The House | The extraordinary story of boxing’s racist ‘colour line’ and the fighters who broke it

4 min read22 min

Thankfully the ‘colour line’ is not a phrase often heard today, but the history behind boxing’s racist exclusion of black fighters should not be forgotten.

From the 1870s until the late 1930s, black boxers were forbidden from competing for world titles in a conspiracy maintained by white fighters, administrators and promoters.

This excluded black athletes from a what was one of the great pinnacles of world sport at the time – heavyweight boxing.

There is a long list who should have been given title shots and were not.

Some of them, almost certainly, would have been champions. The most egregious example was Harry Wills, who time and again was prevented from fighting for a world title.

Wills was an exceptional boxer and an unusual character. In an era when boxers, regardless of ethnicity, had a marked tendency to live very fast and die young, Wills lived a very sober life. He invested shrewdly, becoming a successful businessman after his career in the ring was over. He also experimented with diet and different methods of training.

Other black fighters held back by the white establishment included Joe Jeanette, Sam McVey and Sam Langford. Langford in particular was a truly formidable opponent; small for a heavyweight yet often listed among the biggest hitters in boxing history.

The ‘colour line’ effectively broke when Joe Louis became world champion just before the outbreak of the Second World War. But before Louis, another man had overcome the bigotry. Jack Johnson, a black man from Texas, had faced acute racism from birth. He developed into an immensely powerful and skilled fighter who white fighters were keen to avoid.

In 1908, the world heavyweight champion was a Canadian called Tommy Burns. Burns revelled in racism, deploying all the usual vile epithets in his abuse of black fighters. He also clearly underestimated Johnson, who was not a man to be intimidated. Johnson took to following Burns everywhere he went, accusing him of cowardice. He even followed Burns to Australia and turned up every time Burns appeared in public.

This finally got under Burns’ skin. He said he would fight Johnson for the unheard-of fee of £30,000, clearly believing that no promoter would pay such a colossal sum, which just goes to show how wrong you can be. A colourful Australian entrepreneur, Hugh D “Huge Deal” McIntosh, came up with the sum and the fight went ahead. Johnson battered Burns to a standstill over 14 rounds.

The white establishment immediately rounded on Johnson. Distinguished writers such as Jack London and Henry Lawson abused him in the most viscerally racist terms and former champion Jim Jeffries was persuaded to come out of retirement to put the upstart in his place. Fairly predictably, Jeffries also lost.

Back in the US, Johnson was then framed by police officers and the legal establishment and was facing a long prison sentence when he fled to Europe. He was then offered a deal: lose a title fight to white challenger Jess Willard and he would not face prison. Johnson took the deal and Willard became champion. White fighters continued their uninterrupted dominance until the arrival of Louis, who became one of the greatest boxers and athletes of all time.

Jack Johnson was not perhaps an ideal role model. As soon as he had defeated Burns, he made it very clear that he would not face black opponents because boxing white men paid better. Nevertheless, as Ken Burns put it in his great documentary Unforgivable Blackness, “When whites ran everything, Jack Johnson took orders from no one.” That sheer determination and bloody mindedness is at least deserving of respect.

Lord Cryer is a Labour peer, served on the British Boxing Board of Control and is a patron on the East London Boxing Academy