"JACK JOHNSON DOCUMENTARY IS HEAVYWEIGHT CONTENDER"
by
Matthew Whitaker
Assistant Professor
History Department
Affiliate Faculty, African and African American Studies
Affiliate Faculty, School of Justice and Social Inquiry
Arizona State University
Ken Burns' film ''Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,'' offers its viewers a sensitive, yet critical examination of one of the most feared, formidable, reviled, independent, and captivating people in American history. Burns has produced a documentary that meticulously reconstructs the life, times and legacy of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The most salient image of Johnson that Burns reveals is that of an icon who systematically and unapologetically subverted the status quo, particularly America’s venomous late 19th and early 20th century race relations. As Stephen Holden of the New York Times has argued, “the most stinging images of racial animosity conjured by Ken Burns' film come from accounts of the world's first black heavyweight boxing champion grinning confidently amid volleys of epithets hurled by hostile white crowds; the more vicious the language, the broader his smile. Johnson, one of the all-time great defensive fighters, sustained physical punishment with the same imperviousness with which he endured taunts.”
John Arhur Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas in 1878. He left home after the fifth grade. After traveling to the East Coast and back, he started boxing at sixteen, earning as much as twenty-five dollars a fight after joining a traveling boxing company. By 1897 he was a professional fighter. Johnson won over fifty fights (some lasting well over twenty-five rounds), primarily against black opponents over the next ten years. During this time, a period marked by white supremacy, malignant racial attitudes, and racial segregation, Johnson pursued a match against the white heavyweight champion, Tommy Burns, with an unsurpassed single-mindedness. Johnson secured a shot at Burns and the title in Australia in1908, far from the rabid racism of American boxing fans. Johnson won the fight easily while taunting his opponent. Johnson’s defeat of Burns was a resounding affirmation of Johnson’s unparalleled skill, and a penetrating attack at the notion of white supremacy. The scene was so shocking and unprecedented that white film crews at the bout turned off their cameras so they would not record the sight of a white boxer being knocked out by a black man.
Whites were so infuriated by Johnson’s victory that they embraced a systematic effort to find a “Great White Hope,” a boxer who could beat Johnson and re-establish the “honor” of the “white race.” Johnson defeated the next five “White Hopes” that challenged him. Finally, James “Jim” Jeffries, the former undefeated heavyweight champion, and one of many white fighters who had rejected Johnson’s previous requests for a fight, was bullied out of retirement, and convinced to fight Johnson on July 4, 1910 in Reno, Nevada. The bout was hailed “the Battle of the Century.” A reluctant Jefferies stated that “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.” The build-up to the fight was infused with racial tension and rancor. Johnson defeated Jeffries and physically and verbally humiliated him. After Johnson’s victory race riots erupted in over fifty cities across the United States. Many black people lost their lives at the hands of angry white mobs.
The white power structure, unwavering in its efforts to destroy him, attacked Johnson’s most visible weakness, his unabashed attraction to, and intimate relationships with white women. Johnson had sexual relationships with white women at a time when such behavior often precipitated the lynching of a black man. The Justice Department ultimately prosecuted him under the Mann Act in 1913, a recently passed law that prohibited the transportation of women across state lines for prostitution or any “immoral purposes.” The law was applied retroactively to Johnson's relationship with his fiancée, Lucille Cameron. Johnson’s conviction came with a one year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine. Johnson fled to Canada and then Europe to avoid jail. The conviction was racially motivated and inspired by his consensual liaisons with white women, and contrived to strip the champion of his title (A group of prominent leaders including Ken Burns, actor Samuel L. Jackson, Senator John McCain, and boxer Sugar Ray Leonard petitioned President George W. Bush to issue a posthumous pardon to Johnson in 2004).
