Throughline - The fight that shook America

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Jack Johnson was the first world Black heavyweight champion, but winning the title was only part of the battle. Every time Johnson stepped into a boxing ring, he struck a blow to white supremacy. In this week’s episode, the story of Jack Johnson and the legacy of Black athletes pushing for social change in America. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randaabed Fet d'Achtar. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. You could probably sum up the entire history of the United States with the idea of people pushing to make a change. Where that change happens is a whole other story. Sometimes it's on the battlefield. in the courthouse or in the city streets. Other times, it's in a stadium, on a field, or in the ring.

It's December 26th, 1908, and World's heavyweight champion, Tommy Burns, defends his title in Sydney, Australia, against Jack Johnson. Jack Johnson is determined to become the first black heavyweight champion. Johnson has been after this heavyweight title fight for over two years. As Jack Johnson enters the ring, he's already making history. Up until this fight, it was a known, although unspoken rule. That no black fighter would be allowed to fight for a championship, particularly in the heavyweight division. When the fight begins, the mood is tense.

There's a lot more at stake than just the title. Sports have long been a place where people challenge the status quo. From Jackie Robinson breaking segregation lines in the MLB to athletes in the 1960s and 70s, like Muhammad Ali or Tommy Smith, than John Carlos, championing black power and civil rights, to Colin Kaepernick in 2016, taking a need during the national anthem against racism and police brutality in the U.S. Jack Johnson was the father of the first wave of athlete activist.

The champion who started it all, whether he wanted to or not. Today on the show, we're going to take you back to the 1908 heavyweight championship fight that changed history and tell you the story of the rise and fall of Jack Johnson. That's coming up after a quick break. Jack Johnson was born in Texas in 1878, when the memories of the Civil War were still fresh. The son of two formerly enslaved people.

He and his family saw firsthand how many of the rights black Americans had gained were quickly overturned by Jim Crow laws. And yet, long before Jack Johnson ever stepped in the boxing ring, he got a glimpse of a bigger world and his place in it. What people don't understand is that Jack Johnson is from Galveston, Texas. And Galveston at the time, and to a lesser degree still is, is a port community. This is Dave Zyron. He's an award-winning sports journalist and the host of a radio show called Edge of Sports.

So Jack Johnson is a young man hanging out on the docks in Galveston. He met people from all over the world, from the most. Middle East. He's meeting people from sub-Saharan Africa. He's meeting people from all over Europe. And, you know, and he was an almost a curio to them, this entertaining person, because oftentimes the sailors would be involved with the kids because they would ask the kids to fight each other for money. And if that sounds like a dog fight, that's basically what it was. Johnson was, even as a boy, was the best at doing that. And it was in this port town that Johnson started to gain a global perspective. It made him fearless. At a time when international travel was very difficult for most

people, Jack Johnson had the world come to him. He realized there was more to the world than what he saw in Texas. When he was a teenager, he got a job as a janitor at a gym. And that's where he met German-born boxing trainer Hermann Bernal. He started to train, and within a few years, he began fighting in prize fights. He was amazing. And in 1903, he became the colored, heavy heavyweight champion of the world. That wasn't enough for Johnson. He wanted to beat the best white fighters in the world and become the heavyweight champion full stop.

But there was kind of a gentleman's agreement. That no black fighter would be allowed to fight for a championship, particularly in the heavyweight division. But Jack Johnson had an idea for how to get the fight he wanted. And Jack Johnson actually showed up at fights between white boxes for championships and so forth and taunted them, embarrassed them in terms of why they would not allow him to have a shot at the title. This is Dr. Harry Edwards.

He's a professor at Cal Berkeley, and he wrote one of the most important books on this topic, The Revolt of the Black Athlete. So the Boxer Johnson Taunted the Most was the heavyweight champion of the world, the Canadian, Tommy Burns. He would actually travel around the world to all of Burns' first. fights, buy a ringside seat, and talk trash to Burns the entire fight. It was next level trolling. And in the early 20th century, it took a lot of, let's say, moxie for a black man to do this. You know, it was like putting a target on your own back. But it worked. Burns finally agreed to

fight Johnson for a whopping $30,000, which was a lot of money at that time, put up by a promoter in Australia. The fight was to be held in Sydney. And here's an ominous quote from a local newspaper about the match. This battle may in future be looked back upon as the first great battle of an inevitable race war. There is more in this fight to be considered than the mere title of pugilistic champion of the world. It's December 26th, 1908, and World's heavyweight champion Tommy Burns defends his title in Sydney, Australia, against the scourge of the heavyweight ranks, Jack Johnson. And Tommy knows... Nearly 20,000 people pack Sydney Stadium. to watch the match.

