Boxing champ Johnson gets posthumous pardon
The first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, who fought for the title in Las Vegas, N.M., more than a century ago and was an anathema to much of white America, was posthumously pardoned Thursday by President Donald Trump, absolving the champ of his 1913 Mann Act conviction.
Johnson was convicted under the federal law that made it illegal to cross state lines with a woman “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Jim Crow-era prosecutors often used the legislation as an anti-miscegenation device. Johnson was accused of transporting his white girlfriend from Pittsburgh to Chicago.
“A truly great fighter,” Trump said Thursday in the Oval Office, where he signed the pardon in a ceremony attended by boxing legend Lennox Lewis, actor Sylvester Stallone and current heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, among others. “He had a tough life.”
It was Stallone who recently suggested the pardon in a call to Trump.
The president said Johnson served prison time “for what many view as a racially motivated injustice.”
A bill requesting a Johnson pardon from George W. Bush passed the House of Representatives in 2008 but died in the Senate.
A 1,000-page education bill in 2015 included a provision requesting a pardon for Johnson. It called the boxer a “flamboyant, defiant, and controversial figure in the history of the United States who challenged racial biases.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., along with Reps. Peter King, R-N.Y., and Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., later requested a pardon for Johnson from President Barack Obama in 2016, but those requests also fell flat.
The 1912 Las Vegas bout with “Fireman” Jim Flynn of Pueblo, Colo., was filled with head-butting and clinches and was stopped by police in the ninth round with the referee abruptly declaring Johnson the winner.
Before his incarceration, Johnson was known to prance around the ring with swagger. He owned a nightclub and wore gold teeth. He once reportedly purchased a pet leopard and took it for walks while sipping Champagne.
Johnson was a fugitive for seven years after his conviction by an all-white jury. He spent a year in federal prison and died at age 68 in a 1946 North Carolina car crash speeding from a restaurant that refused him service.
Information from the Associated Press was included in this report.