{"product_id":"unforgivable-blackness-isbn-9780375710049","title":"Unforgivable Blackness","description":"In this vivid biography Geoffrey C. Ward brings back to life the most celebrated — and the most reviled — African American of his age. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJack Johnson battled his way out of obscurity and poverty in the Jim Crow South to win the title of heavyweight champion of the world. 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 simply to exist, he reveled in his riches and his fame, sleeping with whomever he pleased, to the consternation and anger of much of white America. Because he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced to endure prison and seven years of exile. This definitive biography portrays Jack Johnson as he really was--a battler against the bigotry of his era and the embodiment of American individualism.\"\u003ci\u003eUnforgivable Blackness\u003c\/i\u003e is likely to be the definitive biography of Jack Johnson . . . A significant achievement. Geoffrey Ward provides an utterly convincing and frequently heartrending portrait of Jack Johnson.\" --Joyce Carol Oates, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A formidable accomplishment . . . Ward has successfully brought this deep and colorful personality, this insufficiently understood and altogether amazing man, back to life.\" --David Margolick, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Brings [Johnson] to life in all his vulgar, splendid glory. Engrossing and definitive, Unforgivable Blackness is a great biography of a great and utterly fascinating subject.\" --Allen Barra, The Philadelphia Inquirer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An engaging and well-researched popular biography . . . Throughout the book, Johnson's energy never flags, and neither does our interest. [Ward] has drawn a portrait of a fascinating figure, whose oversized personality fills every page.\" --Bruce Schoenfeld, Washington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This remarkable book is at one and the same time a rousing story, a terrific biography, and first-rate history. With immense skill, Geoffrey Ward has not only brought Jack Johnson back to life but has provided a telling window onto what it was like to be a great black athlete in early-twentieth-century America.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Geoffrey Ward’s \u003ci\u003eUnforgivable Blackness\u003c\/i\u003e is a stunning exploration in the unbelievable bigotry of whites in early-twentieth-century America.” —David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois\u003cbr\u003e Geoffrey C. Ward\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003ewon the National Book Critics Circle Award\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003ein 1989. With Ken Burns, he is coauthor of \u003ci\u003eThe Civil\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eWar\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eJazz\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New York City.The Pure-Blooded American\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the spring of 1910, Halley’s comet returned to the heavens after an  absence of seventy-five years. Some believed it a sign from God that  the world was about to end. Nearly everyone saw it as a momentous  event, and during the week of May 18, when astronomers predicted the  earth would pass through the comet’s tail, adults and sleepy children  all over the country stumbled out of their homes at night to see if  they could get a glimpse of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the Lower East Side of New York, thousands of tenement dwellers,  mostly immigrants and their families, filled the streets to peer up at  the cloudy skies, while on the roof of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel  uptown, Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon led two hundred tuxedoed  guests attending the annual dinner of the National Association of  Manufacturers in a champagne toast to the comet’s passing. In Memphis,  Tennessee, separate all-night revivals were held for white and black  believers awaiting Judgment Day. In Chicago, panicked householders  blocked their doors and windows against deadly gases they believed the  comet would release.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd early one morning, at the fashionable Seal Rock House on Ocean  Beach at San Francisco’s western edge, guests and staff members alike  gathered on the sand beneath the stars, listening to the rhythm of the  surf and waiting to chart the comet’s brilliant course above the sea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the hotel’s most celebrated guest—the most celebrated black man on  earth—remained in bed in his suite on the second floor. A member of his  entourage had slipped up the stairs a few minutes earlier and tried to  rouse him, but the heavyweight champion of the world had ordered him  out of the room. He saw no need to get up. Over the coming centuries  there would be hundreds of comets, he said. “But there ain’t gonna be  but one Jack Johnson.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike a good many of his claims, this one was both outrageous and  entirely accurate. He had, after all, battered his way from obscurity  to the top of the heavyweight ranks and won the greatest prize in  American sports—a prize that had always been the private preserve of  white combatants. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he  took orders from no one and resolved to live always as if color did not  exist. While most Negroes struggled merely 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. Most whites (and some  Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual threat—profligate, arrogant,  amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe real Jack Johnson was both more and less than those who loved or  those who hated him ever knew. He embodied American individualism in  its purest form; nothing—no law or custom, no person white or black,  male or female—could keep him for long from whatever he wanted. He was  in the great American tradition of self-invented men, too, and no one  admired his handiwork more than he did. All his life, whites and blacks  alike would ask him, “Just who do you think you are?” The answer, of  course, was always “Jack Johnson”—and that would prove to be more than  enough for turn-of-the-twentieth-century America to handle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohnson visited Paris for the first time in June of 1908, before  sailing to Australia and his long-delayed battle with the heavyweight  champion Tommy Burns. It may have been then that he and an unknown  French journalist began laboring together over the manuscript that  would become the first of his autobiographies.