Was Wills better than McVea, Jeannette or Langford?

You beat me to it.

What was "right" then is not necessarily "right" now.

And not everybody who looked down on minorities, or who used racially insensitive language were racists.

My mother until the day she died called african americans the N word but she didnt have a racist bone in her body and didnt use it as an insult, it was simply what she was raised calling them. She never raised me to be racist or look down on others. Those were different times.

 

Exactly, it is not more right. That is the point. I'm not interested in understanding a culture deeming racism as acceptable.

I am less interested in it being an acceptable defence for a fight not happening.

Bottom line is we know racist behaviour to be wrong now and we know it was wrong then.

 

Well we're talking about people who did look down on others.

 

Thats not the point. The point is we know NOW that that behavior was wrong THEN. You cant judge people from a different time by your standards. It doesnt work like that.

 

Yes it does. It is the benefit of hindsight.

It is the biggest stain on boxing history without doubt

 

Not to diminish the horribleness of racism but you don't think the hundreds of people boxing has killed and maimed are its biggest stain?

 

No. A contact sport like this involves well known risks that fighters accept when they lace up their gloves.

The fact that blacks were killed and maimed in a sport that wouldn't grant them a championship shot just makes it worse. This was the way they made a living and to be judged on skin colour is shameful.

People like to hail dempseys time as the golden age but the truth is much more sinister and disgraceful. That is my point and it isn't really debatable as far as I'm concerned.

 

To a degree but it's also dangerous to excuse ignorance in this way. Like I said it was understandable for WW2 Germans to be Anti-Semitic, where is the line drawn? In a a fascist state Jews were persecuted, yet in a democracy blacks were hung and strung up by the KKK, with no recourse.

Anyway it's not like the abolitionists and whites who supported civil rights and talked around prior to this and the media didn't cover such actions.

The colour line for instance wasn't generally popular in a sporting or ethical sense back then, Dempsey himself overtly said the same, reflecting the feeling of the time

Watch 'The Dark Charisma of Adolph Hitler' on the Iplayer and observe the parallels

 

There is no comparison. Ive met and worked with dozens of people who lived in Nazi Germany and hundreds who lived under Nazi rule in France. The comparison between a state sponsored anti-semitism where there was no choice but to go along with government stance and the prevailing common belief during the turn of the century in the USA that blacks and whites didnt mix professionally or personally, and didnt share the same station in life doesnt even work on a superficial level.

The color line, and like the color line, segregation, were not popular in that era? That was a minority opinion? I beg to differ. Not only do I disagree but in discussing the Jeffries-Johnson eras in the same sentence as the Dempsey era you are still comparing apples and oranges.

Race relations in the United States did not improve over night. The 1860s were different from the 1900s, and the 1900s were different from the 1920s and so on. When I was a child, and raised in the north for the record, we had segregated schools. They werent desegregated until after I was out of school.

If things like the color line were so unpopular why did it take nearly sixty years from the era of Jeffries-Johnson before the civil rights movement gained enough momentum to start actually making a difference in peoples lives? Why did it take until Joe Louis, a black man who supposedly knew his place, before we had another black heavyweight challenger and ultimately champion?

Im as angry as anyone out there that Harry Wills never got a shot at the title and I dont make excuses for that situation. In that case I think it had as much to do with fear as racism. But I also think its wrong to look at those previous eras and judge with hindsight. You cant look at the Aztecs sacrifice and judge them based on todays ideaology.