Returning to the "Tribune" in 1849, Dana became a proprietor and its managing editor, and in this capacity actively promoted the anti-slavery cause, seeming to shape the paper's policy at a time when Horace Greeley was undecided and vacillating. However, his writing expressed racist feelings towards blacks on at least one occasion. In 1895, as editor of the New York Sun, he wrote "we are in the midst of a growing menace," the year of eventual black heavy weight champion Jack Johnson's first professional fight. "The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy." The extraordinary influence and circulation attained by the newspaper during the ten years preceding the Civil War was in a degree due to the development of Dana's genius for journalism, reflected not only in the making of the "Tribune" as a newspaper, but also in the management of its staff of writers, and in the steadiness of its policy as the leading organ of anti-slavery sentiment.