ABSTRACT
At 2:30 p.m. on July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, as the band played “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” Jack Johnson climbed into the ring to defend his title against Jim Jeffries. Johnson was the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. Jeffries was a popular white former heavyweight champion who had retired undefeated six years before. Although it promised to be a fine match, more than mere pugilism was at stake. Indeed, the Johnson-Jeffries match was the event of the year. Twenty thousand men from across the nation had traveled to Reno to sit in the broiling desert sun and watch the prizefight. Five hundred journalists had been dispatched to Reno to cover it. Every day during the week before the fight, they had wired between 100,000 and 150,000 words of reportage about it to their home offices. Most had assured their white readership that Jeffries would win. On the day of the fight, American men deserted their families’ holiday picnics. All across America, they gathered in ballparks, theaters, and auditoriums to hear the wire services’ round-by-round reports of the contest. Over thirty thousand men stood outside the New York Times offices straining to hear the results; ten thousand men gathered outside the Atlanta Constitution. It was, quite simply, a national sensation. 1
