"Unforgivable Blackness: the Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a Ken Burns documentary that debuted on PBS this week, should be required viewing for every self-proclaimed American sports fan.
I know this not because I watched, but because I missed both "The Rise," shown on Martin Luther King Jr.'s observed birthday, and "The Fall," shown the next night.
The Jack Johnson the film depicts was the world's first black heavyweight boxing champion, not the contemporary recording artist who garners more popularity.
Johnson seized the belt in 1908, 39 years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. And he did so in a national climate that revered boxing as one of its three major sports but abandoned post-Civil War reconstruction for Jim Crow laws. By any definition, he reached impossible heights.
Burns' effort is the only movement to elucidate the career of one of the 20th century's greatest American athletes that I've encountered. Otherwise, The Great American Sports Narrative has stranded Johnson, showing the racism that still clings to our sporting traditions nearly a century after his rise to greatness.
There is an accepted story of black liberation through sport that we pass on to our youth. But it is full of half-truths and glaring omissions, and is oversimplified to the point of portraying Jackie Robinson as the black athlete's messiah. Robinson's accomplishments were tremendously important, but they hinder the recognition of Johnson and other black pioneer athletes (though through no fault of Robinson's).
As early as 1920, blacks played in the American Professional Football Association, which later became the NFL. After disappearing in 1933, they re-emerged in 1946, a year before Robinson began his Brooklyn Dodgers career.
In 1937, Joe Louis became the second black heavyweight champion, 10 years before Robinson's arrival. While Louis is revered in and around Detroit, where ironically a hockey arena is named after him, he remains an overlooked figure in early sports history.
And there is of course Jesse Owens, whose sprinting triumphs in front of Hitler at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 draw considerable praise, but again not as much as Robinson's career.
Unfortunately, most athletic historians can't stop heaping clumsy praise on Robinson's grave. Major League Baseball retired his number 42 not only from today's Los Angeles Dodgers, but from every organization. Of course, the MLB waited until Robinson died before it deified him, sparing him the embarrassment and humiliation from worship he would not have wanted.
Ultimately, Robinson is celebrated not because he was emancipated, but because he conformed to the white vision of emancipation. He absorbed fans' racial slurs quietly, adhered to understated racial activism, married a black woman, and relished the help of white owners, coaches and players, most notably from Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese.
Furthermore, Robinson entered into baseball, a gentlemen's game that was thought to be much further out of reach of the average black man than the savagery of boxing and football.
Johnson, from what little a Google search tells me, not only ruled a brutal sport, but did so to the beat of his own drum. He relentlessly pursued white challengers in the ring, and white females out of it. The latter eventually got him convicted, and after Johnson fled the nation until losing his title in 1915, it got him imprisoned.
Babe Ruth proved that you could live an unconventional life and still be revered in the early 20th century. Jackie Robinson proved that you could also be revered living a black life. But Johnson proved that doing both was scandalous. If you compare the reputation of Minnesota Viking receiver Randy Moss to that of New York Giant tight end Jeremy Shockey, perhaps little has changed.
But I know little else of Johnson. The gaps in his story and others remain unfilled, revealing a color barrier that is lowered, but not truly broken.
I only hope PBS shows numerous reruns.
