ring. There has been no frame-up — there will be none.”

Jeffries underwent a lengthy training camp to drop the excess weight and get himself back into fighting shape. The closer he got to his fighting weight, the grumpier he seemed to become. This agitated mood was exacerbated by the enormous pressure heaped on him as the proposed savior of the white race. Everywhere he went he was reminded of how much depended on his performance in the fight. He received countless letters from all over the country begging him to pummel and even kill Johnson. Eventually he stopped even opening these letters, insisting they be trashed as soon as they were received.

In mid-June, less than a month before the fight, California finally caved to the political pressure. Governor Gillette sent his attorney general to San Francisco to tell promoter “Tex” Rickard to “get out of my state” and take the fighters with him. This left Rickard with just weeks to move the entire fight — and the stadium, which he ordered to be disassembled one plank at a time — to a different state.

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Rickard settled on Reno, known primarily as the place Americans went to get divorced, due to its permissive laws on the matter. Nevada Governor Denver Dickerson asked only one thing of Rickard — his personal assurance that the fight would not be a fix, as had been rumored.

“It will be the squarest fight ever pulled off,” Rickard assured him.

By early July, Reno was the fight capital of the world. The throngs of spectators overwhelmed the relatively small city, far exceeding any ability the local infrastructure had to house and feed them. People paid exorbitant prices to sleep on floors and in horse carts. They settled for any food they could find, and many got none at all. Even the mayor was renting out rooms in his home.

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The immense crowds provided a paradise for pickpockets. One even stole the silver badge of a police officer and then sent a porter to return it, all for a laugh. It got to a point, one reporter noted, that if “a hand was not dipped into your pocket sooner or later it was almost a sign of disrespect.”

Jeffries stayed far away from it all in a private training camp, closed even to fellow members of the fighting fraternity. He tasked Corbett with keeping it that way, which led to a particularly tense standoff when John L. Sullivan, the great former champ who Corbett had retired when he knocked Sullivan out to claim the heavyweight title, came to wish Jeffries well. Ketchel also made an appearance and was deemed to have been too friendly with Johnson to be trusted now. Jeffries told “Farmer” Burns, a famous wrestler who’d been brought into the Jeffries camp to improve Jeffries’ clinch fighting (one of Johnson’s many strengths), to pick Ketchel up and physically throw him out.

Johnson, on the other hand, ran his camp like a carnival. He seemed to be all smiles while welcoming visitors, even taking them for wild joy rides in his fast cars. At night, however, he had armed guards on the premises. The death threats had started even before he accepted the fight, and had never stopped — even after Jeffries demanded it, saying it would be a disgrace if anyone harmed Johnson before or after the fight.

As the final contest loomed, many white sportswriters seemed to have convinced themselves that Jeffries’ racial pedigree alone would guarantee victory. Writing for "Collier’s," Arthur Ruhl insisted that Jeffries would overcome Johnson’s skill and speed with help from the “dogged courage and intellectual initiative which is the white man’s inheritance.”

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Some others, especially those more familiar with the fight game, were not convinced. Even the Nevada governor took a side, telling reporters that he had “never seen a man who can whip Jack Johnson as he stands today and I am forced to bet on him.”

July 4, 1910 was a scorching day under the Nevada sun, and carpenters were still putting the finishing touches on the reconstructed stadium as spectators began to arrive. There were no preliminary bouts for this grand showdown. Instead, there began an extensive process of introducing the many celebrities at ringside, including almost every current and former champion in all of the boxing world. A band played several songs, including a sorrowful Civil War anthem called “Just Before The Battle, Mother,” in which a soldier laments that tomorrow he’ll likely “sleep beneath the sod.”

Corbett would later claim that Jeffries became so emotional at hearing the song, he was jarred out of his steely focus. To many, this had the classic air of the post-fight excuse. (Jeffries was born 10 years after the end of the Civil War.) The band also played “Dixie,” which made for a somewhat curious juxtaposition to the Union Army ballad, and later there would disagreement over whether or not the band had followed through on a plan to play a song entitled “All Coons Look Alike To Me.”

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Just before the fighters entered the ring, 19th-century wrestling champion William Muldoon gave a speech imploring the crowd to stay calm and peaceful so that no one would be able to say afterward that Johnson hadn’t received a fair shake.

When Jeffries stripped down in the ring, his extensive comeback training appeared to have paid off. Novelist and playwright Rex Beach wrote that, in Jeffries, he saw something he never expected to see: “A man who has come back.”

Rumors spread among spectators that Johnson was slow to appear because he’d been reduced to a nervous wreck in his dressing room, overwhelmed by fear of Jeffries. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Johnson's last telegram to his brother advised him to bet every last cent he had on a Johnson victory. He was certain he would win.

Once the fight began, it quickly became apparent that it would not live up to its billing as an epic battle of champions. Johnson was simply too good. Jeffries tried to employ his usual strategy of fighting out of a low crouch, with his left arm extended and his chin hiding behind his shoulder. Johnson stood him up with right hand uppercuts, then gathered him in a clinch and hammered him in close.

“It was not a great battle, after all, save in its setting and its significance,” Jack London wrote while in the New York Herald. “Little Tommy Burns down in far-off Australia put up a faster, quicker, livelier battle than did Jeff. … The issue, after the fiddling of the opening rounds, was never in doubt. In the fiddling of those first rounds the honors lay with Johnson, and for the rounds after the seventh or eighth it was more Johnson, while for the closing rounds it was all Johnson.”

