A boxer’s last Battle Royal

Before Muhammad Ali, there was Jack Johnson.

Johnson, the son of former slaves, became heavyweight champion of the world at a time when America cared about only three sports: horse racing, baseball and boxing. At 6-2, 200 pounds, he was known for his lightning-fast hands, a near impregnable guard and devastating power. His pugilistic triumph in 1908 punched a hole in the nation’s, even the world’s, racial caste system, and his continued dominance of white opponents sparked riots in more than a dozen major American cities.

More controversial than his athleticism, however, were his sexual predilections. He openly dated and married white women during a period in which black men were lynched for being “too familiar” with them. Between his well-publicized prowess in the ring and exploits in the bedroom, he was frequently, almost routinely, threatened with assassination.

As much as anything, the Galveston, Texas, native strove to ignore America’s racial hierarchy and be his own man. Despite immense pressure to be quiet, modest and deferential, he was instead unashamed, outspoken and flamboyant, even given to the then-unprecedented practice of predicting the round of an opponent’s knockout.

“Ali wouldn’t have been who he was without Jack Johnson,” said Ken Burns, whose two-part documentary “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” airs Monday and Tuesday on PBS. “Johnson was a man who forced America to confront its definition of freedom. And that is an issue with which we continue to struggle.”

As the four-hour program makes unmistakably clear, it was not a lynch mob that eventually dragged Johnson down but trumped-up charges by the U.S. government. Prosecutors convicted Johnson of violating the Mann Act, a federal statute originally aimed at halting commercialized vice but contorted in this solitary case to apply to an individual. Throughout his legal ordeal, he remained defiant.

“I am not a slave,” said Johnson in response to his many critics, mostly white, but some black as well. “I have the right to choose who my mate shall be without the dictation of any man. I have eyes and I have a heart, and when they fail to tell me who I shall have for mine I want to be put away in a lunatic asylum.”

After the verdict in what is regarded today as a sham trial, Johnson fled the country in 1913 rather than be imprisoned. In the first of his seven years in exile, he lost the title to a white boxer. Finally, in 1920, he returned to the United States to serve a yearlong prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kan. Although the subject of a hit Broadway play and movie in the 1970s called “The Great White Hope,” Johnson, given his accomplishments, remains a relatively obscure historical figure -- a status critics blame on the permanent blot on his record.

Largely at the behest of Burns, a national committee was formed last year and is pressing for a presidential pardon for Johnson. Among others, the group boasts the bipartisan support of U.S. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), as well as celebrities like actor Samuel L. Jackson and ex-boxer Sugar Ray Leonard. In October, the power-studded group secured a nonbinding Senate resolution calling on President Bush -- the only person who can grant such a pardon -- to expunge Johnson’s record.

“Although it is too late to properly rectify what was done to Jack Johnson, I hope in some small way we can call attention to his remarkable achievements and repair his good name,” said Hatch in a written statement from his office.

Added Burns: “Because Johnson is dead, the point is really moot in some ways. But in pardoning him, we heal ourselves.”

No stranger to encountering racism in historical research, Burns was nevertheless jarred by the level of virulent race hatred during Johnson’s era. In fact, it was so surprising, Burns departed from his normal practice of using understated titles as in his widely acclaimed series on “Baseball,” “Jazz” and “The Civil War.”

“We were just overwhelmed by it,” said Burns. “And in the end, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, it all came down to unforgivable blackness.”

Johnson’s unlikely ascension to world fame -- and infamy -- began as a Texas teenager when he competed in a Jim Crow-era Southern practice called the “Battle Royal.” The contest called for the blindfolding of a group of African American youths, who were then instructed by white bettors to bare-knuckle box. The one left standing, frequently Johnson, won.

By 18, he was traveling the country, earning between $5 and $10 a night boxing. By 25, he was ready for a shot at the world heavyweight title. At the time, however, white champions refused to grant a title bout to a black man, citing reasons of racial inferiority. It took another five years, until 1908, but Johnson finally got his chance against Tommy Burns. (Burns got $30,000 for the bout, Johnson $5,000.) At the bout, held in Sydney, Australia, Johnson was subjected to a torrent of racial epithets from the crowd, his opponent’s corner and Burns himself. There were, of course, numerous death threats.

