Yesternow

Site-specific performative project designed by Raleigh artists Lincoln Hancock and André Leon Gray, along with musician/composers Finn Cohen and Anthony Kelley, in tribute to heavyweight champ Jack Johnson. The performance took place at the remains of the Saint Agnes Hospital in Raleigh, NC, where Johnson died in 1946.

Using a projection mapping and animation tool created by Austrian artist team OMAi, Hancock and Gray delivered a live visual composition with a score by Cohen and Kelley, based on themes from Miles Davis’ 1970 album, Tribute to Jack Johnson. Philip Bernard Smith incorporated spoken word inspired by Adrian Matejka’s poems about Johnson in The Big Smoke.

About the project

In the early half of the last century, St. Agnes was just about the only well-equipped hospital for blacks between Washington, D.C. and New Orleans. It closed in 1961 (with the opening of what is now Wake Med) but the walls of the structure still stand on Oakwood Avenue in Raleigh.

In June of 1946, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Johnson, was traveling with his friend Fred Scott, headed back to New York from a public appearance in Texas. The two stopped for lunch near Raleigh. They were served, but told they had to eat out back. Insulted and irate, Johnson and Scott sped north on Route 1.

On a curve in Franklinton, Johnson lost control of his Lincoln Zephyr. He and Scott were both ejected from the vehicle. Scott was OK, but Johnson was gravely injured and in shock. The Franklinton hospital’s ambulance service refused to transport Johnson. The town’s undertaker was summoned and had to take the champion to St. Agnes, 25 miles away. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Jack Johnson’s story and relationship to St. Agnes remains resonant in our present moment. Johnson lived large as the first African-American heavyweight champion, defiant in the face of white supremacy. Unapologetically black and proud decades before the civil rights movement, he dominated his white opponents and gave the disenfranchised a hero and a reason for hope in a perilous time. Ultimately, when they couldn’t beat him in the ring, racist white ultimately devised another way to get rid of the boxer… in 1913, Johnson was prosecuted and convicted under the Mann act, found guilty of transporting women over state lines “for immoral purposes.”

Johnson’s story has been oversimplifies and co-opted by a conservative-led movement anxious to demonstrate its post-racial bonafides by posthumously pardoning the boxer. Despite his open scorn for outspoken black athletes, Donald Trump cravenly issued the pardon in early 2018. “Yesternow” reclaims Johnson as a figure of resistance. It celebrates and honors the boxer, but also takes aim at the rotten segregation and racism that ultimately led to his death at St. Agnes.