Emperor of Masculinity

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted January 19, 2005.

I think anybody that explores American history can't help but be drawn to the question of race. – Ken Burns, "The Making of Unforgivable Blackness"

See, Johnson was a pure individual. He did everything exactly the way he wanted to. I don't think it ever crossed his mind that he should be anybody else's version of Jack Johnson. – Stanley Crouch, Unforgivable Blackness

The story of Jack Johnson is huge. The first black heavyweight champion of the world, 1908 to 1915, he was rowdy, smart, rebellious and proud. He was also resilient in the face of unrelenting racism. And, as Stanley Crouch observes in Ken Burns' Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, "There is nobody like Jack Johnson, because, first thing, when Jack Johnson was fighting, he could have been killed at any of his major fights. There were people out in the audience who were probably willing to murder him. He knew it, they knew it, everybody in the world knew it."

Talented and world-famous as a young man, as well as essentially unbeatable, Johnson was champion when (official, as opposed to underground) boxing was a wholly white province, when The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Jack London, all editorialized as to natural orders, in which African Americans were humble and inferior, and Caucasians were honorable, strong, and always right. And yet, as courageous and frankly brilliant as Jack Johnson was, his story is frequently forgotten in the wake of more recent flashy sports and other celebrities.

This despite the fact that he just about invented bling, at least in the form of gold teeth and fast cars. While the play and movie, The Great White Hope (both starring James Earl Jones, who serves as an interviewee for this film) complicate and celebrate Johnson's biography, this exceptional documentary fills in lots of blanks. At once wildly popular with most black audiences and grievously threatening for most whites, Johnson's achievements (his rise) are attached to his difficulties (his fall), most often, his relationships with white women, private relationships that he refused to hide. In his day, miscegenation was still an offense that inspired lynching.

With the man's elusive history in mind, it's appropriate that Unforgivable Blackness begins with a story that may or may not be true. Born in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, he ran away when he was 12 – or so he recalls (his self-narration, from letters and his autobiography, is read by Samuel L. Jackson) – to meet the man whom he most admired, who happened to reside in Brooklyn. This was Steve Brodie, self-proclaimed "Champion Bridge Jumper of the World," following a reported jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Whether young Johnson actually made it to New York to shake Brodie's hand is unclear, but the story helps to form part of his legend – an ambitious, determined youngster whose rise was inevitable, despite all odds. He began boxing as a teen in the Jim Crow South, and, as the film shows through images of anonymous black folks of the moment, life was difficult, even for the hardiest, most resolute child.

He spent years pursuing the chance to fight for the championship, which he won in 1908, in Australia against Tommy Burns. The reason that Burns, against the wisdom of most other white fighters, even gave the "Negro" a chance at the title, was the money – an unheard of $30,000; Johnson knocked him out in the 14th round. The fact that Johnson so plainly enjoyed beating up white challengers made him a fearsome specter. And as he always had, he refused to moderate his behavior. Taking "orders from no one," he posed what the film calls "a perpetual threat." When, in 1910, he and Jim Jeffries fought the "Battle of the Century" in Reno, Nev., stakes were high: it appears that every white American – save Johnson's many girlfriends (Roberts calls him "heroically unfaithful") – wanted the title returned to Jeffries (who had been retired for several years and came back to salvage the white race's good name).

Jeffries' loss, observes Roberts in the film, incited a kind of panic. "The press reacted as if Armageddon was here. That this may be the moment when it all starts to fall apart for white society." Indeed, race riots broke out in major cities, and Congress got to work on legislation that would ban the release of fight films, at the time very lucrative industry (Johnson's victories tended to play in black theaters, further distressing lawmakers and others). "His real crime," the film observes, "was beating Jim Jeffries."

Johnson persisted in traveling openly with white women (often, "sporting women," or prostitutes, one of whom, 19-year-old Lucille Cameron, he eventually married), and so he was eventually arrested and convicted, in 1912, of violating the Mann Act (Lucille's beside-herself mother instigated the proceedings, though Belle Schreiber testified against him). This despite the fact that the act, passed in 1910, outlawed the transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce, "for the purpose of prostitution, debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose"; in other words, it was designed to stop commercial prostitution, not consenting individuals. But in the eyes of the white legal system, relations between black men and white women could not possibly be consensual.

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