[Marxism] Ken Burns film would KO injustice

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ROCHELLE RILEY: Ken Burns film would KO injustice

December 8, 2004

BY ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Freedom is an amazing thing. It has taken centuries for people to
misunderstand it, abuse it, limit it. But for the strong, freedom can never
be taken. Jack Johnson taught that lesson to America. Now he has taught it
to Ken Burns.

Burns grew up in Ann Arbor but now lives in the small New England town of
Walpole, N.H., where he has become to the American historical documentary
what John Kenneth Galbraith has been to American economics, analyzing the
Civil War, baseball and jazz, among other subjects. For 25 years, he has
documented history. Now, for the first time, he seeks to change it.

He visited Detroit recently to push his latest cause: a pardon for Jack
Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion of the world.
Johnson was railroaded on false charges in 1913, three years after he beat a
white opponent in the boxing match of the century.

It wasn't the fighting that got Johnson, as detailed in Burns' film
"Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," which airs in
January on PBS.

The young boxer was done in by being arrogant, immoral and color-blind, by
living like a free man. He did it at the beginning of the 20th Century at a
time when black Americans were not slaves, but not free. Brutalized, lynched
and discriminated against as they fought their way from slavery to
acceptance as Americans, they saw in Johnson a hope of things immortal.

He died in a car accident in 1946 -- 36 years after the immortal fight, lost
to history.


Victory and flight


Enter Ken Burns, who knew next to nothing about Jack Johnson save the July
4, 1910, battle between Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the white former champion
dubbed "The Great White Hope."

Johnson knocked Jeffries to the canvas for the first time in his career, a
victory that sparked violence against black Americans nationwide and a U.S.
government investigation into Johnson's relationships with white women.

Burns hopes to make the case for a pardon for Johnson, who after the fight
was convicted of violating the Mann Act, which prohibited interstate white
slave traffic. Johnson was accused of transporting women across state lines
for prostitution. He actually was traveling with white girlfriends. He was
convicted in 1913, but fled the country for seven years to evade a one-year
prison sentence. He eventually returned to serve his time at Leavenworth.

"The Jack Johnson that I became interested in was much more intelligent,
much more thoughtful, much more articulate, a man who owns three patents in
the United States government ... this was a different story," Burns said.
"The persecution seemed all the more venal and reprehensible and
unconstitutional. Finally, there was a point where I had to do it."

Burns' pardon committee hopes it has a friend in the White House. President
George W. Bush, when he was Texas governor, annually declared March 31 Jack
Johnson Day in Texas.


Race and history


Race is a part of all of Burns' films, he says, because black people are at
the heart of American history. "Unforgivable Blackness" is no exception.
"The questions raised in American history often involve race and speak to
the soul of who we are," he said. "I don't see how I could ignore it and say
I was interested in how my country works."

History is what Ken Burns teaches. Justice is what he is reaching for this
time, a chance for us all to get past the unforgivable blackness or
unforgivable whiteness of our skin, to, at most, come together, or at least,
to recognize and understand our connections.

Contact ROCHELLE RILEY at riley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx






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