Status Updates From Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourn...

Pleasingly academic and awesome so far.

"Given this social context, it was not a stretch to argue that if black men beat white men in the ring they would feel entitled to ravish white women in the bedroom."
London, South Africa, America....it didn't seem to matter where, it always came back to this hysteria about protecting the purity of white women.

"“The Search for a White Champion,” a series of qualifying tournaments for the British imperial heavyweight title. Promoters in different parts of the world also began organizing their own local crusades. In January 1911 a troupe of U.S. boxers visiting Australasia reportedly inspired a white hope craze in the southern hemisphere...Parisian boxing managers began calling their heavyweights “des espoirs blancs”.

"More news went out over the wires regarding the Jeffries-Johnson fight than the fall of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War. The fight had broken all previous telegraph records, with more than eight hundred thousand words sent at an average cost of two cents per word."
Amazing how little we hear about Johnson and this fight considering how huge it was socially in America's history.

“Do you think it is to go on forever, this domination of the millions of people of color by a handful of white folks? I think it is not.” He warned, “It may not come in my time or in yours, but the time will come when the black and yellow man will hold the earth, and the white man will be regarded just as the colored man is now.”
I love Jack Johnson basically trolling white people circa 1908. He just didn't care.