'Unforgivable Blackness' pulls no punches

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http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050114/REPOSITORY/501140387/1007/SPORTS

Long before Cassius Clay had the nerve to change his name to Muhammad Ali and fight the military draft in the 1960s, another black heavyweight boxer inflamed the passions of his era.

As author Geoffrey C. Ward clearly spells out in his rollicking biography, "Unforgivable Blackness," that was Jack Johnson. But Ali, for all his trials, had it easy compared to Johnson in the first decades of the 20th century.

As a boxer, Johnson had skills that no heavyweight equaled until the rise of Joe Louis in the 1930s. He hit with power. He evaded punches, pulling his head back from approaching blows just as Ali did in his heyday.

And he infuriated conventional society.
As Ward shows, Johnson angered the white establishment, first by beating its boxers and second by dating and marrying white women. More than 50 years before the rise of the civil rights movement, this kind of race mixing was simply not done.

Nor was it tolerated.

Throughout "Unforgivable Blackness," the reader witnesses the rancid seediness of the "sweet science," the sport's brutality and the constant and virulent racism of early 20th-century America. Respectable newspapers and magazines throughout the nation casually referred to Johnson with racial slurs, such as "shine" or "coon" or worse. Cartoonists caricatured Johnson with drawings that would make lawn jockeys seem the height of political correctness.

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