Giants co-owner Charles Johnson has history of contributions to anti-LGBTQ politicians

Charles Johnson’s 15 minutes of infamy may not have run their course.

Johnson, the billionaire co-owner of the Giants, was criticized when it came to light last month that he and his wife each donated $2,700 to the campaign of Mississippi Republican Senatorial candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith — who joked about public hangings and posed holding and wearing Confederate artifacts.

That revelation came on the heels of news that Johnson had donated $1,000 to a super PAC that aired a racist radio ad in Arkansas. It was enough that some critics — Dr. Harry Edwards and civil rights attorney John Burris among them — called for a boycott of the Giants. Johnson, through his attorney, said he was unaware his contributions would be used in such a manner and had requested a refund of his donations.

Johnson’s explanation, and a subsequent phone conversation, was sufficient enough for Burris to proclaim that the boycott was “not further warranted.”

Burris judged Johnson “a man of integrity . ... I walked away thinking this is a pretty decent fellow,” he said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

A Chronicle profile described Johnson as a private man and “a longtime football lover who has come to own 26 percent of a major-league baseball team” and who “has given far more money to charitable causes and his alma mater than he has to political causes.”

But in a Twitter thread posted Tuesday, East Bay Express staff writer Darwin BondGraham highlighted several donations that he asserts Johnson has made to politicians with exclusionary views and anti-LGBTQ leanings, and that constitute a pattern.

In all, BondGraham cites 13 politicians (including one-time presidential candidate Michele Bachmann) and one PAC among Johnson’s political benefactors.

“All of which is to say that Johnson’s recent campaign contributions to a candidate who joked about attending a lynching, and to a PAC that ran racist ads in Arkansas, is contextualized in a long history of his giving to antiLGBTQ politicians,” BondGraham wrote.