Unforgivable Blackness

Unforgivable Blackness is a two-part documentary by Ken Burns that aired on PBS a few years ago. I missed it, and just this weekend caught up with it on DVD. I'm glad I did, because it's a fascinating subject.

Jack Johnson was the first heavyweight champion boxer of African descent. He won the crown in 1908, which is in itself somewhat remarkable, as by the end of that decade over 750 black people had been lynched in the United States. As the script by Geoffrey Ward put it, it was the worst time to be African-American since the end of slavery.

But Johnson, who beat all comers, was a remarkable man, and in many ways a man considerably ahead of his time, much to his detriment. He was given to fancy clothes, fast cars, and most dangerously, white women.

The champion during the early part of the century was Jim Jeffries. He, like champions before him, refused to fight black men (mostly it was out of a fear that they would lose, which would have been unthinkable to most of the country). A few champions after Jeffries also avoided Johnson, but finally a champ named Tommy Byrnes, who had been pestered by Johnson for years, agreed to fight him in Sydney, Australia. Johnson won easily, and it's fascinating to watch the film of the fight (perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Burns' documentary is the fight films, which I'd never seen before). Fight films were big business in those days, and they are in pretty good condition, but this particular film stops mid-punch as no one wanted a black man beating a white man recorded for posterity.

Johnson's victory put white America in a tizzy. The call went out for Jeffries to come out of retirement, as he was "The Great White Hope," to restore order to the universe. Eventually he did, and the fight between him and Johnson, in Reno, Nevada, was a monumental event. Johnson toyed with the over-the-hill Jeffries, and in the 15th round his corner stopped the fight so he wouldn't be knocked out.

If Johnson couldn't be beaten in the ring, he would be by the Justice Department. Because he openly traveled with white women, the law came down on him, arresting him for violating the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. It was intended to stop the flow of prostitution, not a couple of consenting adults, but the law was perverted and Johnson indicted. After he was convicted, he fled the country, but eventually returned to serve his sentence. He lived until 1946, when he died in a car accident.

The film's style is no different than other Burns documentaries: the white-on-black title cards for each section, the slow pans across period photographs, the narration by Keith David (who also narrated "Jazz"), the pointed comments by experts (most notably in this film Stanley Crouch) and well-known actors voicing the participants (Samuel L. Jackson is the voice of Johnson). I know Burns' style grates on some, but I find it comforting, the perfect balance of archive footage and contemporary analysis, and in all of his films I feel that the subject at hand has been well-researched and exhaustively rendered.

What I took away most from this film was how amazing it was that Johnson wasn't murdered by someone. Virulent racism was commonplace--editorials in respected newspapers condemned miscegenation, and blacks were treated as sub-human by most of society. Johnson somehow managed to stay above it, at least until his conviction. He openly taunted his opponents and demanded to be treated as any white man. In many ways he was precursor to Muhammad Ali, who was fascinated by Johnson and saw the play about him, "The Great White Hope," over and over again when it ran on Broadway.

When Johnson lost the title, at age 37 and overweight, it would be over ten years before another black man would even fight for the crown, and it would be 22 before Joe Louis would be the second to win it. Jackie Robinson would play in the Major Leagues ten years after that. Today we are on the cusp of seeing an African-American elected to the Presidency of the United States. To see what America was like 100 years ago makes that concept even more outlandish.