I n the autumn of 1968, the talk of Broadway was a new show called The Great White Hope. It was an extravagant piece of theater with a cast of 65 players. The ensemble’s aim was to portray the atmosphere of six decades earlier, when men wore straw hats and women seemed perpetually under the shade of a parasol. At the center of it all was James Earl Jones. In the role of a lifetime, he played a Black boxing champion enduring the hostilities of white America. Jones, who died recently at age 93, filled the stage with swagger and contempt, exuberance and anguish. It was, wrote critic William Mootz, “a performance of truly heroic proportions.” The drama by Howard Sackler was based loosely on the life and times of Jack Johnson, who reigned as heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915. Johnson’s career sank after his conviction for violating the Mann Act (transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes). Facts were blurred and names were changed for the play – Johnson became “Jack Jefferson,” and his many wives and mistresses were condensed into one woman, played by Jane Alexander – but Sackler’s version was reasonably close to the truth. However, it was Jones who gave the production its fire. “He is a giant of a man,” wrote Mootz, “and an artist among actors. His Jefferson is a genial hulk at first, then gradually develops into a caged, hate- filled tiger, hopelessly battling to establish some kind of foothold in a world bent on destroying him. The role offers virtuosic opportunities every turn of the way, and Jones misses none of them.” “Seldom has there been a performance as overwhelmingly powerful,” wrote George Oppenheimer from Newsday. The role of Jack Johnson made James Earl Jones. You could also say that James Earl Jones made Jack Johnson. When the play premiered in 1967 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, Johnson was a long-forgotten character. Even
among boxing fans, he was a vague figure from the past, no more relevant than a faded postcard from the 1915 World’s Fair. The Ring magazine founder Nat Fleischer, still alive and stirring the pot in those days, often cited Johnson as the best heavyweight he’d ever seen. But for most fans, the past belonged in the past. Compared to Jackie Robinson being the first Black player in Major League Baseball, Johnson being the first Black heavyweight champion seemed insignificant, especially when you learned there’d been Black champions before him in other weight classes. If you studied him a bit and learned that Johnson had a distinct unsavory side, you’d write him off as an unappealing character. Sackler spruced him up for public consumption. Jones turned him into a full-blown symbol of the Black struggle. “I think we knew during rehearsals that we were involved in a significant theater experience,” Jones wrote in his
Jones holds court during the stage production of The Great White Hope.
1994 memoir. “But I was completely unprepared for the critical praise, the later fame, and the thunderous response of our audiences.” The Great White Hope hit the Great White Way like a lightning bolt. Since most theater patrons knew nothing about boxing history, the play was a revelation, a perfect fit for the mood of the times. Johnson had been dead for 22 years but was suddenly a Civil Rights totem. Posters and photos of him appeared in college dorm rooms around the country, alongside images of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Just months earlier, John Carlos and Tommie Smith had raised their fists in the Black Power salute at the Olympic Games. Now Jack
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