Film: Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is a 2-DVD, 220-minute documentary about Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

The first DVD covered Johnson's quest to win the heavyweight title, and the second DVD covered society's persecution of the champion, eventually leading to his arrest, flight from the United States and eventual imprisonment.

I hope that people can watch it to understand the comprehensive, pervasive white supremacy which encompassed all sectors of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. That Euro-Americans considered boxing a sphere of racial competition is symptomatic of a deep pathology of which I have never heard in other places, even where there are patterns of racial, ethnic or tribal discrimination.

Additional Resources:

• On Point with Tom Ashbrook interview with Wiliam Rhoden, author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete


• Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, a lecture at the University of Virginia Miller Center by Thomas J. Sugrue