America at Large: Ninety-four years ago this week in Colma, California, having more or less exhausted the supply of legitimate heavyweight contenders, world champion Jack Johnson defended his title against middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel.

While it was a lucrative proposition for both, the match loomed as such a mismatch - Johnson outweighed his foe by 25lb - that the combatants reportedly negotiated their own ground rules: Ketchel wouldn't try very hard to win, and Johnson wouldn't embarrass his opponent by knocking him out.

Twelve rounds in, Ketchel abrogated the agreement when he decked Johnson with a right hand. It was an error in judgment for which he would pay dearly. Johnson got up from the canvas, dusted himself off, and proceeded to hit Ketchel with an uppercut of such ferocity that it not only knocked him cold, but ripped his front teeth from the gums. Ketchel's manager thoughtfully collected his man's front teeth from the ring and had them made into a pair of dice.

John Arthur Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion, at once the most celebrated and most reviled sporting figure of his age. Denied a title opportunity because of his race, he chased his predecessors - first Jim Jeffries, later Marvin Hart and Tommy Burns - around the world in pursuit of a match, with Burns finally succumbing to the lure of a $100,000 purse to fight in Rushcutters Bay in Sydney. There, in 1908, Johnson administered a sound thrashing for 14 rounds before the authorities intervened to stop the carnage. Johnson was declared the winner.

He later disposed of Jeffries (in an ill-advised comeback attempt that represented the one and only time Jeffries would lose in the ring), and every other white challenger who could be rounded up, simultaneously defying society by thumbing his nose at convention. He drove fast cars, drank and gambled. He married three white women and consorted with several others, and had a proclivity for adopting white prostitutes and inducting them into his private harem.

It was this quirky predilection which ultimately proved his undoing. He was convicted of violating the Mann Act, which made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines "for immoral purposes". Forced to flee the country, Johnson spent seven years in exile, boxing in Spain, France, Mexico - and in Havana, where he would lose his title to Jess Willard.

He eventually surrendered to US authorities in 1920, and spent a year at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

He continued to box after his release. Seven of the dozen losses registered on his career record came after the age of 50, including his last bout, a seventh-round knockout in Boston, when he was 60 years of age.

Fifty-eight years after his death, the legend of Jack Johnson is about to enjoy a renaissance. Ken Burns, the acclaimed filmmaker responsible for the classic Civil War, Baseball and Jazz television series, has just completed an epic, four-hour documentary entitled Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, which is scheduled to air on American Public Television next January in conjunction with Martin Luther King Day.

Three months before its public release, Unforgivable Blackness has already enjoyed considerable acclaim after screenings at film festivals in Colorado, Toronto and New York.

And earlier this month the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution introduced by Senator John McCain calling for the posthumous pardon of Johnson.

"Now, if we can get their attention, we have to put a little pressure on our friends in the House," McCain told us two weeks ago.

McCain explained that the resolution represents an expression of the "sense of Congress" and not legislation per se. The justice department would then have to submit a formal pardon, which the president would have to sign.

Not to be cynical, we asked McCain, but does this president even know who Jack Johnson was?

"I don't know," chuckled the one-time Republican presidential candidate. "But it seems to me the facts are quite compelling."

As it turns out, George W Bush does know something about Jack Johnson. The boxer was a native of Galveston, Texas, and Ken Burns discovered that for six years, beginning in 1995, the then-governor of Texas had proclaimed March 31st, the legendary champion's birthday, "Jack Johnson Day" in the state of Texas.

The dossier of evidence supplied by Burns makes a persuasive case that Johnson was ultimately persecuted because he refused to conduct himself as society demanded of a black man. His defiance was one protracted declaration of personal freedom.

Burns has managed to stitch together racially-charged newspaper accounts with rare, old fight footage: Johnson's 1910 destruction of Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, after the former champion had been lured out of retirement to assume the White Man's Burden by the likes of novelist Jack London, and his 1912 Las Vegas defence against Fireman Jim Flynn, who is shown repeatedly head-butting Johnson, to no avail.

Burns said he initially became attracted to the Johnson project because he sensed the filmic value in the tale of the boxer's life.

"First of all it's a story of athletic accomplishment," said Burns. "Then there's the question of race. There probably wouldn't be a story of Jack Johnson had he been a white man. And finally there's the matter of sex: as a nation we're preoccupied with a curious combination of puritanical values and prurient interests, and both come into play with Johnson. He was the most intriguing figure of his age - or, perhaps, of any age."