No “White Hope” Today – 1946
No “White Hope” Today
A recent retelling of the story of the championship fight at Reno on July 4, 1910, takes our memory back to that day in Missoula. The contestants were Jack Johnson, Negro, and Jim Jeffries, who had retired some years before as undefeated champion. Johnson had won the title from a smaller heavyweight, Tommy Burns, who had acquired it by beating some lesser light whose name we cannot remember. This matters not at all, for what we are thinking about this morning is the “color” prejudice that came to its boiling point that hot July morning so long ago. For all practical purposes, it was the White race against the Black that day. (Anthropologists, as you know, say that there is no such distinction, that all of us, no matter what the color of our skins, belong to the human race.)
The Missoulian, as was the custom in those days, announced the fight’s details by megaphone from a second-floor window of its then home on West Main street. If there had been more room within the range of the announcer’s voice there might have been more listeners, we suppose, so keen was the interest in the brawl between the two men. A skilled campaign of propaganda had whipped up concern by capitalizing prejudice and there were fervent cheers for the “white hope” whenever Jeffries, then fat and aged for a ringster, managed to land a blow. There was glum silence when Johnson scored and the crowd dissolved in disgusted silence when the younger and stronger man finally battered the other into unconsciousness. There were no cheers for the winner, not even from the local Negro colony, present to a man.
As a matter of fact, this little group of Negroes melted away in silence a minute or two before the end, when the outcome no longer was in doubt. They were afraid of trouble of some sort, we must suppose, with majority of the crowd, angry in its disappointment. (As a matter of fact, there were small riots here and there over the country as the result of the defeat of the “white hope.”)
This brings us to the point we wish to reach: Joe Louis, the current champion of the heavyweight division, is a Negro. He has defeated many white men in the squared circle, and is soon to risk his title against another, yet there is no talk of “white hopes,” and, at least as far as we know, there is no prejudice against Louis on account of his color. In fact, we think he is more popular than many a white man who has been the champion bruiser. To be sure, the animosity of July 4, 1910, partly was artificial but it was not so entirely. We think the lack of prejudice against the current Negro champion very likely is proof of improved relations between the white majority and the black minority in this country. Surely we hope so. At least there is no eager search for a “white hope.”
The above editorial appeared in the Sunday Missoulian on June 2, 1946.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/349303842/
In 1946 the above could only have been written by French T. Ferguson. He started working as a reporter for the Missoulian in 1908, early on as a sports reporter. In 1910 he may well have been the Missoulian’s voice of the fight himself. His column “The Oracle” later appeared in the paper for over two decades.