It’s a plot with all the makings of a new Fox drama.
An outsider making his mark.
Sex.
Hypocrisy.
| Filmmaker Ken Burns is leading an effort to win a posthumous presidential pardon for Jack Johnson.
Burns and the Committee to Pardon Jack Johnson filed a petition last year with the Justice Department, documenting how the government’s decision to indict and convict Johnson in 1912 under the Mann Act was racially motivated and discriminatory. If the pardon is granted, it will be only the second posthumous presidential pardon in history. A nonbinding sense of the Senate resolution passed unanimously in October, urging President Bush to pardon Johnson for “the racially motivated 1913 conviction that diminished Johnson’s athletic, cultural and historic significance and unduly tarnished his reputation.” Backers of the pardon campaign are hoping for a decision by March 31, Johnson’s birthday. The White House might be sympathetic: For five straight years while governor of Texas, Bush proclaimed March 31 as “Jack Johnson Day.” The Washington Post |
Freedom.
It was the life of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
The champ’s triumphs and ultimate collapse are presented in a remarkable, eye-opening four-hour documentary, “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.”
The first two hours start tonight at 9 on KCTS, channel 9. The final two hours air at 9 p.m. Tuesday.
The film is directed by award-winning documentarian Ken Burns, who brought us “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “Jazz.”
When racism in America was as prevalent as ever, Johnson upset white people by punching his way to the title in 1908.
But his triumphs infuriated whites when he flashed his gold-toothed smile after the victory, raced around in his fancy sports car and traveled the world with white women at his side.
“There is nobody like Jack Johnson,” writer Stanley Crouch says in the film. “When Jack Johnson was fighting, he could have been killed at any of his major fights. There were people out in the audience who probably were willing to murder him. He knew it. They knew it, and everybody in the world knew it.”
Johnson emerged from the small port town of Galveston, Texas, just before the turn of the century and soon was traveling the country looking for prize fights. By 1903, he’d beaten every opponent who would take him on, but white heavyweight champs refused to fight him.
After chasing down champions unwilling to fight a black man, Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns for the title in 1908.
From that moment, the “white hope” era began as every large ivory-skinned man was sought out to beat Johnson. Jim Jeffries, the “Great White Hope,” finally agreed to come out of retirement and fight him on July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nev., and was beaten easily.
Johnson’s victory set off race riots across the country – blacks celebrating the win, whites aiming to maintain dominance.
Racism was so institutionalized, so pervasive, that even the mainstream media piled on. Apparently it wasn’t so “liberal” then.
“A word to the black man,” the Los Angeles Times wrote the next day. “Do not point your nose too high. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not be puffed up. … You are just the same member of society you were last week. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration and will get none.
“No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno.”
Because whites couldn’t beat Johnson in the ring, they took aim at his personal life.
Using a federal law, the Mann Act, designed to prohibit transporting women to other states for prostitution, the feds arrested Johnson after an old girlfriend was coerced into saying he forced and paid her to be with him.
Johnson was sentenced to a year and one day in federal prison. He jumped bail and spent several years in exile before returning voluntarily and serving his time. During his exile, he lost the title to Jess Willard, a white fighter, in 1915 in Havana.
He died in 1946 in a car accident just outside Raleigh, N.C. He was 67.
“Just remember,” Johnson told a young reporter before he died, “whatever you write about me, that I was a man.”
It’s easy to reflect on Johnson’s life and chalk it up to mistakes made in our nation’s past. But one has to wonder how far we’ve actually come.
Last week, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss pretended to “moon” fans in Green Bay and we can’t get away from this story. Fox TV announcer Joe Buck called it “a disgusting act.”
Yet most passing NFL fans don’t remember that Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer last month flipped his middle finger at his home crowd after getting jeered for throwing an interception – no miming, just old-fashioned obscenity.
Moss was fined $10,000 by the NFL for his act and Plummer was fined $5,000 for his gesture.
The disparity in the reactions to Moss, who is black, and Plummer, who is white, might show that black athletes are still held to different standards – even 100 years after Johnson’s ascent.
“I don’t see his life as a tragedy, either,” actor James Earl Jones said in the film. “The scene was a tragedy. America was a tragedy that it couldn’t cope with him.
“I’d say, to a lesser degree, America was a tragedy in terms of race and racism and we’re still fighting with that, trying to get over that little pimple in our psyche.”
Columnist Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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