Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight Read Online Free PDF Page B

Negro sent the nation into a blind rage. One letter to the editor called Johnson’s victory “a calamity in this country worse than the San Francisco earthquake.”
    The search began in earnest for a “white hope” who could put Johnson in his place. In his report on the Burns match, London implored the former champion Jim Jeffries to come out of retirement and restore the title to white America. A series of mediocre white contenders came forward to challenge Johnson in 1909 and he knocked out each one in succession, delivering a taunt with every punch.
    By the end of the year, cries for a Jeffries fight had reached a fevered pitch, with London leading the charge, describing the retired champion as the “chosen representative of the white race.”
    Finally, the financial lure proved too much for Jeffries to resist. Anticipating the largest gate in the history of prizefighting, a sleazy promoter named Tex Rickard offered him a huge sum of money to take on Johnson. Announcing that he was succumbing to “that portion of the white race that has been looking for me to defend its racial superiority,” Jeffries signed on for the fight.
    Rickard was anxious to exploit the growing racial fear and hostility of Americans, and he heavily promoted the fight as a battle for racial supremacy. The nation was whipped into a frenzy. Editorial cartoons portrayed Johnson as a gorilla or a watermelon-eating brute and Jeffries as a Superman. From pulpits all over the nation, ministers took up the theme that the fight would be the salvation of white pride. One Baltimore minister warned his congregation that a Johnson victory would make it unsafe for white women and children to walk the streets. The three-time Democratic presidential nominee and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan telegraphed Jeffries before the fight: “God will forgive everything you do to that nigger in this fight… Jeff, God is with you.”
    The fight—and the hooplah leading up to it—was sending shock waves through the west coast. Originally scheduled to take place in San Francisco, it was moved to Reno, Nevada, after fifty ministers held a prayer vigil at the California State Capitol to convince the governor to reject the controversial bout.
    But overwhelmingly, the country was hypnotized by the promotion of the fight as an epic duel between black and white. A song was penned by Dorothy Forrester in a typical vaudeville Italian-style dialect, popular in those days, capturing the mood of the country:
    Commence right away to get into condish
    An’you punch-a da bag-a day and night
    An’-a-din pretty soon, when you meet-a da coon,
    You knock-a him clear out of sight.
    Chorus: Who’s dat man wid-a hand like da bunch-a
    banan!
    It’s da Jim-a-da-Jeff oh! da Jim-a-da-Jejf,
    Who give-a da Jack Jonce one-a little-a tap?
Who make-a him take-a one big-a long nap?
Who wipe-a da Africa off-a da map?
It’s da Jim-a-da-Jeff!
    White Americans weren’t the only ones aware of the symbolic implications of the fight. The black press used the match as a rallying cry against thirty years of backwards progress for Negro Americans. The Chicago Defender assured its readers that Johnson would be fighting “Race Hatred,” “Prejudice” and “Negro Persecution.” In a sermon the Sunday before the match, the black Chicagoan Reverend William Ransom declared that the match had deep significance in the struggle for Negro advancement. “The darker races of mankind, and the black race in particular, will keep the white race busy for the next few hundred years in defending the interests of white supremacy… what Jack Johnson seeks to do to Jeffries in the roped arena will be more the ambition of Negroes in every domain of human endeavor.”
    The stakes were much higher than just a boxing match, and it seemed everybody in the country was anxiously awaiting the verdict. When the fight finally took place on the holiday of July 4,1910, eighteen thousand spectators greeted