E-mail a friendKen Burns
airdate January 10, 2005
Filmmaker Ken Burns has shaped some of the most celebrated documentaries ever made. His credits include Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness, the 15-hour miniseries The War and the landmark The Civil War, which earned two Emmys and was the highest-rated miniseries in the history of public television. At age 22, the Brooklyn native formed Florentine Films after earning his B.A. at Hampshire College. His latest project is the six-part documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which premiers this month on PBS.
Ken Burns
Tavis: As we kick off the first full week of our second season here on PBS--by the way, Happy New Year, since I'm seeing you for the first time--I want to welcome to this program one of the most talented, important members of the entire PBS family, award winning filmmaker, Ken Burns. His latest documentary is a look at the life of boxing champion, Jack Johnson. 'Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson' airs here on PBS next Monday and Tuesday, make that the 17th and 18th of January. Here now a scene from a wonderful film.
Narrator: They had come to see their hero, the white ex-heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, take back the title from the first African American ever to hold it, Jack Johnson. It was, said the Chicago Tribune, going to be a contest between the white man's hope and the black peril. Somehow, in the minds of many white Americans, this boxing match would decide whose country America really was.
Tavis: Ken Burns, Happy New Year.
Ken Burns: Happy New Year to you, Tavis.
Tavis: And you have done it again.
Burns: It's a great story.
Tavis: Let me just be very frank and start with this simple, fundamental and controversial question, I guess. How does a white guy get it as well as you do? What I mean by that is that every piece you do has an undercurrent--if not on the topside, there's always an undercurrent of race matters in everything you do, which I think is such an important conversation for us to have. But why do you get it where other people don't?
Burns: I'm curious about how my country ticks. And if you're honest, you can't scratch the surface of American history without bumping into the question of race. You know we were founded under the sign, 'All men are created equal,' then you have to stop and realize the guy who wrote that owned 200 human beings as he wrote those words and never saw fit in his lifetime to free them, and set in motion an American narrative that's not only bedeviled by, but ennobled by, a question of race. And if I say I'm interested in who we are as Americans, I can't help but bump into it almost every time. I don't seek it out. It finds me. And you have to deal with it directly.
Tavis: I hope I won't offend you or insult your intellect by this question, but one of the things we're proudest of around here, as we start season two, is that we have--this is inside-Hollywood talk--but we have one of the youngest demographics of all PBS programming. This is to say a lot of young people watch this program, and I'm thankful and grateful for them. I suspect, though, given that reality, that a lot of young folk don't really know who Jack Johnson is. So let me start with the real rudimentary, elementary, fundamental question: Who was Jack Johnson?
Burns: Jack Johnson was the first African American heavyweight champion of the world. He did this--
Tavis: So before Ali, before Roy Jones, Lennox Lewis.
Burns: 50 years before all that. In the two decades in which African American life was at its lowest, when more blacks were being lynched than at any time in our history, and where there was a gentlemen's agreement that no black man could fight for the highest title in boxing, Jack Johnson became the sole heavyweight champion of the world and set in motion this insane manifestation on the part of his own country to go and do something to him.
He lived his life out loud. He slept with whoever he wanted. You know, I'll tell you, a way to understand Jack Johnson is to think about if he got transported to now, he'd be on the cover of People magazine. He'd be 'the sexiest man alive.' He would be the original hip-hop star. He would have his bling-bling and his long coats and his fancy cars and his cribs and all that sort of stuff.
Tavis: Yeah.
Burns: And he would be the real deal, though. He would be the real deal, 'cause he did all of these things. We think of Muhammad Ali as a hero, in the 1960s, a decade dedicated to civil rights, where he fights defensively. That's Jack Johnson's style; he got that from Jack Johnson. He strides across the public scene with this brash public persona, he got that from Jack Johnson. And in his darkest nights, when his government was after him for his religious beliefs, he must have taken comfort from the fact that 50 years, 55 years before him, another African American with his government just arrayed against him for his lifestyle, had withstood it, not in a decade dedicated to civil rights, but in this low point.
Tavis: Explain to me-- You said something that I think that some people might get lost around or can't wrap their brains around. How, at a time where you're telling me that a black man could not fight for the heavyweight championship, did, in fact, Jack Johnson become the heavyweight champion?
