One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

Willard’s victory provided a crucial, if not laudable, milestone for boxing: it gave the sport a white heavyweight champion, a shamefully necessary prerequisite for its becoming a popular mainstream sport. Before this time, boxing was virtually the only sport in America—indeed, pretty much the only activity—in which blacks could compete with whites on equal terms. It is an ironic point from a modern perspective, but part of the reason boxing was considered unwholesome and insupportably raffish before about 1920 was that it wasn’t racist. And a big part of converting it into a respectable entertainment in the 1920s was making sure that it was, like all other major sports, dominated by white people. No black fighter would get a crack at the heavyweight title for a generation.

Boxing & Race