Jack Johnson

John Arthur Johnson was born on the thirty-first of March 1878 at Galveston, Texas, the third of nine children of Henry Johnson — a former slave who worked as a school janitor — and Tina "Tiny" Johnson, a domestic worker. He completed five years of formal education at the segregated Galveston public schools and went to work at twelve on the Galveston docks. He worked through his teens as a baker's helper, a stable hand and a boxcar painter. He learned to box at the Galveston Athletic Club through the informal teaching of the white sailors of the merchant marine.

He began the prize ring under battle-royal conditions — the segregated-circuit practice of placing five to eight Black boys blindfolded in a ring to fight until only one remained standing — and progressed to the legitimate professional ring around 1898. He fought across the segregated Black-fighter circuit through 1903 — limited by the color line that excluded Black fighters from world title contention — and won the World Colored Heavyweight Championship from "Denver" Ed Martin on the third of February 1903.

His decisive title pursuit came over the following five years. He chased the heavyweight champion Tommy Burns across Britain, the European continent and Australia from 1906 to 1908 — Burns repeatedly refusing to defend his title against a Black challenger. The Australian promoter Hugh "Huge Deal" McIntosh offered Burns thirty-thousand dollars to defend at Sydney; Burns accepted. Johnson defeated Burns in fourteen rounds at the Rushcutters Bay Stadium on the twenty-sixth of December 1908, becoming the first Black world heavyweight champion.

He defended the title seven times across the following seven years. The decisive defense — the so-called Fight of the Century at Reno, Nevada — was against the former champion James J. Jeffries on the fourth of July 1910. Jeffries had emerged from retirement specifically as the Great White Hope. Johnson knocked him out in the fifteenth round. The result produced anti-Black riots across twenty-five American cities; the federal government banned the interstate transport of the film of the fight.

He was prosecuted by the federal government in 1912 under the 1910 Mann Act and sentenced to a year and a day at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He fled abroad and lived in exile until 1920. He lost the title to Jess Willard at Havana on the fifth of April 1915 in twenty-six rounds. He served the federal sentence at Leavenworth in 1920.

He died in an automobile accident near Franklinton, North Carolina, on the tenth of June 1946, at sixty-eight. He received a posthumous presidential pardon in 2018.

He is honored here as the first Black heavyweight champion.