Unfogiven, unapologetic

No figure in sports has been as fraught with symbolism and racial overtones, alternately reviled and beloved by the culture, as boxing’s black heavyweight champion. In Ken Burns’ absorbing four-hour documentary “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” airing tonight and tomorrow on PBS, we meet the first of these, Jack Johnson.

Burns is a television niche unto himself, having taken on, in long-form documentaries with a middle-brow tone and liberal humanist sweep, entire historical epochs and deeply ingrained cultural topics. These include “Baseball,” “The Civil War” and his nearly 18-hour “Jazz,” which both popularized jazz for neophytes and irked some aficionados of the music, who saw the scope of the film as too narrowly defined around specific artists and eras.

Here, Burns takes on a comparatively slimmer narrative -- the profile, in essence, of a fighter -- seen against the backdrop of black emancipation, both personal and political.

As they play out in “Unforgivable Blackness,” the race politics, ugly as they are, feel known, but the telling of Johnson’s story, particularly the photos of him and footage of his fights, is a revelation. Burns may lose viewers who aren’t interested in boxing, but Johnson is an undeniably great subject, rising to the top of a nationally prominent sport, boxing, at a time when blacks generally weren’t allowed to get in the ring with whites.

Indeed, black men were more often forced to engage in battles royal -- in which they were blindfolded and put in a ring with other black men while white men threw coins at them, a practice vividly depicted in Ralph Ellison’s classic novel “Invisible Man.” But Johnson was too dynamic and skilled, as quick as he could be ferocious, to be held back. He was also beautiful, powerful and graceful at once, with a flamboyant personality out of the ring; he was a precursor, in this way, to Muhammad Ali. In much of the film he is smiling, like the world is casually perched on his shoulders, when in fact it was at his heels, forever hunting him down. When Johnson first won the heavyweight title in 1908, crushing Tommy Burns in the 14th round of a 20-round fight in Sydney, Australia, the film crews shut off the cameras before Burns hit the canvas, so movie audiences wouldn’t have to witness a black fighter knocking out his white opponent. Two years later, in Reno, Nev., when Johnson beat the former heavyweight champ Jim Jeffries, whites rioted across the country; in New Orleans, a young Louis Armstrong was told to run for his life to elude an angry mob.

The racial hatred and violence that Johnson stoked as a fighter, combined with his independence out of the ring, make him a rich focus for a documentary. In “Unforgivable Blackness,” in fact, he emerges as the prototype for the modern-day black superstar athlete, 100 years before the equation flipped, with black street culture now mass-marketed to white suburban kids who buy the tennis shoes and the jerseys.

At a time when lynchings were common, here was Johnson: beaming for the cameras, trash-talking his opponents, driving fast cars and openly consorting with, if not marrying, white women, some of them prostitutes. “The society was in trouble, and Jack was just being himself,” says James Earl Jones, who portrayed Johnson in the Broadway play and subsequent film “The Great White Hope.” Cultural critic Stanley Crouch puts things more starkly: “He could have been killed at any of his major fights.”

And yet, the face that stares back at you in the photos and grainy films that Ken Burns and his team have amassed is a face out of time, as if Johnson is unaware of the burdens of the Jim Crow era in which he’s living.

Burns, more oral historian than polemicist, is concerned here with three themes: Johnson’s dynamism, boxing’s emergence as a sanctioned blood sport and symbol of masculine superiority and racism in America in the decades after Reconstruction. As he has done in previous films, he animates the era with a mixture of music (jazz great Wynton Marsalis did the original score), first-person voice-overs (Samuel L. Jackson is the voice of Johnson) and talking-head cultural commentators and historians (Crouch and Gerald Early, featured prominently here, were also interviewed extensively in “Jazz”).

It works as usual, although mostly because Johnson is so compelling to look at, and Burns gets out of his way. Up until now a figure known mostly to those who’ve long followed the fight game, Johnson, in “Unforgivable Blackness,” becomes popularized, a cross between Michael Jordan (the physical grace and beauty, the joy in athletic performance) and Ali (the threat his ego and individualism posed to the powers that be). To be sure, much about his journey is incredible, a continuing act of defiance against the forces well-placed to keep him subjugated.

Amid this, Johnson slept with whomever he pleased. It was this that American society finally wouldn’t abide. If the “Black Peril,” as the Chicago Tribune dubbed him, could subvert the power structure to become the heavyweight champion, he would, finally, be brought down for sleeping with white women.

Some of the details of Johnson’s life are not unlike those of other great fighters: the sad fall from grace that ends with the retired boxer reduced -- literally, in Johnson’s case -- to Vaudeville shtick. “Unforgivable Blackness” chronicles the fall. But there’s also a great story that Crouch tells, of his father being in a Los Angeles gym, in the late 1930s or early ‘40s, when Johnson showed up. By then Joe Louis was the heavyweight champ. Johnson was retired and getting old, but he still dressed to the nines. He asked to spar with the boxer with the fastest hands, then stood in the ring in a suit as the guy couldn’t hit him. Then he left. But not before he told the awed gathering: “I was a brunet in a blond town, but gentlemen, I did not stop stepping.”

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‘Unforgivable Blackness’

Where: KCET

When: 9-11 p.m. today and Tuesday

Ratings: TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for language)

Keith David...Narrator

Driector Ken Burns. Writer Geoffrey C. Ward. Producers Dave Schaye, Paul Barnes and Burns.