Burns: It was a remarkable story of courage, perseverance, and, I think, out-and-out will. Blacks could fight for lesser titles. And he did. He fought everybody he could possibly fight, then he fought them again, and he fought them again and again and again. But you had champions who were retiring undefeated, as Jim Jeffries did, rather than fight a black man. The ostensible reason is they're inferior, right? The real reason, they're terrified: What if I lose? What does that mean in the larger symbolism when the heavyweight champion was sort of the emperor of masculinity. So Jack Johnson just followed the champions around and around, begging for a fight. And finally, one day, in 1908, some promoter offered the current champion, a guy named Tommy Burns-- No relation.
Tavis: I was about to ask you, was that your great-great granddaddy?
Burns: No, no, no, no, no. His real name was Noah Brousseau, and at one point he says, 'If I can't lick this...N-word, my name isn't Tommy Burns.' And to which we say, his name wasn't Tommy Burns. And he didn't. He didn't do it.
But they offered him enough money, he couldn't resist it. $30,000 was like $30 million or whatever, and he fought Jack Johnson, and Jack Johnson whupped him. And it was such a whupping that, when he knocked him out, the police in Sydney, Australia, where the fight took place, the day after Christmas, 1908, stopped the newsreel cameras from recording this indignity. And Jack London, the great celebrity journalist who was in the thing, and he says, 'We have to wipe the golden smile off Jack Johnson's face. We need to find a great white hope who can come up and beat him.' And of course, they sent white hope after white hope and white hope, and nobody could beat him.
Tavis: So I'm thinking, Roy Jones wishes those cops had been around a few weeks ago...
Burns: That's right, that's right.
Tavis: ...to stop the indignity. But that's a whole 'nother story. Sorry, Roy. I love you, man. But you still-- You were the man, pound for pound. You were the man. Uh, back to Jack Johnson, though.
Give me an example of some of the things-- We know 'cause we see Ali on film all the time. We know the things Ali said and did that bravado that he had, that he got, as you said earlier, from Jack Johnson. Give me two or three things that Jack Johnson did that just really p.o.'d white folk.
Burns: Well, first of all, he didn't lower his head and walk to the other side of the street. He didn't accommodate, as Booker T. Washington was suggesting. He wasn't even gonna be a talented tenth, as W.E.B. DuBois was suggesting. He was going to be his own self. So, all of a sudden you have a loose cannon on the deck of racial politics.
You have a true free agent in the best sense of that word. And he's gonna do whatever he wants. He's gonna dress like this, drive fancy cars, and drive fast. He's forever getting speeding tickets, and everybody's after him all the time. I mean, he would just have something to say. And then he starts turning up with white women on his arm and marrying white women. And this is in a period... We just cannot appreciate it. We'd normally think of the Jim Crow era--it's the South, it's the Ku Klux Klan. Why, I have quotes in this film that so outrage me that we're now seeking a presidential pardon for Jack Johnson. But they're from the New York Times, they're from the Detroit News, they're from the Los Angeles Times, who, when Jack Johnson would win a fight, would just address the black population, saying 'Do not puff your chest too much. Do not raise your head so high. You are the same lowly member of society--'
Tavis: Wait, wait, wait. Hold the phone. Hold the phone. Hold the phone. You're telling me that back in the day when Jack Johnson won, the L. A. Times, the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press and other papers would say to the Negroes, 'Just 'cause this Negro won...'
Burns: '...don't think you can have anything more to--'
Tavis: In the paper?
Burns: In the paper. It was unbelievable, and they'd take his-- This is well-read man, a student of history. He holds three patents with the United States government for the design of wrenches he designed to fix the fast cars he liked to drive. But they'd reduce what he said to dialect. 'Oh, Massa Jeff, he sho' was tough.'
Tavis: Yeah.
Burns: And, you know, it's an opportunity to shed a light on one of the most shameful aspects of our period, but more than that, to say here's a man who figured out a way for the most part to transcend it. The real film's subtitle should be 'The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Jack Johnson,' 'cause he was not going to be defeated. And he is a kind of humanitarian example of what we can do in the face of just the--the sort of the racism of the universe. He fought against it. He just said no. And it's to me the power of the word 'No.' No.
