Obama urged to pardon late boxing great Jack Johnson
By Caulton Tudor June 12, 2011 12:08AM
President Barack Obama has yet to act on a presidential pardon for the late heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. | AP file
Updated: September 24, 2011 12:22AM
Although 65 years have passed since Jack Johnson died, the best boxer of his time remains a person of much social and political dialogue.
The first African-American heavyweight world champion was 68 when he died on June 10, 1946, following a car crash about 20 miles north of Raleigh, N.C.
Johnson died an ex-convict — the result of a 1913 conviction in Chicago of having violated the Mann Act, a federal law that prohibits the interstate transportation of people for the purposes of prostitution and/or immoral sexual activity.
Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to 366 days in prison in a case decided by an all-white jury. The trial involved an alleged prostitute with whom Johnson was said to have had a relationship in 1909 and early 1910 — before the Mann Act was passed on June 25, 1910.
Johnson almost immediately skipped bail but eventually surrendered and was imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., from September 1920 until July 1921.
In July 2009, Congress passed a resolution that requested President Barack Obama issue an executive pardon. Thus far, Obama hasn’t acted on the request or even mentioned it in any public forum, but Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Pete King of New York (an amateur boxer) are again pressing Obama for action.
King has called the conviction a “grave injustice.”
On May 24, the two Republican lawmakers reintroduced the resolution and urged the president to act immediately.
The original resolution was handed from Obama’s office to the Justice Department. The Justice Department informed the two lawmakers that its general policy is to deny posthumous pardon requests.
Johnson’s great-great niece, Linda E. Haywood of Chicago, believes Obama may respond favorably.
“That’s most definitely our hope, and I really think it will happen,” Haywood said.
Haywood, in her “mid 50s,” says Johnson, who was born and spent his early years in Galveston, Texas, has several living relatives but never had children of his own. Most of the family lives in Chicago. “There’s a large extended family that would love to see his name finally get cleared,” Haywood said.
At just over 6 feet and weighing about 190 pounds in his boxing prime, Johnson wouldn’t be considered an unusually large athlete by today’s standards.
But he was larger than life during and after his run as champion from 1908 to 1915.
A 2005 Public Broadcasting Service television documentary — “Unforgivable Blackness” by film producer Ken Burns — detailed the impact of Johnson’s career on young boxers throughout much of the entire century, and the attention he drew for marrying three white women and leading a free-spirited life. That life — and his domination of white boxers — angered many whites at the time.
“Jack Johnson wouldn’t be my choice as a husband for my daughter, but he died having been convicted of a blatant ongoing injustice. That’s one wrong that can be corrected, certainly to some degree as these things go, even at this late date,” said Samuel Collins of the Texas Historical Commission.
Johnson was buried in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery next to the grave of his former wife, Etta Terry Duryea Johnson. Johnson’s grave, Haywood said, attracts many visitors.
Wayne Rozen, whose book America On The Ropes deals with Johnson’s life and times, says Johnson’s name will be cleared. “It was a sham of a case, which is obvious to anyone who studies the facts,” he said.
“There may not be a pardon from this administration, but there’ll be one eventually. It’ll happen, but I doubt he’ll ever be really forgotten.”
Scripps Howard News Service
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