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Jack London, Jack Johnson, and the Fight of the Century

Held in Jim Crow–era Nevada on the 4th of July, the 1910 World Heavyweight Championship was slated to be a fight to remember. Moonlighting as a boxing journalist, novelist Jack London cheered on Jim Jeffries — ringside and on the page — as the “Great White Hope", a contender to take back the title from Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion. Andrew Rihn examines the contradictions of London’s racial rhetoric, which is more complex and convoluted than it may initially appear.

While the poet Walt Whitman had sung pugilism’s praises anonymously in his recently recovered “Manly Health and Training”, Jack London was the first major American writer to give the sweet science sustained literary attention. While such language rightly draws the attention and ire of modern readers, its shock value can lead some to frame (or even dismiss) London’s boxing coverage as solely racist propaganda (as was the case in the Ken Burns’ 2005 documentary Unforgivable Blackness). And he ends the piece wryly, with a self-recriminating jab at his earlier call for a Great White Hope: “And where now is the champion who will make Johnson extend himself, who will glaze those bright eyes, remove that smile and silence that golden repartee?” It’s a concession speech of sorts.

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