London wrote that, as with all of Johnson’s fights, this great battle seemed more like play for him. He smiled through it all, talking to Jeffries and to ringside observers. Corbett took on the task of talking back, ranging back and forth at ringside and berating Johnson with racist taunts, perhaps hoping to anger him so much that he’d become reckless and walk into a Jeffries punch. He underestimated just how accustomed Johnson had become by that point to all manner of verbal abuse. At one point, while holding a blood-spattered and exhausted Jeffries in a tight clinch, Johnson is said to have looked over at Corbett and asked where he’d like Johnson to set the man down.

Corbett also tried to paint Johnson’s defensive skill as a sign of laziness or unwillingness to fight. It was ironic criticism, since Corbett had also been considered a defensive mastermind of his day, which wasn’t always appreciated by boxing fans eager for blood and action.

“Why don’t you do something?” Corbett fumed while Johnson toyed with a tiring Jeffries. London wrote that Johnson replied with a smile: “Too clever. Too clever, like you.”

The fight had been scheduled for 45 rounds, which, especially under the hot sun, essentially made it a fight to the finish. But in the 15th round, Johnson dropped Jeffries with a stinging right hand in the corner. It was the first time in his career Jeffries had been truly knocked down. He staggered to his feet, clutching the ropes, and Johnson pounced.

According to London, a cry went up among the crowd and was repeated almost as a chant: “Don’t let the negro knock him out, don’t let the negro knock him out.”

Others reported similar cries, but insisted the word used was not “negro.”

With Jeffries stumbling and staggering, blood flowing down his torso and staining his thighs, the fight was abruptly stopped. He would be spared the final indignity of the count. Johnson’s cornermen rushed to him in the center of the ring, forming a protective barrier around him as the ring became a sea of humanity. They’d anticipated this moment and knew that it could be the most dangerous time of the fight for Johnson.

Johnson would leave Reno without incident, boarding a train for his adopted hometown of Chicago. It was only when the train made stops along the way that he learned of the violence and the riots that had broken out all over the country as angry white mobs lashed out at celebrating Black crowds.

In Pittsburgh, one such crowd was rounded up in a courtroom on charges of rioting, then locked inside and clubbed by police officers. In Manhattan, a crowd set fire to an apartment building that was known to be a home to many Black families, then barricaded the doors and windows to prevent their escape. One white man on a streetcar in Houston was accused of slitting the throat of a Black passenger because he’d heard him cheer for Johnson.

Despite all this, many Black Americans felt that the price had been worth the glory. William Pickens, the president of Talladega College, an all-Black school, wrote that he considered it “a good deal better for Johnson to win and a few Negroes be killed in body for it, than for Johnson to have lost and Negroes to have been killed in spirit by the preachments of inferiority from the combined white press.”

For Johnson, the real fallout from the fight had yet to begin. He reveled in the triumph and eagerly spread his wealth, but now that he’d proven he could not be dethroned by any white man inside the ring, he had unwittingly provoked a dedicated effort to bring him down outside of it.

Eventually, some white authorities settled on the Mann Act — also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act — as the best tool for the job. Originally designed to go after brothels that lured women into prostitution, the law made it a felony to transport any woman “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” It had never before been used, as it was against Johnson, to go after an individual engaged in consensual and private romantic relationships — even ones that crisscrossed the country, as various white women had while traveling in Johnson’s entourage.

Johnson was arrested twice on Mann Act violations in 1912, and was convicted the following year. Rather than serve time in prison, he fled the country with help from the Negro League baseball star Rube Foster, who helped smuggle him on a train disguised as a member of the team. Johnson spent the next seven years as a fugitive, traveling and earning money from various fights and exhibitions across Europe and South America, among other places.

During this time, he finally lost the heavyweight title in a fight with the towering giant, Jess Willard, in Havana, Cuba, in 1915. Johnson was knocked out in Round 26 of a scheduled 45, but would later claim that he lost the fight on purpose, perhaps in some sort of deal to ease his transition back to the United States. Willard replied that if Johnson was going to throw the fight, he wished he’d done it sooner rather than forcing him to fight 26 rounds in the hot Caribbean sun.

Johnson finally surrendered to U.S. authorities at the border with Mexico in 1920. Prison authorities complained that, during his incarceration, he refused to be treated like an inmate, rising from bed when he pleased and meandering in for meals at his leisure. He was released in 1921, and resumed his boxing career in 1923 at the age of 45.

Johnson later wrote in his memoir that his battle with Jeffries “was not a racial triumph” in his view, but merely another battle between individual fighters. The irony was that, mostly due to concerns that no crowds would pay to see him defend the title against a fellow Black man, Johnson essentially ended up drawing the “color line” just as prior white champions had done. Another Black man would not hold the consensus heavyweight title until 1937, when Joe Louis defeated James J. Braddock for the belt.

Jeffries later said that the comeback fight was the greatest regret of his life. He couldn't have beaten Johnson on his best day, he told friends.

Films of the Johnson vs. Jeffries fight had sparked controversy immediately, even resulting in a ban on fight films altogether in some states. Many Americans heard tales of the fight and saw the country gripped by its fever before and after, but never got to see it. Instead, they had to rely on ringside reports from writers like London, who, despite views that we would regard today as openly racist, still could not refrain from giving Johnson his due.

“Johnson is a wonder,” London wrote in his post-fight story. “No one understands him, this man who smiles. Well, the story of the fight is the story of a smile. If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won to-day.”

Author's note: A great debt is owed to the following texts, all of which are highly recommended for readers who wish to know more about this chapter of boxing history:

"Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise And Fall Of Jack Johnson," by Geoffrey C. Ward (additionally, the documentary of the same name by Ken Burns)

"At The Fights: American Writers On Boxing," by George Kimball and John Schulian

"Heavyweight Champions," by W.W. Naughton

"50 Years At Ringside," by Nat Fleischer

"The Heavyweight Champions," by John Durant