McCain seeks pardon for boxer Jack Johnson
WASHINGTON – Sen. John McCain wants a presidential pardon for Jack Johnson, who became the nation’s first black heavyweight boxing champion 100 years before Barack Obama became its first black president.
McCain feels Johnson was wronged by a 1913 conviction of violating the Mann Act by having a consensual relationship with a white woman – a conviction widely seen as racially motivated.
Johnson won the world heavyweight title on Dec. 26, 1908, after police in Australia stopped his 14-round match against the severely battered Canadian world champion, Tommy Burns. That led to a search for a “Great White Hope” who could beat Johnson. Two years later, the American world titleholder Johnson had tried for years to fight, Jim Jeffries, came out of retirement but lost in a match called “The Battle of the Century,” resulting in deadly riots.
Authorities first targeted Johnson’s relationship with a white woman who later became his wife, then found another white woman to testify against him. Johnson fled the country after his conviction, but agreed years later to return and serve a 10-month jail sentence. He tried to renew his boxing career after leaving prison, but failed to regain his title. He died in a car crash in 1946 at age 68.
“When we couldn’t beat him in the ring, the white power establishment decided to beat him in the courts,” Burns told the AP in a telephone interview. Burns’ 2005 documentary, “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” examined Johnson’s case and the sentencing judge’s admitted desire to “send a message” to black men about relationships with white women.