Much in the same vein as When We Were Kings, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (imdb | rotten tomatoes) is a film about boxers that even boxing fans will find fascinating. Where Kings was a boxing movie that was really about Muhammad Ali, Unforgivable Blackness is about race. And where Triumph Of The Will now serves as an inadvertent historical damning of Nazism, Unforgivable Blackness is a gobsmacked study of racial ignorance.

Granted, it was a hundred years ago, but I could scarcely believe the words written in prominent newspapers (the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc.), openly referring to Johnson as an animal or a savage. It’s hard for me to grasp, but I suppose at the time there were still hundreds of lynchings each year in the US, so…it’s just a different world.

And it was a different world that made Johnson’s story remarkable. Had he been of lesser talent and lost to a white champion, there would have been no story. Had he won the title but conducted himself humbly and meek as the white onlookers would have preferred, there would have been little notice taken. But Johnson was a thoroughly dominant fighter, and as far from humble or meek as one could imagine (though next to modern-day fighters, he looks downright mellow), and so he had to go. No one could beat him inside the ring, so they decided to beat him outside of it.

Despite being nearly 4 hours (it is a Ken Burns documentary, after all), I strongly suggest you see it.