And that was Jack Johnson. And it's-- Look, it's a subject for me as a filmmaker, it is firing on all cylinders. You know, it's about athletic achievement. He's an amazing athlete. It's about race. It's about sex. And we're so dishonest about sex. We're puritan and we're prurient all at the same time, and we vibrate strangely. And when that sex is between a black man and a white woman, well, then, you know, get under your seats until the storm blows over. And in the end it is about freedom. What more can you ask for in a story and what more can you ask for in an than to give us something that we could carry now as we still struggle with these things. We've made some progress, but there's still work to be done.
Tavis: I get the sense, of everything I have read about Jack Johnson, including the book that came out of this documentary... Everything I've read about Jack Johnson suggests to me, to your point about freedom, he was much more concerned about freedom as a human being...
Burns: That's right.
Tavis: ...more so than freedom as a black man.
Burns: That's right. He wasn't in the parlance of its time, 'a credit to his race.' And that's what got him into so much trouble. I think one of the things the film shows is there's no monolithic black opinion. Everybody thinks, 'Oh, black people think this way, they vote this way, whatever.' Well, you've got Booker T. Washington, who's very upset with him. He said, 'A man with muscles minus brains is a useless creature,' he thunders. You know, W.E.B. DuBois doesn't particularly like his choice of profession or his lifestyle, but he's defending his right to do it. And there's a huge segment of black society that's thrilled, metaphorically thrilled, that the door has been cracked a little bit, that one of ours has reached the highest level. And at that point the heavyweight champion really meant something, like a president or a king. He was-- It was so symbolic. And so, you know, you have this figure that is upsetting the applecart because he's not following anybody else's program. He's for himself. He'd read his Constitution. He knew what he could do.
Tavis: You give me a good sense just now of what black America, although the opinion of him was varying and disparate. I get a good sense now of what black people thought of Jack Johnson. What did Jack Johnson think of black people?
Burns: You know, that's a really wonderful question. I think at some point along the line he created himself as a free agent divorced from race, which is both a blessing and a curse, you know. He knew that his people would turn against him, and he predicted it. Even at the height his fame and his powers when he beat Jim Jeffries and he was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, he sort of knew that there would be a problem. But I think he also...
You know, he drew the color line himself once he got into the heavyweight championship, he didn't fight again the people he'd beat before, the black boxers like Sam McVay and Sam Langford, because they represented the greatest threat. There was also no money in it. Nobody was going to pay, as somebody said, to see two black guys fight. But he drew the color line. Then he said, I'm gonna be exclusively with white women. And that itself was a kind of provocative thing. And I just sort of think, in the scheme of history, he's an agent of some sort of change. He's a harbinger of where it's gonna be.
There was a wonderful cartoon we came across after he won the championship. A white editorial cartoon, and it said, 'It could be worse.' And then it showed all these characters with Sambo lips. And it showed a black golfer, a black baseball player, a black football player, a black tennis player. This was what you didn't have to worry about. 'Yeah, there might be a black boxer, but you don't have to worry about the rest.' And what you were looking at was the history of the 20th century.
And I just love Jack Johnson. He didn't just come up and tap politely on the door. He broke the window, he reached in, he turned the knob, and he walked in, and this wouldn't stand. So our country went after him with a vengeance. When they couldn't beat him in the ring, they went after him in the court.
Tavis: Let me explore this, um, which is still taboo in many respects, to the point you made earlier. That is to say, black men and white women. And certainly we see a lot of that in our country today. We certainly still see a lot of it in athletics. Always have, since Jack Johnson, I suspect always will. Black men who are accomplished athletes dating and marrying white women. Here's the question: Did Jack Johnson do that to be a provocateur, or did Jack Johnson have some inner issues where he really didn't love his own people, didn't love himself, or was it deliberately to put this in your face?
Burns: I think it's more the putting it in your face. He went with anything that moved. He was a lover, an omnivore of--of other people. In the best sense of the word.
Tavis: That's a nice way to put it. I was gonna say a word with two letters in it.
Burns: But, yeah, I think to some extent he then knew that he would be a provocateur. Everything he did was calculated, I think, for some sort of effect. Even though I think he knew in some way he was gonna bring on, not just the opprobrium, but as it turned out the full force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States government, the state of Illinois, and the city of Chicago, who were gonna go after him when they couldn't beat him in the ring. But I think it was to be a provocateur.
