EPISODE 27 Jack Johnson (Part 2): The Fight

“And it was fast cars and whiskey Long legged girls and fun I had everything that money could bring And I took it all with a gun” from the song I’ve Never Picked Cotton “Johnson did not care. He had no use for the bourgeois values of thrift and respectability.” Randy Roberts “You don’t catch Jim Jeffries losing to a colored man.” Jim Jeffries “Quite conceivably there had never been a more important athletic event in American history.” Randy Roberts “Even those who have an absurdly exaggerated horror of prize fighting as a ‘brutal’ sport should gently warm in their sensitive minds a little hope that the white man may not lose, while the rest of us will wait in open anxiety the news that he has licked the—well, since it must be in print, let us say the negro, even though it is not the first word that comes to the tongue’s tip.” New York Times By 1900, the federal government had long abandoned Reconstruction, and white supremacy was returning to the South with a vengeance. Jim Crow was in full swing. Segregation was the law of the land. And Fifty years before Jackie Robinson challenged segregation in baseball, there was Jack Johnson. Lynching was a weekly event. Any black man in the S…