To think that 30,000 people gathered around a ticker in Times Square for updates on the fight is wild. Moreover,the idea of an technology of immediacy galvanizing racial violence simultaneous to the event is equally intense. Ranking it up there with the Draft-=Riots puts in perspective just how important this moment was for the vision of some kind of Social Darwinist notion of physical and intellectual supremacy.

This comment needs to be a post in and of itself, about the convergence of this new century with the convergence of technology, race, and sport that, as you say, frames some of the most important historical threads over the course of the 20th century. Amazing stuff, Luke, I m lucky to have someone as intelligent as you reading the bava and bringing my plagiarized Wikipedia quotes to the next level. And further deepening my interest in both Jack Johnson specifically,and history more broadly. You rule!

Johnson’s reign coincided not only with the rise of Jim Crow (a moment John Cell has called “the highest stage of white supremacy”), but also with an extended moment when sport took on extra allegorical weight as a national enterprise, and when boxing came out of the shadows to thumb its nose at Victorian mores.

The Johnson-Jeffries fight was followed by ticker by crowds who gathered around the country; in New York, thirty thousand New Yorkers– almost entirely white men– gathered in Times Square to look at a special bulletin on the front of the Times Building (the paper had run a special wire from an office in Reno for fast returns).

Following Johnson’s dominating victory, violence broke out on street cars, in work camps in the South, and as bands of drunken Jeffries fans wandered into black neighborhoods looking for Johnson fans. A black waiter named George Crawford was beaten to death on the West Side of Manhattan, and a black man in Hells Kitchen was strung up to a lamppost (before being rescued by policemen… and then charged with carrying a weapon).

The rioting following the Johnson fight was the worst New York had seen since the Draft Riots in 1863, and foreshadowed the race riots of 1917-1921. No other sporting event in American history has so stirred the pot; and race riots have only erupted simultaneously in multiple locations across the country at one other point– following the assassination of MLK. At least ten men were killed by fight-related violence that night.

The reactions were about race; but they was also about the power of a new stage in the development of mass media to connect people, and not in good ways. The build up to the fight was like never before, and the ability of followers to react instantly and passionately to a result was new, too.

In those days, most heavyweight championship fights were filmed and then shown in movie theaters… a movement emerged immediately following the fight to stop distribution of the film, supported by references to the riots, to threats to white supremacy, but, mostly, by Progressives, to boxing’s ugliness as a pursuit.

So Johnson’s life tells us a lot about race and racism; but it also tells us a lot about the birth pangs of both modernism and the American century….

Sorry for rambling… you got me excited, you rascal.