Friends: I gave boxer Jack Johnson short shrift in class yesterday. Circumstances did not permit any other treatment of him, although he deserves much better. He is a far more interesting and complex man than I depicted him. Johnson was a musician, a business man, a race car driver, an actor, a bullfighter, a wrestler, and a raconteur, a well-traveled man of catholic taste, and a decent writer. Geoff Ward’s biography Unforgivable Blackness is a fine and detailed consideration of his life. Ken Burns’s documentary of the same name is one of the best ever done on a boxer, indeed, on any athlete. There was an earlier documentary, by former Mike Tyson manager Bill Cayton, on Johnson with rare footage from some of the films in which Johnson appeared as an actor. This documentary is extremely difficult to find, although the soundtrack by trumpeter Miles Davis is readily available. By the way, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis did the soundtrack for Burns’s documentary.
Johnson actually knew Joe Louis and Louis’s trainer Jack Blackburn, who was a well-known fighter during the days when Johnson was champion. Johnson in fact wanted to be Louis’s trainer but Louis’s managers turned him as they felt he brought too much baggage with him from his notorious days as champion. Johnson went on to predict with incredible accuracy that Max Schmeling would beat Louis when the men first fought in 1936, pointing out the flaws in Louis’s style of which Schmeling took advantage. Johnson’s near-fatal mistake was predicting that Louis would lose the rematch with Schmeling. It was near-fatal because after Louis won the rematch, several angry blacks went looking for Johnson with bad intentions. He had to hide out for awhile.
Renaissance writer and NAACP secretary James Weldon Johnson knew Jack Johnson well and wrote about him sympathetically in his autobiography, Along This Way, which I highly recommend. It offers a detailed and personal view of the sporting world of black celebrities in the early 20th century, boxers, jockeys, songwriters, actors, singers, musicians, and the like. James Weldon Johnson knew this world as he was a member of it and so was Jack Johnson.
-- Gerald Early
