Richie's Picks: BLACK JACK: THE BALLAD OF JACK JOHNSON by Charles R. Smith
Jr. and Shane W. Evans, ill., Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, June 2010, 40p.,
ISBN: 978-1-59643-473-8
"I'm Jack Johnson -- heavyweight champion of the world! I'm black! They
never let me forget it. I'm black all right; I'll never let them forget it."
-- spoken by Brock Peters (who played Tom Robinson in the film To Kill a
Mockingbird) at the conclusion of the Miles Davis album A Tribute to Jack
Johnson.
"A lover of cars,
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.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
_http://www.librarything.com/profile/richiespicks_
(http://www.librarything.com/profile/richiespicks)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
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FTC NOTICE: Richie receives free books from lots of publishers who hope he
will Pick their books. You can figure that any review was written after
reading and dog-earring a free copy received. Richie retains these review
copies for his rereading pleasure and for use in his booktalks at schools
and libraries.
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