James Earl Jones, star of “The Great White Hope” is photographed in his home in 1968. Associated Press

In December 1967, Arena Stage in Southwest D.C., did something you might expect from what was the first integrated theater in the nation’s capital: It raised the curtain on an original production by a 37-year-old Jewish playwright, Howard Sackler, that dared to explore race and racism in America. Through the lens of sport, to boot.

Sackler titled his play “The Great White Hope.”

He based it loosely on the profligate life of Jack Johnson, the first Black boxer allowed to fight for the world heavyweight championship – which he won – a title that was perceived as the mark of masculinity forever reserved for white men to prop the myth of racial superiority.

And to play the Johnson character, Sackler chose a 36-year-old Black actor, James Earl Jones, who had been bouncing around Broadway stages after supporting himself as a janitor upon moving to New York in the mid 1950s.

James Earl Jones portrayed heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in “The Great White Hope.” Associated Press

Jones certainly looked the part. He stood about 6-foot-2, a little taller than the real Johnson, with a boxy athletic frame, a shaved head and, most unforgettably, a basso profundo voice to make him seem even larger. The kind of booming intonation that rattled your ribs.

And he deserved the part, evidently. The Washington Post observed then that Sackler’s play, and Jones’ performance, generated “ … the most enthusiastic audience and critical reaction in the theater’s history.”

Upon Jones’s death Monday at 93, he was immediately recalled for his distinctive deep voice in its amplification as the iconic villain, Darth Vader. And that of Mufasa in the animated adaptation of “The Lion King.” And for his acting, he was remembered as the older priest in the anti-apartheid movie “Cry, the Beloved Country,” and as Terrance Mann, the writer in “Field of Dreams.” He was that rare EGOT, having won an Emmy, Grammy (for his voice over work), Oscar, and Tony.

But for me, it was Jones’ acting at the intersection of race and sport – like in “The Great White Hope,” surrounded by all those complexities – that made his stature onstage or screen as nonpareil as his voice. I don’t think any actor did so more purposefully and profoundly.

Like in the fictional comedy-drama “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” about a barnstorming Black baseball team in the 1930s whose players fight to be recognized as good enough to play in the all-white major leagues. Jones plays the team’s slugger, Leon Carter, who by the end of the film, when a white major league scout buys one of Carter’s teammates, sadly realizes the advent of integration means the death of Black baseball, one of the largest Black enterprises in American history. That critique is not often made, especially then.

And there was his stern delivery of August Wilson’s lines in “Fences,” a play about a former Negro Leagues baseball player grown bitter who doesn’t want his son, a football recruit, to be used by what the father believes is an athletic industrial complex that used him and left him a garbage man.

“The white man ain’t gonna let you get nowhere with that foot-ball no way,” the father says. “You go on and get your book-learning so you can work yourself up in that A&P or learn how to fix cars or build houses or something, get you a trade. That way you have something can’t nobody take away from you.”

It is a lament that echoes today as Black parents, especially of Black boys, play the high stakes lottery of earning a college athletic scholarship that leads to a lucrative pro career, rather than investing as much in “book learning,” as Jones’s father character Troy Maxson demands, that “can’t nobody take away.”

And in “The Sandlot,” Jones plays a junkyard owner named Mr. Mertle, whom the neighborhood kids come to understand was a former player and rival to Babe Ruth despite his skin color.

Jones was always able to poignantly portray Black people’s seemingly forever battle for dignity.

It was anything but easy. Jones endured to be successful. Portraying the fictional champion Johnson proved so stressful that he sought counseling. “I had my first bout with therapy,” he told The Post’s Dorothy Gilliam in 1977 while portraying Paul Robeson in a one-man play. “I had primal therapy.” It was a newfangled psychotherapy developed by Arthur Janov, the psychologist and author of “The Primal Scream,” that encouraged patients to exorcise what troubled them with emotional outbursts, most notably, screaming.

I’m not surprised by the depths Jones traveled to understand how to wrestle with race from the public theater, particularly in the space of sport, which some believe should be apolitical. His father, Robert Earl Jones, was a prizefighter and one-time sparring partner of Joe Louis before his own acting debut on Broadway in 1945. He’d go on to act in a number of well-known films and plays in the 1960s and beyond.

But the elder Jones fell victim to the Red Scare in the 1950s and wound up blacklisted on Broadway under pressure from the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s investigations into suspected communists in American life. After all, Robert Earl was audacious enough to introduce his son, James Earl, to Robeson, the seminal athlete-entertainer-activist, who despite being hailed by “Time” magazine in the 1940s as “probably the most famous living Negro,” was in HUAC’s bull’s-eye for his praise of communist countries, denouncement of American policies and Jim Crow and active participation in communist organizations. Fittingly, James Earl Jones went on to play Othello as momentously as Robeson, the first Black man to play Othello for a major theater.

After Jones’ “Great White Hope” completed its first Broadway run, it was rewarded with the 1969 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A year later it was adapted to film and Jones was nominated for the Oscar for best actor. George C. Scott beat him for his lead role in “Patton.”

The New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte took in “The Great White Hope” after it landed on Broadway with its original cast, the first Arena production to do so.

“In the play,” Lipsyte wrote, “Johnson is … played with such raw power and precise subtilty by James Earl Jones that our image of Johnson and of an epic heavyweight champion will always be affected.”

That can be said for any deeper understanding of sport’s importance and place among us. It was all made clearer by the work of James Earl Jones.