Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, all sports — boxing, tennis, golf, basketball, football, racing, the Olympics — strongly discour- aged or, more often, prohibited African Americans from engaging in athletic activities with whites, though there were notable exceptions. Boxing's Joe Gans was lightweight champion between 1901 and 1908; Jack Johnson defeated Tommy Burns in 1908 for the heavyweight crown (and defended against Jim Jeffries in 1910, causing race riots in many cities); and Tiger Flowers held the middleweight title in 1926. But throughout the 1920s Jack Dempsey was reluctant to face such black boxers as John Lester Johnson or Harry Wills, the "New Orleans Brown Panther." In the nineteenth century nearly all jockeys had been black (Isaac Murphy won the Kentucky Derby three times), but at the turn of the twentieth century white jockeys formed an "anticolored union" that prohibited blacks from participating in the.....
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