Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

(fairground music and cheering) -

Narrator

On the morning of July fourth, 1910 15 special trains pulled into the little desert town of Reno, Nevada. Aboard were thousands of white men who had paid their way across the country to see a prize fight unlike any that had ever taken place before. They had come to see their hero, the white ex-heavyweight champion, Jim Jeffries take back the title from the first African American ever to hold it, Jack Johnson. It was, said the Chicago Tribune, going to be a contest between the white man's hope and the black peril. Somehow, in the minds of many white Americans, this boxing match would decide whose country America really was, who was meant to be in charge. (fairground music) (dramatic music) For more than 13 years Jack Johnson was the most famous and the most notorious African American on earth. He battled his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight ranks, won the greatest prize in American sports, a prize that had always been the private preserve of white combatants, then suffered persecution at the hands of his own government and years of exile before the title was taken from him. And he did all these things during the years which marked the low point of African American life after emancipation. Abandoned by the federal government, denied the vote if they lived below the Mason-Dixon line and living under the constant threat of mob violence, black Americans at the turn of the 20th century were no longer enslaved but not yet truly free. Jack Johnson insisted on being free. When whites ran everything Jack Johnson took orders from no one. While most African Americans struggled merely to survive, Jack Johnson reveled in his riches and his fame. When black Americans were expected to defer to whites Jack Johnson battered them to the ground, and at a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life Jack Johnson slept with whomever he pleased. To most whites, and to some African Americans, Johnson was a perpetual threat, profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things. The real Jack Johnson was both more and less than those who loved or those who hated him ever knew. Just remember, he told a young reporter not long before he died, whatever you write about me, that I was a man. (lively music)