I think he was proud of his race. He knew what his position was. I just don't think he was going to buy into anybody else's timetable or schedule of behavior. If you could very simplistically, and as you know better than I do, that it's simplistic to say, well, you've got the Booker T. Washington accommodationists, and you got the W.E.B. DuBois New Negroes, and Jack Johnson is the third 'other.' That's too simplifying, but that's a way to understand it. He just wasn't gonna cop to one particular way to proceed with this horrendous situation, which is, though emancipation had been five decades before, progress had really gone backwards.
Tavis: All right, so we know the Ali story. They couldn't get Ali in the ring. They came after him on his refusal to serve in Vietnam. When they could not get Jack Johnson in the arena--I'm just trying to draw some parallels here--what did they do to come after Jack Johnson?
Burns: This is the Progressive Era. There was a perfectly reasonable piece of legislation called the Mann Act. We know it as the transportation of females across state lines for immoral purposes or debauchery. It was never intended to regulate personal morality, it was never intended to be used against individuals, just syndicated vice. But they saw this an opportunity to prosecute Jack Johnson. So they found an old prostitute he had gone with, trumped it up. He got convicted, sentenced to a year and a day in jail in Leavenworth. And he skipped bail, went into exile, essentially ruining his career. He had some fights in Europe. He came back to Havana, overaged, undertrained, and after 26 rounds in 105-degree heat, he finally succumbed, and they shut the door, they locked it--
Tavis: 26 rounds?
Burns: 26 rounds.
Tavis: 26 rounds of fighting?
Burns: Of fighting. 3-minute fighting, in 105-degree heat. Johnson was winning on points through the first 20 rounds.
And the next African American to be able to fight for the heavyweight championship was Joe Louis, who was light-skinned where Jack Johnson was dark, who agreed not to celebrate his victories where Jack Johnson was all a big winning smile, who agreed not to be photographed with white women or to be photographed in a nightclub. Jack Johnson owned a nightclub. Jack Johnson not only went with white women, he married them. So you just had the anti-Jack Johnson.
He's this radioactive force in American history, and I think one of the reasons why he's disappeared, why a younger audience might not have even heard of him--maybe James Earl Jones performance in 'The Great White Hope' is the only thing in you radar screen, your consciousness--is that he was so scary. He was so ahead of his time. He was such an American original.
Tavis: For all my pugilist fans watching, tell me how fighting was--you say 26 rounds, I'm laughing, like I can't imagine. In my lifetime, we started 15 rounds for the heavyweight, and then they went down to 12 rounds. So how different was the fight game then? I know Don King wasn't around back in the day.
Burns: It's huge. I mean, there are no real rules in terms of ringside doctors and commissions that check up on the legitimacy of it. It was very challenge-- it was halfway illegal. Most states it was illegal. It was the new era where you were no longer bare-knuckled, but these fights could go 65 rounds, 45 rounds. It was a tough, tough business.
And it was this interesting subculture, this exhilarating, democratic, slightly integrated subculture of the boxing world that was also allied with what was called the sporting world, which was filled with people of all classes--high steppers, gamblers, drinkers. And it was into this milieu that Jack Johnson comes into and then learns his craft.
He learns a craft, a defensive style of fighting which is gonna serve not only him but Muhammad Ali extremely well, as opposed to the classic thing that we see even now in a Tyson or we saw before in a John L. Sullivan, which is the brawler. Or the Jim Jeffries. You're gonna go for a quick knockout and get rid of your opponent. Jack Johnson is nuanced the way Muhammad Ali is. And so he appeals to us, not just because he rises out politically and socially and economically and in this larger question of American identity with race, but because he's such a superb fighter. And there are many people who think he's the greatest of all time.
Tavis: Give me some sense of--of... I get a sense of his style and his bravado, but give me a sense of his, um, how he articulated. I mean, Ali we know not just to be fancy and flashy in the ring, but Ali the Louisville Lip. Was Johnson a talker, or was he just a doer?
Burns: He was a talker.
Tavis: OK.
Burns: And he was always good copy, and he was always being quoted by the newspapers. And the more important thing is that, you know, he'd go to these races--he's the only black person around. And people are shouting the worst sort of invective at him, and we've got the film footage to prove it. He's turning around, he's smiling, he's laughing. He's talking to his lesser opponent, and he's saying, 'Hit here. Hit me here. Hit me here. You can't-- Who taught you to fight? Did your mama teach you how to fight?' And meanwhile the guys that have been trying to get his goat are just spitting and fuming and they can't do it. There's this one guy, Jim Corbett, who used to be just horrendous from the ringside after Jack Johnson. Jack Johnson would just say, 'I'm just doing what you did. I'm just fighting like you did.' He would just throw these guys off. And he was just himself.
