match Midwestern boxing promoter Floyd Fitzsimmons rendered a check to Wills for his fee, but failed to produce even a downpayment for Dempsey's much larger fee for a bout between the two fighters, who had, in July 1925, signed an agreement for a 1926 title match, which never materialized as a result. Disagreement has existed among boxing historians as to whether Dempsey had avoided Wills—though Dempsey swore he was willing to fight him—as having said he would no longer fight Black boxers after winning the title. Wills twice attempted to sue Dempsey for breach of contract over the canceled bout, which had also been barred in New York State on orders from Governor Alfred E. Smith by Athletic Commissioner James Farley, an early champion of African-American equal rights due to his public threats to resign from the Athletic Commission if Wills was not given the fight against the champion Dempsey, as Farley deemed Wills the number one contender. A deadly race riot in the wake of Jack Johnson vs. James J. Jeffries also created reluctance to promote the match. The stand taken by Commissioner Farley would help enable Farley to add the African American vote to the New Deal coalition as Franklin D. Roosevelt 's campaign manager and subsequently Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from the Republican Party, which had traditionally up until the 1930s controlled the African American voting block as the party of Lincoln. Retirement Wills retired from boxing in 1932, and ran a successful real estate business in Harlem, New York. He was known for his yearly fast, in which, once a year, he would subsist on water for a month. Wills admitted that his biggest regret in life was never getting the opportunity to fight Dempsey for the title. Wills was confident that he would have won such a match. Wills died at Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York City of complications from diabetes on December 21, 1958. Legacy and honors In 2020 award-winning author Mark Allen Baker published the first comprehensive account of The World Colored Heavyweight Championship, 1876-1937, with McFarland & Company, a leading independent publisher of academic & nonfiction books. This history traces the advent and demise of the Championship, the stories of the talented professional athletes who won it, and the demarcation of the color line both in and out of the ring. For decades the World Colored Heavyweight Championship was