When he “was fighting he could have been killed in any of his major fights,” notes writer Stanley Crouch in the documentary. “There were people out in the audience who probably were willing to murder him. He knew it, they knew it, and everybody in the whole world knew it.”

Johnson knocked down Burns twice in the first round and went on to win by a knockout in the 14th. The documentary shows original footage of the fight, but just as Johnson is about to end the fight, police ordered the filming to be stopped. The sight of a black man demolishing a white man was deemed too much for the public.

Never one to shy from controversy, Johnson said after the fight: “I’ve forgotten more about boxing than Burns ever knew.”

An almost hysterical search for a white champion -- better known as “The Great White Hope” -- developed across America, but none could unseat the new champion. Eventually, undefeated former champ Jim Jeffries was coaxed out of retirement from his Burbank farm to return the title to white America.

Dubbed the “Battle of the Century,” the fight was staged in Reno, Nev., on Independence Day 1910. Johnson knocked out Jeffries in the 15th round, a feat that prompted race riots from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, D.C., led mostly by whites. It also drew this editorial, “A Word to the Black Man,” from the Los Angeles Times.

“Do not point your nose too high,” the editorial advised. “Let not your ambition be inordinate or take a wrong direction. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration and will get none. No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno.”

(The Times apologized for that editorial in Thursday’s paper and joined the call for a presidential pardon.)

Unable to wrest the title from Johnson physically, the white public turned to his personal life and the law. The boxer’s public preference for white women had long been a tinderbox issue, and his episodes of domestic violence and drinking didn’t help him.

“We hold his feet to the fire,” said Burns of Johnson’s physical abuse of women. But he added that modern expectations of heroes are too narrow. “A hero isn’t perfect. They have extraordinary strengths and also inevitable weaknesses. The heroism is the negotiation between those strengths and weaknesses.”

Federal prosecutors, after a former lover stepped forward, were able to finally convict Johnson of a violating the Mann Act, which banned the transportation of women in interstate commerce “for the purpose of prostitution, debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

Almost a century later, the conviction still stands. However, there’s a chance it could be reversed if Bush grants a pardon. The only other time such a pardon has been bestowed was during the Clinton administration, when a racially motivated conviction of West Point’s first African American graduate in 1881 was expunged.

Bush has been handed a petition asking for a Johnson pardon, and the president can “at his sole discretion” act upon it, according to John Siegel of the New York City law firm Proskauer Rose, which prepared the legal documents. While few still believe Johnson is guilty of any crime, the fear is that another presidential pardon would simply open the floodgates.

“There’s a lot of work to do if you are going to right all the wrongs of American history,” said Siegel. “But Johnson’s is different because you can’t find another case where a champion of this prominence was destroyed by a wrongful conviction.”

Johnson’s legal troubles, as dramatically presented in “The Great White Hope,” served as an inspiration for another besieged and black boxing champion some half-century later. After attending the play, Muhammad Ali saw close parallels between Johnson’s plight and his own -- being stripped of the title for refusing to report for military service during the Vietnam War.

“Ali felt persecuted by the government and strongly identified with Johnson,” said Gerald Early, a professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, who has written about Ali. “He really saw himself as the new Jack Johnson.”

Unlike Ali, Johnson’s public image never was rehabilitated. In 1946, Johnson died in the same race-torn American South in which he was born. After a racial altercation in a Raleigh, N.C., restaurant, an enraged Johnson sped away, took a turn too fast and crashed his Lincoln Zephyr into a tree. He was 58.

America has made enormous strides in race relations since the Jim Crow era, but Johnson’s story still has much to teach us, notes Burns. The filmmaker contends that the reasons for the intense interest in the O.J. Simpson trial, the Kobe Bryant case and Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl slip-up are obvious.

“We may ignore it, we may disguise it, but race is always with us,” he said. “America vibrates strangely about sex, even more so when it involves both races.... It goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.”