Trump Pardons Late Boxer Jack Johnson, Rights Racial Injustice

WASHINGTON, DC — President Trump on Thursday posthumously pardoned former heavyweight champion boxer Jack Johnson, an African-American who was convicted by an all-white jury in 1913 in a case that came to symbolize racial injustice.

Johnson, regarded as one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time, was arrested in 1912 while traveling with Lucille Cameron, a white woman who would later become his wife, in violation of the Mann Act. The law, passed in 1910, made it a felony to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.”

The president’s pardon came three years after Congress passed a resolution calling for Johnson’s pardon, largely at the urging of Arizona Sen. John McCain and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. President Obama didn’t sign it.

In 2016, Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general from 2009-2015, told television station WPIX that Johnson without question was “convicted unfairly,” but allegations of domestic violence made the pardon problematic.

“That might be a historical injustice that might need to be rethought,” Holder said at the time. “There are on the other side countervailing concerns about the way [Johnson] treated women, physically treated women. So all of this has to be balanced before this president or his successor would make a determination that a pardon is appropriate.”

Most recently, Sylvester Stallone, the actor in the “Rocky” boxing-movie franchise, and heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis appealed to Trump to pardon Johnson. He died in an automobile accident in 1946 while leaving Franklinton, North Carolina, where a diner refused to serve him because of his race.

Noting “tremendous racial tension” during Johnson’s reign as a boxing legend, Trump said he “really represented something that was very beautiful and very terrible at the same time.”

"We have done something today that was very important, because we righted a wrong," the president said. "Jack Johnson was not treated fairly, and we have corrected that, and I'm very honored to have done it."

Both Stallone and Lennox were on hand when the president signed the pardon in a ceremony in the Oval Office. Also joining Trump were current heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder and Johnson's great-great niece Linda Bell Haywood.

“This has been a long time in coming,” Stallone said.

Burns, who produced a documentary on Johnson’s conviction, issued a statement, saying:

“It is the right thing to do. I’m just so happy that Senator John McCain, who has led our efforts to achieve a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, has lived to witness this moment. The pardon announced today helps correct an injustice experienced by Jack Johnson. But it also reminds us of a racist past and how even today racist remarks and coded words are used to imperil African Americans, especially black men, and to advance an un-American agenda.”

In the ring, the 6-foot, 1-inch, 210-pound Johnson was known for his extraordinary quickness and agility.

“I don’t know a whole lot about the kind of boxer he was because that was a long time ago, but I have seen highlights of him and you can see he was a force in [the ring],” Wilder told Yahoo Sports. “Lennox told me he was one of the best. [Muhammad] Ali got a lot of his stuff from [Johnson].

“He was the original. He was the original TBE,” Wilder said, referring to former professional boxer Floyd Mayweather, who called himself “TBE,” or “the best ever.”

Johnson, Wilder said, “came up with it all.”

“He had his style and his swagger and he was the first to do that,” Wilder said. “Now, everybody talks and everybody wants to do their thing in there, but he was the guy who started it all. It was amazing for me to see this, to see a guy after all these years and all these presidents that could have done it but not to do it, for this to happen for him now. It was good to see.”

Lead photo: President Donald Trump signs an executive grant of clemency for former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in the Oval Office of the White House on May 24, 2018. (Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)