The Fight of the Century

On July 4, 1910, Reno hosted a prizefight that was about far more than boxing. Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion, faced former champion Jim Jeffries, coaxed out of retirement and cast as the "Great White Hope." Promoter Tex Rickard drew more than twenty thousand to an arena built for the day. Johnson dominated, and Jeffries's corner stopped it in the fifteenth round. Johnson's victory shattered the era's racial mythology and set off violence against Black Americans in cities nationwide. A bus shelter and marker now stand near the vanished arena on East Fourth Street.

What the plaque says

On this site on July 4, 1910, Reno hosted "The Fight of the Century," a heavyweight championship boxing match between John Arthur "Jack" Johnson, the black title holder, and James J. "Jim" Jeffries, a former champion seeking to regain the title he had vacated in 1904. Jeffries had refereed a previous championship bout between Marvin Hart and Jack Root at this site on July 3, 1905, but the promotion of the ex-champion as "The Great White Hope" focused world-wide attention on his 1910 contest with the talented Johnson, known as the "Galveston Giant.". Gamblers had their money on Jeffries, but Johnson easily handled his opponent and Jeffries' trainers called the fight in the fifteenth round to save their man from the disgrace of a knockout. Promoted by Tex Rickard, the fight brought over 30,000 fans to Reno, some 22,000 of whom packed the arena here on the day of the fight.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 1.0 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 17 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 18 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 24 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• N.C.O. Railroad Depot – 1910 — 0.7 mi
• Coney Island — 0.9 mi
• Grand Army of the Republic Tree — 1.0 mi
• Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps — 1.0 mi