Boxing great Jack Johnson is pardoned
Stallone’s plea on behalf of first black heavyweight champ spurs Trump’s move
“I am taking this very righteous step, I believe, to correct a wrong that happened in our history. It’s about time.”
President Trump
WASHINGTON – President Trump granted a rare and historic posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson 72 years after his death Thursday, clearing the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of racially motivated charges resulting from his relationships with white women in 1912.
Advocates for Johnson — including boxers, historians, academics and senators — pushed for a pardon for 14 years through the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies.
A call to Trump from actor Sylvester Stallone helped make it happen.
“He was treated so unfairly. His prime was taken away, but somehow he managed to keep his pride,” Stallone said in a surprise Oval Office ceremony Thursday.
Stallone, best known for his portrayal of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, stood among real-life heavyweights, including former champion Lennox Lewis and current champion Deontay Wilder.
Johnson’s is the third posthumous pardon granted in the history of the presidency. “I am taking this very righteous step, I believe, to correct a wrong that happened in our history,” Trump
said. “It’s about time.”
Alongside Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, Johnson is in the pantheon of the greatest boxers, breaking the sport’s color barrier by pressing champion Tommy Burns until he agreed to face the challenger in Australia in 1908. His title defense in 1910 against Jim Jeffries sparked racial unrest that resulted in deaths around the country — and led to the search for the “Great White Hope” to reclaim the title.
Johnson openly dated white women — and married three of them. The mother of Lucille Cameron, his second wife, accused him of abducting Cameron, which led to federal charges in Chicago. Those fell through, but he was then convicted of sexual debauchery against an alleged prostitute, Belle Schreiber.
He was convicted of violating the Mann Act, which had passed Congress two years earlier to combat human trafficking but was never intended to criminalize consensual relationships.
Johnson slipped out of the country before being sentenced. He spent seven years in exile in Canada, Europe and Mexico during World War I before returning to serve his year-long sentence at Leavenworth prison in Kansas.
Johnson lost his heavyweight title to Jess Willard in Cuba. Because of his federal conviction, he was denied licenses to fight in many states and ended his career in vaudeville and as a coach before dying in an automobile accident in 1946.
Johnson’s title defense in 1910 against former champion Jim Jeffries sparked racial unrest and deaths around the country.