In 1908, Jack Johnson, the son of a former slave, became the first black heavyweight champion of the world. America would never forgive him.
In 1910, Jim Jeffries, a white former heavyweight champion took on the mantle of white supremacy by stepping into the ring with Johnson. The black champ pounded the “Great White Hope” into the mat three times before the match was stopped. Enraged white mobs across the country poured into black neighborhoods, killing more than two dozen people for the crime of looking like Jack Johnson.
Still, the first black champion lived his life on his own terms. He defied myths of white athletic supremacy and challenged white masculinity in the ring with bone-crushing efficiency. He smiled every time he put a beatdown on the Great White Hope of the moment.
He was rich. He drove fancy cars and dated white women. He married three of them in an era when merely talking to a white woman could get a black man lynched. Jack Johnson violated every taboo and dared his haters to get in his face and complain about it.
Though millions of African-Americans got a vicarious thrill as he pounded his white opponents into submission during Jim Crow’s darkest period, Jack Johnson was also considered a man of low character by huge swaths of the black community. His interracial transgressions, reckless braggadocio and embrace of Chicago’s nightlife made him the embodiment of everything working-class black parents warned their children not to be.
Jack Johnson was finally brought low in 1913 by the Mann Act, a law constructed to curb “white slavery” — interstate prostitution. The boxer was convicted of taking a white woman across state lines for immoral purposes. The white woman in question was his girlfriend, who later became his wife.
During his appeal, Jack Johnson fled the country and traveled the world defending his title. He finally met a better fighter in Cuba in 1915. A few years later, he turned himself in to U.S. authorities and served 10 months in federal prison for violating the Mann Act.
Jack Johnson died in a car accident in 1946 at 68, nearly a decade after watching Joe Louis become the second black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Despite having lived a storied life by the standards of the 20th century, Jack Johnson was just another black felon in the eyes of the criminal justice system that had worked overtime to incarcerate him.
Decades later, his relatives petitioned President Bill Clinton for a pardon with no luck. With the help of documentarian Ken Burns, who made a film about the boxer called “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson” in 2004, the family appealed to President George W. Bush for a full, posthumous pardon. Chuck D. of Public Enemy and former boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard joined the cause to no avail. He became an unlikely cause celebre.
Arizona Sen. John McCain introduced a resolution recommending a full pardon for Jack Johnson during every Senate session beginning in 2004. It was supported by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including then-Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, but President Barack Obama, a fellow Chicagoan who pardoned 1,324 people during his two terms, was curiously unmoved by the campaign.
Though Mr. Obama left office before the #MeToo movement took root, it is believed that Jack Johnson’s alleged beating of a girlfriend, when he found out she cheated on him, repulsed the 44th president. Mr. Obama may have also been influenced by unsavory stories he heard about Johnson from old-timers when he worked in Chicago. Because Mr. Obama didn’t do posthumous pardons anyway, Jack Johnson wasn’t going to be his first, despite his place in black history.
Now, President Donald Trump has a chance to address the issue. Last weekend, Mr. Trump tweeted that “Rocky” actor Sylvester Stallone reached out to him for a full pardon for Johnson, an action he said he’d seriously consider.
A Trump pardon would bring comfort to Johnson’s family. And on a broader level, it presents the rare issue on which Trump antagonists could find themselves in agreement with the president.
But it also could be argued that Johnson’s conviction is a far better witness to the failure of American justice than a pardon that could be seen as whitewashing an entire history of racist persecution. America should feel shame when confronted with the facts surrounding the railroading of Jack Johnson — not smug satisfaction that an empty symbolic pardon by a president who’d never heard of him until lobbied by a movie star approximates justice at some level. Despite spending nearly a year in prison, Jack Johnson lived his life as a free and unrepentant black man in Jim Crow America. He really doesn’t need our posthumous validation seven decades later.
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.
First Published: April 24, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
