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 RAMSEY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Jack Johnson

Historian Paul D. Nelson answers the question...
What was the city of St. Paul’s reaction to  African American boxer 
Jack Johnson's defeat of James Jeffries on July 4, 1910 ?

People took a great interest in the event. All three St. Paul dailies carried front page stories leading up to and reporting the fight. The Daily News and the Pioneer Press both also reported it live, round-by-round, to thousands gathered downtown. The telegraph reports from Reno were broadcast by a technology more ancient than anyone can trace. In front of the Daily News building, "Fatty Giss, the Daily News ‘King of the Newsboys,’ handled The Daily News megaphone, reading preliminary bulletins and the rounds for four hours steadily without a break, enunciating distinctly every sentence to all parts of the crowd." The DN also printed breathless extra editions, on pink paper, four of them,

so it claimed, within four minutes of the end of the fight; 23,000 copies were sold.

Where crowds across the country had reacted violently to Johnson's demolition of the Great White Hope, the St. Paul throngs responded in a way that people today would recognize: They swallowed their disappointment and left. In five minutes "the streets in front of the Pioneer Press and Dispatch Building were as deserted as a Great Sahara." Those who had favored Johnson were "entirely decorous and undemonstrative. There were no taunts, no treading on the toes of the greater number. There was an absence of the flaunt,"I told you so." All but a handful of African-American citizens had the good sense to stay home.

There were no disordered reactions to Johnson's triumph. In Minneapolis, according to the Daily News, "Negroes crowd on streets. One Negro attacked and pushed through plate glass window. Negro flourished revolver and escaped." St. Paul, naturally, was even duller. "A few hilarious Negroes jubilant about streets. C.C. Johns, colored, arrested for displaying a revolver. Fined $5."

The newspapers treated the fight as, well, a sporting event. The bout had been honest and the better boxer had won. In the view of the sports editor of the Daily News, "Today there are few hearts beating within white breasts that do not mourn the defeat of James J. Jeffries at the hands of his black adversary, but all true sportsmen will not withhold from the champion, even though his color is black the credit that is due him for his splendid victory."

Neither the Pioneer Press nor the Dispatch, the two major papers, commented on the fight or the national reaction. The Daily News, which covered the fight and its aftermath more closely than the other dailies, waited two weeks to reflect.

In an editorial entitled "The Sorrow Over Reno," The paper noted that there was still much lamentation about Johnson's victory. But this could have nothing to do with the champion as a boxer, for his superiority had been amply demonstrated. "The pained feeling must, then, arise because of some other deficiency of the Negro, which presu-mably would not be found in a white champion. Let us review the recent conduct of Jack Johnson to see how he 'stacks up' as a man." His conduct had been polite, respectful, sportsmanlike – in short, beyond reproach. "Where is the white prizefighter,or the white man of any calling, who would be at all likely to improve on this record?"

St. Paul's African-American weekly, the Appeal, made two tries at putting The Fight of the Century into context. The author, editor and publisher John Quincy Adams, was a conservative, upright, and Republican citizen. His views may not have matched those of his readers in general. On July 9 he wrote that the best thing to come out of Johnson's victory were the many calls to ban exhibition of the film record of the event. Even though Adams believed that there would have been no such movement had Jeffries won, still, "it may bring them [movies] under a more strict censorship, to which we say amen!"

Adams returned to the topic on July 16, here quoted in full.

The Fourth of July already dear to American heart as the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is now rendered doubly and trebly glorious as the date of the second great event in American history, the meeting of the two great and illustrious excellencies, Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. These two great Americans met at Reno, Nevada, stripped, girded the American flag about their loins and forthwith proceeded to pummel each other in the most refined and scientific manner. They continued this plesing wxchange of smashers, rib-roasters and uppercuts to the extent of fifteen rounds when the white man was knocked out and the black man proclaimed the victor.

It will be readily seen that this untoward event has complicated the race problem to an amazing extent and henceforth it is to be anticipated that the famous "burly Negro" will be more terrific than ever. As a natural result there will be a notable increase in the number of lynchings down in Dixie and the lies sent out by the Associated Press and United Press and the various news gathering organizations will be more flagrantly picturesque than ever.

THE APPEAL is opposed to prizefighting and does not cheer very much for either victor or loser but, under the existing circumstances, when the alleged Caucasian Christians of the country are endeavoring to have the fight pictures put under a ban, not for any moral reason, but because a black man won, it will suspend the rules and say, "Bully for Jack Johnson."

In Minneapolis the mayor banned showing of the films of the Johnson-Jeffries fight. In St. Paul, the theater owners got together and forswore playing the film voluntarily.

Paul D. Nelson