[Marxism] Jack is Back

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  Jack is back

The first black heavyweight champ reigns again

Under a blazing Cuban sun with the mercury registering 105 degrees, a mostly
hostile, mostly white crowd of 20,000 leaned forward in anticipation in the
26th round. The latest great white hope, Jess Willard, landed a succession
of four blows; to the mat went his opponent, Jack Johnson, heavyweight
champ, the most visible black man in the world.

A gambling man, Johnson knew the odds, knew the battering he'd taken, the
teeth he'd swallowed to save some bit of his pride; he didn't even try to
get back to his feet. At the count of 10, Willard's fans broke out hundreds
of white flags in jubilation. An era ended on that afternoon in 1915.

But in a sense, Johnson spent the rest of his life trying to get back up, to
be the star again - or, at least, remind the world of the star that he'd
been. He floated the story that he'd taken a dive in a fixed fight. He tried
to spar his way back to the top. He ran a Harlem nightspot, played
vaudeville and wrote an autobiography - though his general trajectory was
downward - and he finished his days as a sort of living exhibition in
Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus near Times Square.

        

Since his death in 1946 in the last of his many car crashes, there've been
plenty of others to raise the memory of Johnson off the mat. James Earl
Jones conquered Broadway in 1968 as Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope,
a recasting of Johnson's story for the '60s. The autobiographical Jack
Johnson is a Dandy was returned to print, while Miles Davis recorded A
Tribute to Jack Johnson, and Muhammad Ali gave props to Johnson as a sort of
kindred soul tangling with the establishment.


There've also been at least a half-dozen posthumous books on Johnson or his
fights, and now he gets the full Ken Burns treatment with a two-night
television documentary, a new biography by Burns' collaborator Geoffrey C.
Ward (published by Knopf) and a sound track by Wynton Marsalis (on Blue
Note), all titled Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
Jack is back, asking us to deal with a man and all he defied.

The centerpiece, of course, is the TV presentation, with all the marks of
Burns' craftsmanship from A-list actors as narrators (Samuel L. Jackson is
Johnson here) to a wealth of archival film clips and still pictures, some of
which will be eye-openers even for aficionados of the subject.

As the subtitle signals, Johnson's life is divided neatly into two evenings.
In the first, we meet Johnson who, even as a child, seems possessed by a
limitless sense of derring-do, a sense of himself as a tall-tale hero in the
making. Conscious of his physical prowess from his teens, he set his sights
on a sports career just as turn-of-the-century America was segregating games
from horse racing to baseball. Boxing never drew its color lines quite so
clearly as some other sports - except when it came to the heavyweight
championship, the epitome of American manhood, which, until Johnson, meant
white American manhood. No Ethiop, to use a genteel expression of the time,
could expect to step into the ring for a shot at the white man's title.

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7199



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