* The language of its  opening passage seems stilted, especially in translation, but the  thoughts are unmistakably Jack Johnson’s:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen a white man writes his memoirs . . . he anxiously begins with the  history of his family from earliest times. It seems the higher one  ascends the more interested one is in it. And I think that most authors  embroider their genealogy. Basically, none of it interests anyone other  than family members.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I don’t want to exempt myself from this ancient custom and wish to  say a few words about my genealogy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur [Negro] memories are handed down from father to son. Whites don’t  think so, but we blacks are also proud of our ancestors and during long  days and still longer nights, though we knew neither schools nor books,  we still transmited memories of past centuries. I don’t doubt that the  stories have been modified over time, but the salient facts remain. If  some parts are merely fables it doesn’t matter much. Who can tell among  the white stories what is fact and what is fable?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFacts about Johnson’s ancestry are hard to come by, and he was himself  a cheerful fabulist when it came to retelling his own life. But the  first thing he wanted people to understand about him was that because  his enslaved forebears had arrived in America long “before the United  States was dreamed of,” he was himself a “pure-blooded American.” And  because he knew that that was what he was, he saw no reason ever to  accept any limitations on himself to which other Americans were not  also subject.*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy he insisted on acting that way at a time when most American Negroes  were relegated to second-class citizenship remains the essential  mystery of his life. No amount of sleuthing will ever fully solve it,  but a few clues may lie half-hidden in what little we know of his  boyhood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was born Arthur John Johnson in Galveston, Texas, on March 31, 1878,  the year after the last Union troops were withdrawn from the former  Confederacy, leaving freed blacks to fend for themselves.† His parents,  Henry and Tina (known as Tiny) Johnson, both ex-slaves, did just that.  She was from either North or South Carolina; government records and her  son’s various accounts differ. Henry was born in Maryland or Virginia  sometime during the 1830s; after serving as a civilian teamster  attached to the U.S. Army’s 38th (Colored) Infantry, he settled in  Galveston in 1867. His son loyally remembered him as “the most perfect  physical specimen I have ever seen.” In fact, Henry stood just five  foot five and was severely disabled by an atrophied right leg, the  result of exposure to cold and rain and snow in the trenches at  Petersburg, Virginia, that had caused the “disease of rheumatism” to  distort his right knee—or so his attorneys would later claim in one of  several unsuccessful bids he made for a veteran’s pension.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite his injury, despite the fact that he could not read and that  neither he nor his wife could write, Henry Johnson never failed to find  ways to support his family. He worked as a porter in a saloon, then as  a school janitor, finally as supervising janitor for Galveston’s East  School District. His wife took in washing. Both were faithful  Methodists, and Henry sometimes helped with the preaching on Sundays;  Jack Johnson’s glib tongue and enthusiasm for public speaking may have  been an inheritance from him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Johnsons had nine children, four of whom lived to adulthood. They  kept them all fed and clothed, saw to it that they attended at least  five years of school, and somehow managed to put enough money aside to  buy a plot of land at 808 Broadway at the island’s eastern end, and  build their own single-story home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJack was the Johnsons’ third child and first son, and from the  beginning seems to have been the focus of his family’s attention. He  was bright, talkative, and filled with energy, but, as he and his  mother both remembered, he’d also been frail as a small boy and was  still so thin at twelve that the family physician warned he might be  tubercular. Like his sisters and brothers, he was expected from early  childhood to help keep the family going. He swept out schoolrooms to  ease his father’s burdens. “Those devilish brooms were taller than I  was,” he remembered. “It was sure the joy of my early life to grow  taller than the broomstick.” And he got an early morning job, riding  along on a milk wagon to keep an eye on the horse when the milkman got  down to make a delivery. Every Saturday night, he was paid ten cents  and a brand-new pair of bright-red socks, of which his employer  evidently had a limitless supply.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOtherwise, Jack remained at home with his older sisters, Lucy and  Jennie, and his younger siblings, Henry and Fannie and an adopted  brother named Charles. He was especially close to his mother, who told  him again and again he was “the best boy in the world” and assured him  he could do anything he wanted if he wanted it badly enough.