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He was the first black heavyweight champion
in history, the most celebrated–and most reviled–African
American of his age. In Unforgivable Blackness, the prizewinning
biographer Geoffrey C. Ward brings to vivid life the real
Jack Johnson, a figure far more complex and compelling than
the newspaper headlines he inspired could ever convey. Johnson
battled his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight
ranks and in 1908 won the greatest prize in American sports–one
that had always been the private preserve of white boxers.
At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took
orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not
exist. While most blacks struggled just to survive, he reveled
in his riches and his fame. And at a time when the mere suspicion
that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost
him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased,
and married three. Because he did so the federal government
set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure a year
of prison and seven years of exile. Ward points out that
to most whites (and to some African Americans as well) he
was seen as a perpetual threat–profligate, arrogant,
amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order
of things.
Unforgivable Blackness is the first full-scale biography
of Johnson in more than twenty years. Accompanied by more
than fifty photographs and drawing on a wealth of new material–including
Johnson’s never-before-published prison memoir–it
restores Jack Johnson to his rightful place in the pantheon
of American individualists.
Geoffrey C. Ward won the National Book Critics Circle Award
in 1989. With Ken Burns, he is coauthor of The Civil
War and
Jazz. He lives in New York City.
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