Television: Too Black, Too Strong

Racial supremacists hold two contradictory beliefs: 1) that one race is mentally and physically superior to another and 2) that at all costs the disdained race must never get a chance to prove that first belief wrong. In 1908, Jack Johnson shattered the racists’ worldview with his two gloved fists when, after years chasing a title shot, he pummeled Tommy Burns to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

Ken Burns’ two-part PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (debuts Jan. 17; check local listings) rediscovers the story of an athlete who not only broke the color line but insisted, to white and black critics, that his color was irrelevant. The title of Blackness–the companion to last year’s book of the same name by Geoffrey C. Ward–is no throwaway. Towering and obsidian-dark, Johnson was the kind of black man, critic Stanley Crouch says in the documentary, who makes whites “think they’re in the presence of something aboriginal.”

Yet he was more like a man from the future. While his white opponents stood and slugged in the style of the bare-knuckle era, he weaved the way Muhammad Ali would later do. Outside the ring, the handsome, savvy and charismatic Johnson prefigured today’s celebrity athletes (and polarizing black stars like Kobe Bryant and Mike Tyson). He wore tailored suits, drove custom cars and slept with many women, white women in particular. His boxing wins drew death threats and caused riots, but it was his sex life that most outraged whites, and many blacks. In 1913 he was tried under the Mann Act on charges of transporting a girlfriend across state lines for immoral purposes; he was convicted and went into exile and dissolution.

Blackness includes the usual complement of interviews with experts and star voices (Samuel L. Jackson reads Johnson’s quotes), but as in Burns’ earlier projects, the real star here is the archival material, especially the excavated fight reels. In one, Johnson teasingly applauds an opponent midround for landing a punch. In the Tommy Burns fight, the frame freezes as police stop the fight and order the cameras stilled to spare the world the trauma of seeing a black fighter whip a white one. On film, Johnson’s singularity is stark: he is a lone, relentless black giant amidst a sea of white faces.

Many of Burns’ past documentaries have examined well-covered subjects (the Civil War, baseball) to draw passionate conclusions that few people would disagree with (war is terrible, racism is evil). Johnson is a less obvious subject and in some ways more complicated. Blackness is about race, even more blatantly than Baseball or Jazz, and yet Johnson was not self-consciously a racial hero. He would not kowtow to racists, but he also rebuffed Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington and other black community leaders who chided him for fraternizing with whites.

The Jack Johnson whom Burns and Ward reveal was less a civil rights crusader than an Ayn Rand protagonist: a stubborn individualist who refused to be bound by society’s rules or by any group’s claim on him. He didn’t merely want to transcend second-class status; he seemed to believe his talent placed him in a class above all. Blackness captures how tragically he was proved wrong–and how exhilaratingly, for moments in the ring, he proved himself right. –By James Poniewozik