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJack Johnson seems to have needed little encouragement along those  lines. He saw himself as someone special from the first—someone set  apart, not subject to the limitations holding others back. His mother  liked to recall what he told her one evening when he was still a small  boy doing his homework by lamplight. As she told it,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJack was reading in the Texas history book about great men, and he  turns around to me and he allowed as how he was going to be a great man  himself some one of these days. And I says, “Shucks, boy, what you  talking about? What you think you’re going to be—president?” He said,  no, he wasn’t figuring on being president, but he expects he’ll be  something what’ll be just about as big. And that child sure was talking  a parable that night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohnson would remain deeply devoted to Tiny Johnson until her death,  lavishing her with gifts and telling reporters she had been responsible  for all his success. After her death, he delivered a pulpit talk called  “The Influence of My Christian Mother” before black congregations in  several cities. In it, he urged his listeners to “keep your mother’s  image before you all the time. Remember what she taught you when you  was a youngster, and there is nothing you can’t accomplish.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat message was reinforced by the city (and the neighborhood within  that city) in which Johnson grew up. In 1929, long after his boxing  life had ended, he cooperated in writing a series of syndicated  articles about his career. In one, he argued that the outstanding black  heavyweights of that era, Harry Wills and George Godfrey,* would never  reach the heights he had reached, in part because they were from the  Deep South and therefore “grew up with the thought implanted in their  minds, through generations of tradition, that the COLORED man was not  equal to the WHITE. The inferiority complex which was planted in their  grandfather and his father has never been shaken off and never will be  shaken off.”†\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohnson was a southerner, too, of course, and had also been raised in a  city where, as he said, “the whites were in control.” But Galveston was  different from most southern communities. It was a seaport and, like  its rivals, Mobile and New Orleans, took a more relaxed view of racial  separation than did the inland towns and cities of the South. All sorts  of people came and went at the waterfront. “You had all walks of life,  races, creeds, colors . . . in here,” a longtime resident remembered.  “We were segregated but it wasn’t as bad as other places in the state  of Texas. . . . That was a unique thing about Galveston. Negroes and  Caucasian people were poor and lived in the same neighborhood, ate the  same food, suffered the same problems.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo part of Galveston Island was more racially mixed than the Twelfth  Ward, in which Johnson grew up. Its most important citizen was Norris  Wright Cuney, who, as the son of a Texas planter and his slave  mistress, was regarded as black, not white. At a time when Negro  political power was eroding all over the South, Galveston’s “sable  statesman” managed to hold on to his for some fourteen years. As  alderman, labor organizer, collector of customs for the district of  Texas, Republican National Committeeman, and leader of the racially  mixed “Black and Tan” faction of the state Republican Party, he was at  the time of his death in 1896 perhaps the most powerful Negro  officeholder in the country—and a constant reminder to neighbors like  young Jack Johnson that a black man need not limit his horizons.*\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe public school Johnson and his brothers and sisters attended was  segregated, but the streets and alleys through which they raced once  school was out were not. “From the time I was old enough to play on the  Galveston docks I played with a gang of white boys,” Johnson recalled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe had a great gang, too, and every kid in Galveston looked up to the  11th Street and Avenue K gang. That was us. My best pal and one of the  best friends I have now is Leo Posner, a white boy who was the head of  our gang down there. So you see, as I grew up, the white boys were my  friends and my pals. I ate with them, played with them and slept at  their homes. Their mothers gave me cookies, and I ate at their tables.  No one ever taught me that white men were superior to me, and when I  started fighting I fought just as enthusiastically against them as I  once had fought on Leo Posner’s side.†\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFighting of any kind had seemed alien to Johnson as a small boy. He  avoided quarrels, he recalled, ran home rather than face neighborhood  bullies, and depended on his older sisters to protect him until he was  twelve.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was in that year . . . when I first discovered that I could fight  just a little bit. While going home from school one day, I fell into a  heated argument with Willie Morris, one of my school mates. We had just  reached my home, and I noticed [a neighborhood woman whom the children  called] Grandmother Gilmore standing in the front yard. As I looked in  Grandmother Gilmore’s direction Willie struck me in the jaw. Now at  that time Willie was much larger than I, and his unexpected blow to my  jaw rather stunned me for a few seconds, and upon getting my bearings  my first impulse was to run, and perhaps I would have had it not been  for Grandma Gilmore. She had witnessed Willie strike me and when she  saw that I did not show fight, she called out to me, “Arthur, if you do  not whip Willie, I shall whip you.” Now this assertion from Grandmother  Gilmore made a different aspect upon the whole thing, it caused me to  lose all thought of retreat. At once I figured that I’d much rather  give Willie a whipping than receive a whipping myself . . . so  immediately I sailed into Willie and whipped him. This was my first  fight and I won it by in-fighting and clinching. I clinched Willie and  in the breakaway I struck him in the eye which ended the fight.*","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303537332453,"sku":"NP9780375710049","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375710049.jpg?v=1767743245","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/unforgivable-blackness-isbn-9780375710049","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}