[Marxism] Unforgivable Blackness

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

=

Film review By Salah Ahmed
The Michigan Citizen

Less than 50 years after the Emancipation Proclamation officially rendered
slavery illegal, a Black man, for the first time ever, became heavyweight
champion of the world. With a series of relatively effortless punches that
sealed his opponent's fate, Jack Johnson also sealed his own as the most
hated man in the United States.

But he wasn't a man as far as white society was concerned. In most white
people's eyes, he was worse than all the country's Black people put
together, because he gave Blacks hope in a world that saw past their color.

And for that he was a marked man.

Johnson's victory against Tommy Burns - who'd become champion virtually by
default after his predecessor, James Jeffries, retired rather than allow
Johnson a chance at the title - got white people hoping too, for nothing
less than the Great White Hope.

And so began the race to find any white man capable of avenging the shame
that had fallen upon white America's bosom. Two years later Jeffries
himself, lured by the promise of a huge cash prize, stepped up to the plate.

When he lost to Jackson on July 4, 1910, in what was probably the most
anticipated fight in boxing - a relatively new, and in some places illegal,
sport - race riots broke out across the country, prompting most of the
media, not only to vilify Johnson, but also to warn those who made up most
of his fans to take heed.

"A word to the Black man: do not point your nose too high, do not swell your
chest too much, do not boast too loudly; do not be puffed up. Let not your
ambition be inordinate or take a wrong direction. Remember, you have done
nothing at all; you are just the same member of society you were last week,"
said a Los Angeles Times editorial a day after Johnson's win in Nevada. "You
are on no higher a plane, deserve no new consideration and will get none. No
man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as
that of the victor at Reno."

When whites found they couldn't beat Johnson in the ring, they went after
him for what they hated even more than his prowess as a boxer: his affection
for white women.

"He wouldn't let anyone define him," says James Earl Jones in Ken Burns' new
documentary, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson."
"He was a self-defined man. And this issue of his being Black was not that
relevant to him. But the issue of his being free . . . was very relevant."

In the two-part documentary, to be aired Jan. 17-18 on PBS, Samuel L.
Jackson provides the voice of Johnson while Keith David, the deep-voiced
actor who played Lester Wallace in "Barbershop," narrates.

Aided by the voices of actors including Billy Bob Thornton, Ed Harris and
Studs Terkel, and commentary by writer Stanley Crouch and others, they tell
the story of how one man, almost 100 years ago, broke down barriers
separating the races in championship boxing - and in the bedroom.

Johnson's romances with white women, one of whom he eventually married, were
fodder for the press, sparking a violent debate over miscegenation and
earning him convictions under laws put in place especially with him in mind.

Politics and fear never mixed so well, and in white people's eyes there was
every reason to fear Johnson.

"The advantage that light-skinned people have with white people is that
white people actually look at them; they can see themselves. But Jack
Johnson was a big, Black, dark-skinned man," Crouch comments in the film.
"See, extremely dark-skinned Black guys, in particular - everybody is put
out by them. Because when they come onto the scene, everybody tends to feel
they're in the presence of something aboriginal. With somebody like Jack
Johnson, everybody's like, 'Oh, now we're back at the beginning.'"

Like its white counterpart, much of the Black press made it clear to Johnson
what lines he shouldn't cross.

"Advice to Jack Johnson: Mr. Jack Johnson must conduct himself in a modest
manner. He can hurt the race immeasurably just now if he goes splurging and
making a useless, noisy exhibition of himself," the New York Age wrote in
its editorial. ". . . On the other hand, becoming modesty and self-control
will win him many friends."

The times being what they were, Johnson truly was out of control. But he
would have it no other way, even if it was the early 1900s.

"So long as I do not interfere with another man's wife, I shall claim the
right to select the woman of my own choice. Nobody else can do that for me.
I am not a slave," Johnson said at the time. "And I have the right to choose
who my mate shall be without the dictation of any man. I have eyes and I
have a heart, and when they fail to tell me who I shall have as mine, I want
to be put in a lunatic asylum."

It is a film worth seeing if only to marvel at Johnson's courage more than
40 years before 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered for merely
whistling at a white woman. It was an America where Blacks were being
lynched left and right, and assassination attempts on Jackson's own life
were common.

In the end it wasn't his heavyweight championship that caused so many to
seethe, or even his unabashed choice of women.

"Of course, some pretend to object to Johnson's character, but we have yet
to hear, in the case of white America, that marital troubles have
disqualified prize fighters, or ball players - or even statesmen," W. E. B.
DuBois wrote. "It comes down then, after all, to this unforgivable
Blackness."

Salah Ahmed is news editor at The Michigan Citizen.



http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=73&twindow=Defaul
t&mad=No&sdetail=1403&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restat
us=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname




_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism