By Lee A. Daniels

For Black History Month this year, I re-played my copy of “Unforgivable Blackness,” Ken Burns’ gripping 2005 documentary on the early twentieth-century African-American boxer, Jack Johnson.

As I watched it again, the same thought I had had four years ago recurred to me: That an equally appropriate title to describe that extraordinary man would be “Unbelievable Blackness.”

Born into dire poverty, the son of hard-working, achievement-oriented ex-slaves, Johnson rose against the seemingly insurmountable barriers of the pervasive, fierce racism of the day to capture an exalted symbol of the sports world-and of white supremacy-the world heavyweight boxing championship.

And he did it by fighting and defeating three of the greatest white champions of the era with unbelievable ease.

As I watched Burns’ depiction of the championship fight between Johnson and then-world champion, Jim Jeffries-which was held, very deliberately, on July 4, 1910 in Reno, Nevada, with much of America hanging on telegraphed reports from the stadium-a vivid question took shape in my mind.

Why was Jack Johnson allowed to fight for the championship?

Jack Johnson

After all, white America had long adamantly declared that blacks should never be allowed to seek boxing championships, especially the heavyweight title. Johnson, outboxing every white heavyweight pugilist in sight, had been pursuing a championship bout for years. But there was, seemingly, no chance of his ever reaching his goal.

That he did is even more astonishing considering that his was an era when black Americans were marooned in a vast sea of hostility: the Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy decision had effectively stripped them of their civil rights; lynchings and other violent crimes against blacks had reached epidemic levels in the South and some states in the North; and everywhere in the U.S. blacks were routinely and profoundly disregarded as American citizens and human beings.

So, why did Jack Johnson get the championship bout he was seeking?

Because, I am convinced that, even as white majority America hated Jack Johnson for his unforgivable blackness, they were mesmerized by him, too.

They were mesmerized by his unbelievable boxing skill, which enabled him to toy with the most skilled white boxers in the ring while simultaneously blithely parrying the racist jibes of spectators.

Most of all, they were mesmerized by Johnson’s ebullient personality and absolute self-confidence in and out of the ring.

In the America of that era, no black person was supposed to exhibit such bravado, and Johnson’s frank and often-declared insistence that he was his own man and would not be bound by racist restrictions was astonishing to hear and see.

This attitude, and his ability to carry it off, gave him an enormous, albeit deeply hidden, appeal to white men, whom the dynamics of industrialization and urbanization had long since penned up in factories and office buildings and cities-leaving them fewer and fewer ways to live according to time-honored notions of manhood.

Of course, his uniqueness “protected” Johnson only up to a point-the point when he actually won the title.

From then on he was persecuted by no less than the Justice Department for his “unforgivable” relationships with white women until he was falsely charged and convicted of luring white women into prostitution, and stripped of his title.

It is unclear at this point whether that coalition will re-form to press the Obama administration for a pardon.

Johnson endured hard times for a number of years after his fall from grace. But he never for long lost his irrepressible spirit. He lived a full life before dying in an automobile crash in 1946 at age 68.

Jack Johnson did not see himself as a “race man,” the term used then to describe what we would call a civil rights activist or a black nationalist. Nor was he without flaws, including at least two instances of physically abusing women who loved him.

But, considered in the broader context, Johnson’s flamboyant refusal to knuckle under to white racist beliefs must be seen as just a more extravagant expression of the fire that burned in many black Americans in that era.

The same spirit burned in W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar-activist who coined the term “unforgivable blackness” in an essay on Johnson, and became a co-founder of the NAACP.  That same spirit was there in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the crusading journalist and activist, and in and Madame C.J. Walker, the socially-conscious entrepreneur who became the first black woman millionaire. And it was there in the millions of black migrants who would flee the South, as Jack Johnson had fled Galveston, Texas, his birthplace, during the century’s early and middle decades.

What all these people had in common was the determination to live their lives as they, not whites, saw fit.

In that regard, then, Jack Johnson’s unbelievable blackness did, in one of the most racially benighted periods of American history, provoke a meeting of the minds across the color line: blacks with overt enthusiasm, and many whites, by their complex fascination, revealed they saw in him-an authentic American hero.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline, and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.