Word: burnses
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Racial supremacists hold two contradictory beliefs: 1) that one race is mentally and physically superior to another and 2) that at all costs the disdained race must never get a chance to prove that first belief wrong. In 1908, Jack Johnson shattered the racists' worldview with his two gloved fists...
Ken Burns' two-part PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (debuts Jan. 17; check local listings) rediscovers the story of an athlete who not only broke the color line but insisted, to white and black critics, that his color was irrelevant. The title of Blackness...
Blackness includes the usual complement of interviews with experts and star voices (Samuel L. Jackson reads Johnson's quotes), but as in Burns' earlier projects, the real star here is the archival material, especially the excavated fight reels. In one, Johnson teasingly applauds an opponent midround for landing a punch...
Many of Burns' past documentaries have examined well-covered subjects (the Civil War, baseball) to draw passionate conclusions that few people would disagree with (war is terrible, racism is evil). Johnson is a less obvious subject and in some ways more complicated. Blackness is about race, even more blatantly than...
The Jack Johnson whom Burns and Ward reveal was less a civil rights crusader than an Ayn Rand protagonist: a stubborn individualist who refused to be bound by society's rules or by any group's claim on him. He didn't merely want to transcend second-class status; he...