Role in 'White Hope' opened doors

SAG Awards: Jones fanned flames of racial provocation -- When "The Great White Hope" opened on Broadway in October 1968, the Voting Rights Act was 3 years old and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated six months earlier. The image of sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their black-gloved fists during their awards ceremony at the Summer Olympics was still fresh in Americans' minds. Chicago was about to become a Roman arena for rioting against the war in Vietnam. And in New York, as Jack Jefferson -- aka heavyweight great Jack Johnson -- James Earl Jones was presenting America with the anti-Sidney Poitier: not a font of quiet dignity and restrained anger, but an exploding landmine of racial resentment, gleeful provocation and, far more scarily, a black man who slept with white women. Poitier had already thrust race mixing into the mainstream culture with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." But Jones and Jefferson were something else. Something more volatile. Playwright Howard Sackler had ... (link)