E-Mail This Article to a Friend Heavyweight champ Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward take on Jack Johnson BY SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS

If Jack Johnson hadn’t existed, would Ken Burns have had to invent him? In a sense, with the new documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, the auteur behind such reimaginings of American history as Jazz, Baseball, The Civil War, and The West sets out to do just that. Johnson (1878–1946) is already well known. The controversial slugger grew notorious during his early-20th-century quest to become America’s first black heavyweight champion. His pursuit of that title despite racist barriers was a sensational story in his own lifetime and was immortalized thereafter, most memorably by the 1967 Broadway drama and 1970 movie The Great White Hope. Both starred James Earl Jones as the burly champion; the "Great White Hope" was any white man who dared to challenge Johnson and try to return the heavyweight title to the white race. Johnson’s flashy lifestyle and open affairs with white women during the height of the lynch mobs made him anathema to white-supremacist America; crossing the color line made him a hero among many blacks. But if he was not already ensconced in some quarter of the American pantheon, his place will surely be fixed now that he’s received the Burns treatment.

In Burns’s documentaries, as in ancient Greek drama (Oedipus, for one), suspense abounds, but one thing is crucial to the product’s success. The audience must already know the outcome, whether it’s the preservation of the Union or the winning of the West or the morphing of once-reviled slave tunes into "America’s classical music." The bounty of beautifully presented information aside, the cumulative aim of the nostalgia produced by means of carefully culled stock photo images, the appropriate "period" music on the soundtrack (in this case by Wynton Marsalis — see Jon Garelick’s "Giant Steps" column, on page 8 of the Music section), and the heady voiceover intonations of first-class actors isn’t to reveal or to disconcert. The goal, it seems, is to confirm some deep-seated sense of "what it means to be American."

Does Jack Johnson’s life adhere to the script? Perhaps. The many threads of his outsized and contradictory existence are brought together in a parallel biography. The book and the film share more than a title: author Geoffrey C. Ward is also the principal writer of Burns’s documentary, as he was for The Civil War, Baseball, The West, and Jazz. The book is not a mere glossy companion volume; it stands on its own as a work of scholarship. It feels a little strange to read Ward’s hefty tome and then watch the equally hefty film that he wrote. Both works adopt a polyphonic, panoramic style. Both trace the contours of Johnson’s life from his scrappy beginnings as the child of emancipated slaves in post-Reconstruction Texas to his teenage hoboing, his earliest bouts, and his taking the world heavyweight title from Australian Tommy Burns in 1908. Both works climax with his defense of the title against former champion Jim Jeffries (who had refused to face Johnson when he had the title) on July 4, 1910. Both take the requisite pathetic turn with his prosecution and 1913 conviction for violating the Mann Act (which prohibits the interstate transportation of women for "immoral purposes" — in other words, white America was punishing him for his exploits with white women), his jail sentence (he eventually served 10 months at Leavenworth), flight from America, the loss of his title to Jess Willard in Havana in 1915, and his bitter last years, and they turn tragic with his death in a car accident when he was driving too fast, having been angered by racist treatment at a roadside diner near Raleigh, North Carolina. In the book, Ward’s painstaking chronology is especially effective in dramatizing the excruciatingly long run-up to Johnson’s moment in the limelight. A viewer of the film unfamiliar with this chronology would experience the passage of time as if Johnson’s success had happened overnight.

But even in the book, nuance can be hard to come by. At times, Ward doesn’t seem to have decided whether he’s telling the story of a legend or a human being. He doesn’t insist, as some authors might, that his work reconstructs the true story of Jack Johnson’s inner life; it’s as if Johnson had none, or as if Ward had chosen not to try to imagine it. Ward takes his subject at face value (which is of course, his public value), adhering to the vast public record of Johnson’s multiple (and contradictory) memoirs, racist news accounts, and government documents.

Because there’s so much raw data to draw from, the book is a bit drunk on detail. Sometimes this works to dazzling effect; sometimes it’s gratuitous — we learn, for example, that the name of the Everleigh Club, a white-only Chicago brothel where Johnson chose his favorite companions, was probably inspired by a superscription favored by the owners’ grandmother, "Everly Yours." And the book is conspicuously short on analysis. Steering clear of the school of speculative biography, with its layers of "possibly" and "perhaps," Ward favors a straightforward piling on of details and events; he narrates these events in uncluttered prose that threatens to flatten a very rich story into a series of dispatch-like accounts. The book is too overwhelmed with information to make an argument.

The mere fact of Johnson’s existence is better established by the film. Even when the book gives the tantalizing details of Johnson’s famous togs (one outfit consisted of sharply creased trousers, kidskin spats over patent-leather boots, a Stetson, a high-white-collared shirt, an ermine silk scarf with a diamond pin, an olive-green vest, and gloves of pearl-gray suede), it cannot match the sensation produced by the sight of the man on screen. It is a marvel to see him in action, less for his skill at boxing than for his humanity and grace, his easy smile in the middle of a fight, his slow stroll, utterly without boast or grandstanding, back to his corner after flooring his opponent. The archival footage alone justifies the entire enterprise.

Johnson claimed not to be a political man, but politics are inextricable from his story. Burns states in the film’s press material that "Johnson in many ways is an embodiment of the African-American struggle to be truly free in this country — economically, politically, and socially." The white-supremacist attitudes that delayed Johnson’s rise, the race riots that followed his defense against Jeffries, and the racist prosecution that precipitated his fall are not in dispute. But Johnson was, if anything, the historical archetype for that old Charles Barkley ad for Nike: "I am not a role model." He exercised his "freedom" in the least noble ways, and thus he embodies a liberty that has more to do with that dangerous-but-celebrated national lust for "rugged individualism."

It is for this trait and not just his racial pioneering (upon crossing the color line and winning the championship, he drew it himself and refused to fight black challengers) that he is reinvented by Ward and Burns as a quintessential American. Stanley Crouch (just one in a cast of commentators that includes James Earl Jones, Jack Newfield, the late George Plimpton, Bernard Sugar, and Gerald Early) says, "Johnson is there with people like Lincoln, Edison, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong: these homemade guys . . . these guys who you couldn’t figure out, that there’s no recipe for. . . . He’s the kind of a person who could only have come about in the United States. Because America whatever its problems still has a certain kind of elasticity, and a certain latitude that allows a person to dream a big enough dream that can be achieved if the person is as big as the dream."

Crouch gets the last word, reimagining Johnson as an all-American, log-cabin kind of guy. But Burns had hoped to tie up the story with an even bigger bow. Last July, at the head of a committee including Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy, Representatives Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson Jr., boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, and musicians Chuck D and Wynton Marsalis, Burns introduced a petition asking for a posthumous overturning of Johnson’s Mann Act conviction. Although it would have been the perfect end to Burns’s reinvention of Johnson as a hero for all Americans (not just blacks), it seems a dubious use of history and still poorer politics. Even if America pardoned Jack Johnson, would it ever forgive him for being black?