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Monday, January 29, 2007

I was watching the Jack Johnson documentary last night

Well as much as I could before I turned the TV off. It was real good and I don't know if it was made by Ken Burns who was responsible for such documentaries about Baseball and The Civil War. I had no idea this guy was so colorful.

He was the first black heavyweight champion in boxing and he loved white women. His first wife killed herself because of the pressure of being a black man's wife, though perhaps more importantly she was the wife of a black man who wasn't very popular. The fact that he liked white woman was controversial in his era the early 20th century. According to this documentary whites really didn't like him but neither did blacks because of that fact.

He eventually went to jail. He was charged with transporting women across state lines for "immoral purposes". The law he was prosecuted on was called the Mann Act and this prosecution was generally considered a intentional misuse of the Act. The main idea of the Act was to stop prostitution.

An interesting piece of trivia as Black History Month is coming up. I would like to write more but I think I'd like to see more of this documentary. All I got to go on was Wikipedia. I had to do this from memory.

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