A New Graphic Novel Takes Readers Inside the Fight of the Century

Jack Johnson was known for his patient boxing style—allowing his opponents to tire themselves out, then punishing them brutally once they’d run out of gas. With his uncanny timing and devastating blows, he became the first Black American to win the world heavyweight championship, in 1908. After that victory, many white commentators, including the novelist Jack London, fumed over Johnson’s success and swagger, and agitated for Jim Jeffries, a white former heavyweight champion, to emerge from retirement and put Johnson in his place.

The big moment came on Independence Day 1910, before a crowd of 20,000 spectators in Reno, Nevada. In perhaps the most famous 15 rounds in American boxing, the out-of-shape but still formidable Jeffries took on the six-foot, 200-pound Johnson, nicknamed the “Galveston Giant” after his Texas birthplace. Last on His Feet, a graphic novel written by the American poet Adrian Matejka and illustrated by the Moroccan artist Youssef Daoudi (see the two panels above), revisits this “Fight of the Century,” which wasn’t just a landmark in athletics—it was a crucible for the racial animosity Black Americans had to navigate during Jim Crow. Through a stylish mix of prose, blank verse and illustrations, Last on His Feet captures these tensions with unsparing poignancy.

“Johnson’s parents were enslaved, so he was from the first generation of Black Americans to grow up supposedly free,” said Matejka, who in 2013 published The Big Smoke, a celebrated collection of biographical poems about Johnson. “But his brilliance, his idiosyncrasy, his adeptness in the ring and out were terrifying” to certain white people who wished to maintain a rigid racial order. In the end, Johnson bested Jeffries—an outcome that triggered racial unrest in more than one city.

When Johnson died in 1946, at 68, having lived the unapologetically extravagant life of a true celebrity, the headline on his obituary in the New York Amsterdam News, a Black-run newspaper, recalled the disdain many Americans had harbored toward the great fighter: “They Hated Jack Johnson For He Feared No Human.”

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Brandon Tensley is a national political writer at CNN, where he covers culture and politics. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Time and the Washington Post.