Johnson was finally defeated by a “Great White Hope” in 1915. At thirty-seven years old, and out of shape, Johnson was beaten in the twenty-sixth round of a forty-five round bout in Havana, by “the giant,” Jess Willard, a younger, bigger (6’6”, 250 lbs) boxer. Twenty-two years passed before another black man, Joe Louis, won the heavyweight title, and “Louis went out of his way to be the opposite of Johnson and cultivate a polite, non-threatening public image.” It took another twenty-seven years before another black heavyweight, Muhammad Ali, defied the white establishment again and won the heavyweight title while marching to his own drum. After Johnson lost to Willard, he suddenly became a “non-person,” and a fugitive from justice. He lived in Europe and Mexico with his wife, Lucille Johnson, until he turned himself in to U.S. Marshals in 1920 to serve one year in Leavenworth. As always, Johnson, was his own man in prison, and thanks to an old acquaintance, who happened to have been the promoter of the Reno fight and the administrator of Leavenworth at the time of Johnson’s incarceration, Johnson was allowed to sleep-in, stage fights, and walk freely throughout the prison. For the rest of Johnson’s life, which ended in a car accident (precipitated by an enraged departure from a segregated restaurant) in 1946, Johnson continued to seek the spotlight through boxing, public appearances, business ventures, and the entertainment industry.
This desperately needed, timely, and informative documentary illuminates the extent to which the history, life and legacy of Jack Johnson reaffirms and embodies the challenges that racism has wrought in a multiracial democracy, and the principles of freedom, justice, individuality and independence that gave rise to and sustains the U.S., while contributing simultaneously to its many trials and tribulations. By bringing revealing and often rare source material to bear, including government documents, public archival materials, relevant secondary sources, photographs, vintage film footage, period music (composed by Wynton Marsalis), and scholarly commentary, Burns has demonstrated convincingly that the dynamism and scope of Johnson’s life, is inextricably linked to the problems, progress and hope for positive change that has marked the modern era. This film will encourage many, perhaps grudgingly at times, to abandon some of their long held (linear) beliefs about the significance of Jack Johnson in modern American history and life. For above all, the rise and fall of Jack Johnson was shaped as much by Johnson being black as by America’s reaction to his independence and ability to define himself and dismiss prevailing social and racial conventions.
In other words, if Johnson struck fear in the hearts of most whites, it was because he threatened their power to control him. He endangered the efficacy of white power. The American system is greatly influenced by the pursuit, acquisition, consolidation and manipulation of power. If the American power structure took human form, however, its skeleton may be class stratification, its nervous system could be gender conventions, its heart may be competing philosophies of the spiritual and secular, and its epidermis would surely be racial dogmas. Johnson’s race was his most salient attribute, but it was not necessarily his most potent. His systematic attack on the pillars of American power, colored by his blackness, is what made him a true menace in the minds of many.
As Holden has indicated, “Burns' view of Johnson's defiance in those grim post-Reconstruction days of lynchings and Jim Crow laws pointedly resonates with the present.” Throughout his film Burns reminds us that Johnson's troubles speak to the nature of our less ubiquitous, yet enduring racial tensions. Johnson, who embraced liquor, women, song and dance, was known as a fashion coinsurer and “sportin man.” In today's “hip-hop nation,” the “sportin life,” as it was called in Johnson’s time, is now occupied by “playas,” and “hustlas,” who “bling, bling.” These “playas,” despite their nihilism, misogyny, and materialism, like Johnson, offer a window into, and critique of rigid structures, classism, representative authority, socio-economic isolation, and negative perceptions of black people, especially youth. Unlike today’s young black cultural insurgents, Johnson “refused to think of himself as a black man or an African-American. In his mind he was simply an American and entitled to live as he pleased. That meant flouting taboos by buying a house in a white neighborhood in Bakersfield, California, and living openly with white women.” In 1968, Johnson’s life was adapted for the stage in the play “The Great White Hope,” staring James Earl Jones. Jones, in addition to scholar and writer Stanley Crouch, offers some of the most astute observations of Johnson’s life and its significance. Samuel L. Jackson excels as he brings Johnson’s words to life. Straight forward and accessible, yet analytical and thought provoking, this film stands at the vanguard of a growing number of documentaries that shed light on under explored, yet vital aspects of our past. Viewers will find this documentary unsettling, edifying and long overdue.
