Ken Burns’s documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is about the world’s first African-American heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson rose to prominence during the early 20th century and created controversy by winning the championship title. At the same time that many African Americans were persecuted and limited in their position in society, Johnson went out and did what he wanted, disregarding social trends that were based entirely on race and social mores. Ultimately it was his lifestyle that proved his undoing. He provoked the political powers of the time. The film’s director Ken Burns makes documentaries about people he feels embodies aspects of America. Here Burns presents us Jack Johnson, a man who embodies the American idea: Stanley Crouch states in the film, “Johnson embodied the American idea of being able to go where you want to go on the basis of your ability.” However, despite Johnson fighting for this American idea, Burns also presents us a story wherein he is opposed by America. Johnson represents the fact that America has opposed the American dream out of bigotry and intolerance. He was a fighter for the heavyweight title, racial equality, and freedom.
Gary R. Edgerton writes in Ken Burns’s America about Burns’s biographies being “majoritarian rather than marginalized.” Meaning that they are larger than life people who show the majority of views and movement of America. Edgerton says Burns’s reasoning is to ask, “‘Who are we Americans as a people?’ This preoccupation with the elemental question--‘Who are we as Americans”’--could not be more relevant in an era when multiculturalism has become the source of sweeping and fundamental reappraisals of almost every aspect of national life.” Edgerton wrote this concerning the film Thomas Jefferson, but this line of questioning ourselves as Americans can be applied toward Unforgivable Blackness as well. J.B. Lewis writes in the forward of Johnson’s autobiography In the Ring and Out, “In the story of Jack’s life, there is an abundance of thrill and adventure, but there is also the ripened wisdom of years of experience.” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in the book Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, “He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing--no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female--could keep him for long from whatever he wanted. He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men.” He embodied the American spirit, his actions are what we aspire to be. However those that opposed him show America as it was and as it is.
Two schools of thought existed amongst the African Americans of the time, that of the militant black man, and that of Booker T. Washington. Geoffrey C. Ward quotes a critic of both movements who explains, “The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and depredations, it deprecates political action and preaches the doctrine of industrial development and the acquisition of property.... The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place. It believes in money and property, but it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain.” In the time of Jack Johnson, many of those in the African American community followed Washington’s school of thought, and were outraged as well as white Americans with Johnson’s behavior. White America had become used to Washington’s school of thought, and having submissive black Americans under them.
The behavior of Johnson was that he was a celebrity flaunting his wealth, slept with only white women, and moved into white neighborhoods, further enraging white men. Ward states, “While most negroes struggled merely to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. At a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased. Most whites (and some Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual threat--profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.” Johnson’s individualistic personality isolated him from both black and white Americans. Johnson became a threat to white Americans, and their pride. J.B. Lewis writes, “Steeled by a determination that a man of [Johnson] race should not posses laurels so highly prized in the realm of sports, it was easy to marshal against him native prejudices, and back them with charges of deviation from the moral code and violation of certain statues.” They sought to use the Mann Act. Ward describes it in Unforgivable Blackness as having “barred the transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce ‘for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purposes.’” Ward continues that the “language of the act was loosely drawn, and both within and without the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation...there were those who believed that “debauchery” and “other immoral purposes” might be more broadly defined to include what the newspapers called “escapades,” sexual relations between consenting adults.” Ward quotes Congressman Seaborn Roddenberry in the book Unforgivable Blackness, “No... degradation in all the years of southern slavery possessed such villainous character... as the provision of the laws of Illinois which allows the marriage of the Negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain....Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit.” This was America’s reaction to the first black man winning the boxing heavyweight championship.
Ken Burns presents us the dramatic story of Johnson through cinematic storytelling. Edgerton writes about Ken Burns’s four plot structures for his epic documentary Civil War in Ken Burns’s America, “To start with, he employs narrative descriptions which primarily move the story along. These sections follow a simple chronology and are designed above all else to provide the audience with the basic historical facts and figures on what is happening and who is involved in the action at any given time.” The movie’s companion book of the same name, shares the writer Geoffrey C. Ward. The film’s narration, read by Keith David, follows the text of the book. It is only when we watch interviews with James Earl Jones, Stanley Crouch and Burt Sugar-- living specialists of Jack Johnson--that the film’s narration veers away from Ward’s original text. Most of the film follows the format given by the book for the narration.
Edgerton continues, “Second, he designs what he calls emotional chapters...which have the ‘ability to float between episodes.’ This category of scene is less bound by chronological demands than by its capacity to affect mood and engage an audience emotionally at strategic moments within the plot.” An effective emotional chapter in the film occurs after Johnson’s death in the film; Stanley Crouch reveals a personal story about Johnson arriving in his father’s gym. Johnson gets inside the ring with the fastest boxer there and wears him out. Johnson then leaves abruptly like a magician. Burns forms a story of Johnson to show his character; this gives the viewer a sense of the emotion of the mystery and legend that was Jack Johnson.
Edgerton explains the third type of scene, “Telegrams in a sense, are a mixture of both the scenes of narrative description, because they are bound to whatever event is transpiring in the story line at the time.” An example of a telegram is when Johnson goes to trial under the Mann Act. It is introduced by the narrator and moves into Belle Schreiber’s testimony against Johnson. We are shown pictures of Belle Schreiber and various shots of court houses, while an actress reads the transcript. This creates an illusion that we are witnessing the actual testimony. Then actor Samuel L. Jackson gives his voice to Johnson, and we hear Johnson say he never met with Belle in a hotel. Burns presents us exterior and interior shots of a hotel, suggesting Johnson is lying, that he did indeed meet her there. It could be any photograph of any hotel Burns is showing us, but Burns creates a situation in which we believe Johnson is lying in court.
Edgerton explains Burns’s fourth technique, “‘editing clusters.’ Burns “constructs editing clusters as his way of critically analyzing the various sides of a theme, question, or controversy that is central to a better overall understanding of his subject.” Burns will cut together relevant images with “a montage of commentators,” who give “conflicting and corroborating opinions, creating a collage of multiple viewpoints.” Burns uses this technique during the trial of Johnson by having Congressman Roddenberry give his opinion of mixing races, W.E.B. DuBois defend Johnson’s actions despite his disapproval of them, and using commentators like Stanley Crouch, James Earl Jones, and Randy Roberts. This conflict of opinions gives the audience a greater understanding of the trial and era from differing viewpoints.
Burns used careful research and storytelling techniques to convey the life and historical worth of Jack Johnson. The plot structure: narrative descriptions, emotional chapters, telegrams, and editing clusters convey the historical and the emotional aspects of Johnson in the film. Johnson becomes more than a boxer in Burns’s film, he becomes a symbol of America. He is an example not just of the American ideal of gaining rewards through hard work; but of the opposition individuals receive when they try. Through him we can better understand racism, bigotry, and intolerance, that has held, and continues to hold, America back from embracing individuals and those that pursue the American ideal.
Bibliography:
Edgerton, Gary R., Ken Burns’s America, Palgrave, New York, 2001
Lewis, J.B., Proteus Limited, New York, 1977
Ward, Geoffrey C., Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Vintage, 2006
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