Jack could often be found
flaunting his style
while tooling around town.
Behind the wheel of his car
Jack was just Jack.
But everywhere else,
Jack was just black."
In his 2006 article "Why White People are Afraid," journalism professor Robert Jensen writes of how perhaps the "most crucial fear is that of facing the fact that some of what we white people have is unearned."
That it is ill-gotten is certainly true. When the Civil War ended there were four million slaves who had spent their entire lives not getting paid for the work they were doing, while those who enslaved them had spent generations building family fortunes and large land holdings on the backs of slaves. Fast-forwarding nearly a century, the 1950 US Census enumerated more than 15 million "Negroes" nationwide. The economic and social disadvantages borne by those 15 million Americans in the years just preceding the Brown v. Board of Education case -- on top of the fact that they were not born into those ill-gotten family fortunes and large land holdings (which were still being maintained generation by succeeding generation in part through the economic benefits of institutional racism) -- ranged from the more subtle economic perversion of unequal pay for equal work, to that of being entirely denied entry into scores of lucrative professions, to the economically exploitive cradle-to-grave Jim Crow system that insured inequitable access to educational, business, and professional opportunities (including everything from the informal networking situations provided by bars and country clubs to Ivy League schools -- all those places where deals get done and careers are made).
"For more than thirteen years, Jack Johnson was the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth."
-- Ken Burns in the film Unforgivable Blackness: the Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson."
As we know, those opportunities withheld for so long by the white majority extended to professional sports. If there is one thing that we can conclude from reading Kadir Nelson's lively, brilliant, and beautiful WE ARE THE SHIP: THE STORY OF NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL, it is that so many Major League records that existed when I was a kid were ill-gotten. If baseball had stayed integrated (It had been so back in the 1880s.), I would have surely grown up reading the names of the guys from Kadir's book splashed all over the MLB record books.
"Fast hands, a clever head,
reflexes like a cat,
and a big right uppercut
sent many to the mat.
With each fight fought
came new improved skills,
and with each win
came a fistful of bills."
Jack Johnson, the son of slaves, who would read about and be inspired by the stories of great men, wanted to be a great man, too. But professional boxing was not integrated when he was at his prime, and Jack Johnson wanted a shot at Jim Jeffries the white heavyweight champion.
"So Jack chased the champ
from fight to fight,
challenging Jim Jeffries
to prove his might."
Jim Jeffries finally retired rather than fight Jack Johnson. It took years, but finally on July 4th of 1910 Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion of the world. And then Jim Jeffries came out of retirement so that he could have his turn at being whopped by Jack, and that left no doubt about who was champion.
Charles R. Smith Jr., who teamed up with Bryan Collier to write about the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time in the award-winning TWELVE ROUNDS TO GLORY: THE STORY OF MUHAMMAD ALI, collaborates this time with Shane W. Evans in telling the tale of Jack Johnson. A one-page afterward "And then what happened?" provides a great summary of the long-term price Jack Johnson paid for his unwillingness to bow down to White America.
This is an exceptional picture book for older readers. In the same way that Jack Johnson read about and was inspired by great men, BLACK JACK: THE BALLAD OF JACK JOHNSON will provide a flurry of inspiration for today's young people.
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