The title of Ken Burns’ powerful documentary about the early twentieth- century African-American boxer Jack Johnson, which aired last week on the Public Broadcasting Network, was Unforgivable Blackness.
But, as I watched it, I thought a title equality appropriate to describe this extraordinary individual would be “Unbelievable Blackness.”
Born into dire poverty, the son of hard-working, achievement-oriented ex-slaves, Johnson rose against the pervasive and fierce racism of the day to capture an exalted symbol of the sports world (and of white supremacy): the world heavyweight boxing championship.
And he did it by fighting and defeating three of the greatest white champions of that era with unbelievable ease.
What he did is more astonishing considering that his was an era when black Americans were marooned in a vast sea of hostility. The Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy decision had effectively stripped them of their civil rights. Lynching had reached epidemic levels in the South and some states in the North. Everywhere in the U.S., blacks were routinely disregarded as citizens and humans beings.
In the America of that era, no black person was supposed to be Jack Johnson, with his charm, sophistication and supreme self-confidence, in and out of the ring. Johnson’s frank insistence that he was his own man and would not be bound by racist restrictions was astonishing.
His ability to carry this off gave him an enormous, albeit deeply hidden, appeal to white men, penned up in factories and office buildings by the dynamics of industrialization and urbanization, with fewer and fewer ways to live according to time-honored notions of manhood.
Of course, Johnson’s uniqueness “protected” Johnson only up to a point n the point when he actually won the title.
From then on, as Burns shows, he was persecuted by no less than the Justice Department for his “unforgivable” relationships with white women, until he was falsely charged and convicted of luring white women into prostitution and stripped of his title.
It is justice long overdue that now President Bush should quickly agree to the bipartisan petition to reverse this governmental wrong and posthumously pardon boxing’s greatest champion.
Jack Johnson did not see himself as a “race man,” the term used then to describe what we would call a civil rights activist. And he was not without flaws, including at least two instances of physically abusing women who loved him.
But, looked at in the larger context, his flamboyant refusal to knuckle under, if one can use that phrase, to white racist beliefs must be seen as a more extravagant expression of the fire that burned in many black Americans in that era.
It was there in W.E.B, Du Bois, the scholar activist who coined the term “unforgivable blackness” in an essay on Johnson. It was there in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a crusading journalist and activist. It was there in Madame C.J. Walker, a socially conscious entrepreneur who became the first black woman millionaire.
In one of the most racially benighted periods of American history, Jack Johnson’s unbelievable blackness provoked a meeting of the minds across the color line: blacks with overt enthusiasm and whites who also saw in him an authentic American hero.