SmithsonianMag.com: 1910, A Year of Hope for Musician Scott Joplin and Boxer Jack Johnson

Jack Johnson, left, fought Jim Jeffries for more than the undisputed heavyweight title; Scott Joplin aspired to more than "King of Ragtime" renown. (George Arents Collection / New York Public Library / Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; The Granger Collection, New York)

Smithsonian Magazine
In 1910, the boxer Jack Johnson and the musician Scott Joplin embodied a new sense of possibility for African-Americans

By Michael Walsh

Smithsonian Magazine
June 2010

On that fourth of July afternoon 100 years ago, the eyes of the world turned to a makeshift wooden arena that had been hastily assembled in Reno, Nevada. Special deputies confiscated firearms, and movie cameras rolled as a crowd estimated at 20,000 filled the stands surrounding a boxing ring. The celebrities at ringside included fight royalty—John L. Sullivan and James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett—and the novelist Jack London. For the first time in U.S. history, two champions—one reigning, the other retired but undefeated—were about to square off to determine the rightful heavyweight king of the world. But more than a title was at stake.

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One of the nation’s first celebrity athletes, Jack Johnson also provided a rough foreshadowing of the political theories of a 42-year-old educator from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, named W.E.B. Du Bois. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard and was a founder of the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had concluded that to achieve racial equality, black people would first have to seize political power by organizing, demanding their rights and not backing down.
Such were the stakes when the bell rang for the first round of what would be called the Fight of the Century.
At about the same time, another African-American was making history on the other side of the country. In a boardinghouse at 128 West 29th Street in New York City—a block from Tin Pan Alley—Scott Joplin was feverishly putting the finishing touches on the libretto and score of an opera he was certain would be his masterpiece: Treemonisha.

[Scott Joplin (c. 1867-1917) is featured as a Ragtime and Classical composer at AfriClassical.com]