Vulgar, Splendid Glory
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In 1908, Arthur John “Jack” Johnson defeated Tommy Burns to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world, and nothing in America would ever quite be the same. No athlete before or since, not even Muhammad Ali, who claimed a spiritual kinship with Johnson, did more to shake up a complacent America.
Johnson defeated James Jeffries, “The Great White Hope,” on July 4, 1910. Three years later he was convicted under the Mann Act (that supremely vague statute, known as the “White Slave Traffic Act,” that restricted the transport of women across state lines), forced to flee the country before coming back in 1920 to serve his sentence. His career was over, his reputation ruined. So hard did white Americans try to exorcise Johnson from their consciousnesses that it was 22 years after he lost his title before another black man, Joe Louis, was allowed to fight for the heavyweight belt.
Currently there is a movement afoot for a presidential pardon exonerating Johnson. Geoffrey C. Ward’s “Unforgivable Blackness” (Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages, $25.95) and Ken Burns’s forthcoming PBS documentary are part of this. But Mr. Ward’s biography is far – very far from hagiography. Biographers are supposed to decide at some point whether or not they like their subjects. Mr. Ward has settled for being fascinated by Johnson without admiring him. He allows Johnson’s greatness without ever trying to make a case for his goodness. Engrossing and definitive, “Unforgivable Blackness” brings its subject to life in all his vulgar, splendid glory.
In the ring, no less an expert than Nat Fleischer – founder of the bible of boxing, Ring magazine, and an astute observer of every heavyweight champion from John L. Sullivan to Muhammad Ali – thought Johnson to be the greatest of all time. Big for his day at six-foot-one and 210 pounds, Johnson was a virtually flawless ring mechanic, packing a tremendous punch with either hand and possessed of a dazzling array of defensive skills. (“It’s not how hard you hit that other fellow,” he once said, “it’s how tired he gets trying to hit you.”)
Outside the ring, Johnson was alternately selfish and generous, arrogant and pompous yet capable of great warmth and sincerity. Born in 1878 in the port city of Galveston, Texas, a town relatively relaxed on racial matters for the Deep South, Johnson grew up playing with white children, unaware of the restrictions he would face in the outside world as he grew older. When he did find out what his boundaries were supposed to be, he simply ignored them, or, as he expressed it, “I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with other people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.”
It never occurred to Johnson that perhaps other black people who could not earn tens of thousands in the prize ring did not have this option; he saw the world in terms of his own good fortune. He raced his automobiles down public streets, mocked and taunted his white opponents, derided his black competitors, made his own deals without white managers, flaunted his success in public, and, most shocking of all, romanced and even married white women. (The singer Ethel Waters, who apparently resisted Johnson’s ardent advances, told him, “It’s universally known, Jack, that you have the white fever.”)
For their part, prominent black leaders like D.A. Hart, editor of The Nashville Globe, were as disgusted as most whites by Johnson’s preoccupation with white women. “No respectable Negro,” wrote Hart, “has the least patience with him. Out of the hundreds of thousands, yea, millions of honorable, intelligent Negro womanhood, any male member of the race can find a worthy and congenial companion.” But Johnson made no apologies: “I am not a slave” he said, and “I have the right to choose whom my mate shall be without the dictation of any man … So long as I do not interfere with any man’s wife, I shall claim the right to select the woman of my own choice.”
Mr. Ward demolishes once and for all the myth of Jack Johnson as a role model for black activists. His victories sparked race riots in which scores of blacks and more than a few whites were killed, but Johnson took no pains to calm the waters he had stirred. “He never seems to have been interested in collective action of any kind,” Mr. Ward observes, “how could he be when he saw himself always as a unique individual apart from everyone else?”
Johnson expressed no solidarity with other black Americans and even took pains to distance himself from their spokesmen. “White people,” he told a journalist, “often point to the writings of Booker T. Washington as the best example of a desirable attitude on the part of the colored population. I have never been able to agree with the point of view of Washington, because he has to my mind not been altogether frank in the statement of the problems or courageous in his solution to them.”
After losing his title to gigantic Jess Willard in 1915 – a fight which Johnson later claimed he intentionally lost, though Mr. Ward finds no supporting evidence for the claim – Johnson was relegated to a sideshow, earning $35 a week in Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus on Times Square. He died as he had lived; in 1946, at age 78, he drove his high-powered Lincoln Zephyr off a curve at more than 70 miles an hour, leaving both blacks and whites to ponder whether he had forced race relations ahead or set them back by years.