It was a serious international event. In round one, Tommy Burns to the left of your screen, moves out and boxes cautiously. This is actual footage from a documentary made about the fight in 1908. The narration was added years later. Right away, you notice that Johnson is much taller than Burns. Johnson clenches with Tommy and smiles to ringsiders. Burns looks almost like a little boy compared to the 220-pound challenger. At the end of round one, things are.

are not looking good for burns. Johnson rushes in and scores with a punishing left at the end of round one. And it kind of keeps going like this. Johnson calmly looks down at Tommy, talks to the champion, taunting him. He wants Burns as well as everyone to know that this is no fight, this is a picnic. Here in round 14, Johnson rushes in, lands an uppercut, three left hooks, a tremendous barrage of punches, left and rights which have Burns helpless. At this very moment in the early seconds of round 14,

the police shut off the motion picture cameras and stepped into the ring awarding the heavyweight championship of the world to Jack Johnson. After 14 rounds, Burns was in terrible shape and the police actually jumped in and stopped the fight. The response to Johnson's win came quickly from the media. People in the U.S. responded with outrage,

including the famous writer Jack London. Yeah, that guy, the one who wrote Call the Wild. He captured that outrage by writing that a quote, Great White Hope should come along and remove the golden smile off of Jack Johnson's face that the white man must be rescued. My favorite is a headline where you have a little girl pointing up and basically saying, you know, are you the great white hope? This is Amira Rose Davis.

She's a professor at Penn State and co-hosts of a feminist sports podcast called Burn It All Down. There's this idea that the whole community is invested on this. And you can see this also reflected in newspaper. This idea that if Johnson wins, the Negroes around the country are going to riot. They're going to revolt. They're going to get the idea that they can fight back. They're going to get the idea that they're not inferior. His fights were nothing short of racial spectacles in the sense that people openly mapped greater racial meaning onto each bout that he had with a white fighter.

This is Jules Boykhov. He's a professor at Pacific University and the author of Scyl. several books on sports history. So Johnson, always the showman, embrace the challenge. He talked trash and backed it up. And so he beat one great white hope after another, culminating with his defeat of the great former champion Jim Jeffries in 1910. This is a quote from the New York Times coverage of the fight.

If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claim. to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors. The night after the fight, black people celebrated in the streets of many major U.S. cities. And white people responded with violence. Race riots ensued. And countless people died. But the thing is, Johnson didn't want to be a racial symbol.

He wasn't looking to carry the hopes of black people or be a symbol of anything. He just wanted to be a champion. In fact, his philosophy was to ignore race and racism. He said in his memoir, quote, I found no better way of avoiding racial prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist. But prejudice did exist,

and it was making him public enemy number one. Here was someone who was going to live his life to the fullest exactly how he wanted. Forget being deferential, I mean, let alone submissive. He's sort of like racial mores be damned. I have a life to live here, and if that meant sleeping across the color line, so be it. Right. So he drove cars. He wore fur, and most of all, he dated white women. And this was absolutely

flagrant. This was a man who would go into a hotel in St. Louis and ask for a room. And when the clerk told him, we don't serve your kind, he responded, it's not for me. It's for my lady. And she's not my kind, she's your kind, at which time, of course, they escorted him not only out of the hotel, but out of town. Johnson was like the prototype of the modern star athlete. Like, he had tons of money, he was brash, he was tough, smooth talking, all that. Yeah, he just loved dating white women and driving nice cars. He didn't really want to make any political statement with it.

He was an iconoclastic individual who wanted it all along the way. He set some standards of rebellion. But Jack Johnson's rebellion would not be tolerated for long. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the government went to extraordinary lengths to stop Jack Johnson. A law called the Man Act made it illegal to transfer women across state lines for immoral purposes. And in the early 20th century, interracial relationships were considered immoral. Johnson as a prize fighter naturally was traveling state-decentral.

state for fights. And he did this with his girlfriend, who later became his wife. She was white. So eventually, a warrant was put out for his arrest. Unfortunately, this is something we've seen quite a bit in U.S. history. When somebody makes a splash, the government tends to go out of their way. Go out of their way to stop them. He was eventually brought to trial. Convicted by an all-white jury in 1913. And sentenced to one year in jail. But essentially jumped bail, fleeed the country, went to Canada, pretended to be a member of... of a black baseball team and then lived in exile all over in Europe, in South America, about seven years in exile.

There wouldn't be another black heavyweight champion for 22 years. Those seven years wrecked Johnson's career. He would eventually lose his title and never regain his dominance in the sport. Oh, and he did eventually return to the U.S. and serve his sentence. In 2018, 72 years after Jack Johnson died, President Donald Trump gathered a number of people in the boxing community, including champion boxer Deonté Wilder, and actor Sylvester Stallone, in the Oval Office to pardon Johnson for his man-act conviction. Today, many don't remember Jack Johnson as an athlete activist. And the truth is, Johnson didn't identify as such. But he did inspire a lot of people. And the battles he fought in and outside of the ring dealt a big blow to the idea of white supremacy that reigned at the turn of the 20th century. That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit.

To hear the full-length episode of ThruLine about the legacy of black athletes using their platform to protest injustice in America, check out on the shoulder of giants. And join us next week when we continue to explore the people that changed the United States, with the story of Eugene Debs and his efforts to unite the working class. So he basically argued, America has this long revolutionary tradition, and socialism is simply the next step. The man behind the origins of American socialism.

That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the ThruLine Production Team, Music by Ramtina-Dablui and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Cain, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randaberd Fattah. Thanks for listening.