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Marc
Morial, MaximsNews Columnist
Jack
Johnson, American
by
Marc
H. Morial
President
and CEO, National
Urban League
Marc
H. Morial,
President of the National
Urban League, is the former two-term
Mayor of New Orleans, former President of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors, and author of TO BE
EQUAL. He is a Columnist for MaximsNews.com.
Hear his weekly Radio Commentary Online.
See
Marc Morial's bio.
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
Please
see All of Marc Morial's MaximsNews
columns below.*
UNITED NATIONS - 27 January 2005
/ www.MaximsNews.com
/ The
title of Ken Burns' powerful documentary about
the early twentieth-century African-American
boxer, Jack Johnson, which is airing now on the
Public Broadcasting Service network, is "Unforgivable Blackness."
But,
as I watched it, I thought a title equally
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 seemingly insurmountable barriers of
the pervasive, 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.
As
I watched Burns depiction of the championship
fight between Johnson and the world champion,
Jim Jeffries -- which was held very deliberately
on July 4, 1910 in Reno, Nevada, with much of
America hanging on telegraphed reports from the
stadium -- a vivid thought sprang into my mind.
Why
was Jack Johnson allowed to fight for the
championship?
After
all, White America had long adamantly declared
that blacks should never be allowed to seek
boxing championships, especially the heavyweight
title.
Johnson,
outboxing every white heavyweight pugilist in
sight, had been pursuing a championship bout for
years. But
there was, seemingly, no chance of his ever
reaching his goal.
That
he did is the 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; lynchings and other violent crimes
against blacks had reached epidemic levels in
the South and some states in the North; and
everywhere in the U.S. blacks were routinely and
profoundly disregarded as American citizens and
human beings.
So,
why did Jack Johnson get the championship bout
he was seeking?
Because,
I'm convinced, even as White Majority America
hated Jack Johnson for his unforgivable
blackness, they were mesmerized by him, too.
They
were mesmerized by his unbelievable boxing
skill, which enabled him to toy with the most
skilled white boxers in the ring while
simultaneously blithely parrying the racist
jibes of spectators.
Most
of all, they were mesmerized by Johnson's
charm and sophistication and absolute
self-confidence whether in or out of the ring.
In
the America of that era, no black person was
supposed to be like this or act like this; and
Johnson's frank and often-declared insistence
that he was his own man and would not be bound
by racist restrictions was astonishing to hear
and see.
This
attitude, and his ability to carry it off, gave
him an enormous, albeit deeply hidden, appeal to
white men, whom the dynamics of
industrialization and urbanization had penned up
in factories and office buildings and cities
-- leaving them fewer and fewer ways to live
according to time-honored notions of manhood.
Of
course, his uniqueness "protected" Johnson
only up to a point -- 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
of Republican Senator John McCain, Democratic
Senator Edward M. Kennedy and a host of others
to reverse this governmental wrong and
posthumously pardon boxing's greatest
champion.
Johnson
endured hard times for a number of years after
that.
But
he never for long lost his irrepressible spirit.
He
lived a full life before dying in an automobile
crash in 1946 at age 68.
Jack
Johnson did not see himself as a "race man,"
the term used then to describe what we would
call a civil rights activist or a black
nationalist (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
just 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; and Madame C.J. Walker,
a socially-conscious entrepreneur who became the
first black woman millionaire.
And
it was there in the millions of black migrants
who would flee the South, as Jack Johnson had
fled Galveston, Texas, during the century’s
early and middle decades.
What
all these people had in common was the
determination to live their lives as they, not
whites, saw fit.
In
that regard, then, Jack Johnson's unbelievable
blackness did, in one of the most racially
benighted periods of American history, provoke a
meeting of the minds across the color line:
Blacks with overt enthusiasm, and whites,
by their own behavior, revealed they saw in him
an authentic American hero.
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
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Morial's Columns in MaximsNews
Jack
Johnson, American 27
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