A word to the black man

Do not point your nose too high

Do not swell your chest too much

Do not boast too loudly

Do not be puffed up

Let not your ambition be inordinate

Or take a wrong direction

Remember you have done nothing at all

You are just the same member of

society you were last week

You are on no higher plane

Deserve no new consideration

And will get none

No man will think a bit higher of you

Because your complexion is the same

Of that of the victor at Reno

--Los Angeles times July 5, 1910

 

 

The excerpt above is an editorial piece written a day after Jack Johnson defeated James Jeffries in a boxing match for the heavyweight championship of the world or was it 100 years later as Barack Obama defeated Senator John McCain and became the first black President of the United States?   What was so significant about the match was that Johnson was black, and Jeffries was white. “De- feated” is actually a kind way to describe the match. To put it frankly he WHIPPED his ass.  Seriously.   It was ugly.  At the time, this match was dubbed “the battle of the century.”  White people were de- pending on Jeffries to prove once and all for all that blacks (and all minorities) were inferior.  They revered Jeffries as indestructible, and talked him out of retirement to fight.  "The white race is DEPENDING on you," they pleaded to him.  Prior to fighting Johnson, he was undefeated.  After the defeat of a white man by a black man, the country flipped out.  Congress tried to ban boxing all together, whites murdered blacks in retaliation (freely, even in public), the government tried to frame Johnson with trumped up charges, and the country's first race riots broke out.  It was now more dangerous than ever to be a black man in the "United" States of America.