And I think there are a couple of--two unanswerable questions that maybe reveal the failure of biography, film or print. One: How come he was not killed and assassinated? I cannot answer that question. This was a guy that should have been assassinated at many--at any of his fights. And, in fact, several times in his life people were determined to kill him, and the police stopped them. The other is: How did this kid from Galveston, Texas, decide to have the courage, the forbearance, and the will to swim upstream against the current of the universe and leave us the kind of example that is transcendent. This is not an African American story. This is not something we put in February, our coldest and shortest month. This is everyday story. This is an American original.
Tavis: That may have been-- That may just now be the answer to the question I want to ask now, but what is the enduring lesson, the enduring legacy of Jack Johnson's life?
Burns: You know, Wynton Marsalis did the music for this, and it's just--
Tavis: I saw Wynton the other day. He told--he gave a compliment to you. Wynton was telling me how excited he was to have been asked to do the score for this thing. But he said to me, in his own words, 'I have arrived now. Ken Burns asked me to do a score for him.'
Burns: Man, he's got that upside down. He, um, he graced us with his extraordinary musical talent, and the music is really alive. It sort of helps will Jack Johnson to life, and Wynton really got it. And at one point, we did a thing at Lincoln Center in his new digs, with the music and the film and some speechifying by me, and it was just a wonderful evening. And he just turned to me and he said, 'You know, this is the power of bravery.' And I just remembered that. And I think that was what it was. He's not a perfect person. He was his own worst enemy. There's stuff in the film, which you will see. You know, we hold his feet to the fire. We're not gonna forgive him for the way he treated some of the women he was with. We're not gonna treat him for some--you know, exult him for other things.
But at the end of the day, we've never asked our heroes to be perfect. That's the superficiality of our media culture. The Greeks have been telling us for thousands of years, a hero is not perfect. A hero is a person with very obvious strengths and obvious and inevitable weaknesses. And it's the conversation, it's the negotiation between those strengths and weaknesses that define heroism. Achilles had his hubris and his heel. That's what they're there for. And Jack Johnson to me seems a hero of the most enduring kind, the kind that reminds us about the power of bravery, as Wynton suggested, about the role of African Americans in being a kind of conscience for our country, reminding us of our great failing, to be sure, which none of us want to hear, but also of our great promise.
These are the community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land that gave us jazz, that gave us Louis Armstrong, that gave us all these remarkable human beings and remind us to be true to our own word back at that old creed by Thomas Jefferson: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Jefferson didn't get it, but the words were vague enough that the story of America is continually enlarging what that simple half sentence is all about. And Jack Johnson is part of the dynamic, pushing it forward.
Tavis: We have less than a minute to go here. You could not have found, it seems to me, given this conversation, a better title for this documentary. 'Unforgivable Blackness.'
Burns: W.E.B. DuBois right there watching it all, wondering why all the opprobrium's being heaped on Jack Johnson, said, 'People like to object to his character, but I have yet to hear in white America how marital difficulties have had anything to do with boxers and ballplayers and even statesmen. 'It all comes down, then,' DuBois said, 'to his unforgivable blackness.' And I was gonna call it the generic 'Jack Johnson,' but when I heard that I thought, man, everybody knows what that means. He, you know--
Tavis: Well, it is DuBois. He's kinda hard to fade. I mean they don't come much better than W.E.B. DuBois...
Burns: And what a great film he would make, too.
Tavis: ...not where words are concerned. Ken Burns, congratulations.
Burns: Thank you so much.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you on here.
Burns: Thank you for helping us spread the word.
Tavis: Oh, please, my pleasure. I know that PBS is glad that Ken Burns has done it once again. If you've ever seen this guy's work, I know many of you have, you do not want to miss 'Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.' And rise again, as Ken Burns said earlier, next Monday and Tuesday, 17th and 18th, right here on PBS.
That's our show for tonight. For more information about this special by Ken Burns, log on to PBS.org to read more about it. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time here on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. and keep the faith.
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