Last week, the LA Times printed an editorial (pdf file), parts of which I offer here...
"It was a fight between a white man and a black man, but it is well at the outset not to pin too much importance on the fact.... The white man's mental supremacy is fully established, and for the present cannot be taken from him... His superiority does not rest on any huge bulk of muscle, but on brain development that has weighed worlds and charmed the most subtle secrets from the heart of nature....
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.... You are the same member of society today you were last week. Your place in the world is just what it was. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration, and will get none.
...Never forget that in human affairs brains count more than muscle. If you have ambition for yourself and your race you must try for something better in development than that of a mule..."
Why hadn't the changes in racial attitudes championed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. yet been recieved by the Times editorial writers? Because King would not be born for another 19 years. As noted, the above editorial did not originate in the Jim Crow south either, it hit the streets in Los Angeles - in 1910. This past Friday, the current editorial department at the LA Times ran the old-but-still-stinging editorial along with a companion piece entitled "Shame on Us".
The occasion which prompted the 1910 racial slap down was a prize fight between heavyweights Jack Johnson and James K. Jeffries. Johnson was black and unstoppable in the ring, Jeffries was billed as "The Great White Hope" and brought out of retirement "...to remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson's face.", according to the New York Herald of the day. Notice, again, that such vitriol was not reserved for publications in Mississippi or North Carolina... Racism was pervasive throughout the nation and remnants of it still are easily found. That is the point of all of this. If such overt racism was omnipresent in what we have been led to believe were the more 'tolerant' parts of our nation during that time, the deep south was most certainly a living hell for African-Americans.
It should be obvious from reading the Times editorial who won the fight. It's also obvious to me who needs to keep fighting. I realize that the above was written in a different time but that just makes it all the more important that I should strive to atone for the now-recognized sins of my fore-fathers
Tonight on PBS, Ken Burns takes a look at the life and times of Jack Johnson in a documentary called "Unforgivable Blackness". Johnson was a man ahead of his time and Burns' examination will throw a new light on all of America in the years leading up to King's life and death. Watch it.
9:28:03 AM 
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