By William Douglas-McClatchy Newspapers
Washington, DC– Sen. John McCain and Rep. Peter King are hoping that they have a fighting chance of persuading the nation’s first African-American president to pardon posthumously the world’s first African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. McCain, R-Ariz., and King, R-N.Y., were to unveil a congressional resolution Wednesday afternoon calling on President Barack Obama to pardon Jack Johnson, who won the heavyweight title a century before Obama took the oath of office.
Johnson’s 1908-1915 reign atop the boxing world was flamboyant and controversial. He was reviled by many whites at the time for his boxing prowess, his wealth, and for openly courting and marrying white women.
Displeasure with Johnson spawned a search for a “great white hope,” a white challenger who could knock him to the canvass and take his title. But the law delivered the biggest blow to Johnson in 1913 when he was convicted under the Mann Act for having a consensual relationship with a white woman across state lines.
McCain, King, and historians believe that Johnson’s conviction was racially motivated. Johnson fled the United States to France before he was sentenced. He finally lost his heavyweight title to a white fighter — Jess Willard — in Havana in 1915.
“Not that I’m a great liberal, but heavyweight champions used to be the greatest athletes and Jack Johnson was a champion, the first African-American champion,” said King, a recreational boxer and conservative lawmaker from Long Island. “Jack Johnson was hounded out of the championship and out of boxing. He didn’t get his due and the African-American community didn’t get their due. This would help clear that cloud.”
Johnson died in a car crash in North Carolina in 1946. His story has been chronicled in stage and film productions of “The Great White Hope,” and in “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” a PBS documentary by Ken Burns.
“A pardon is much needed – it’s fairly clear that Jack Johnson was framed, railroaded,” said Christopher Rivers, a French professor at Mount Holyoke College and boxing enthusiast who translated into English a memoir Johnson wrote in French during his exile years. “He was unapologetic, sassy, always with a smile on his face. White Americans were not ready to see a black man beat up white men and get paid lots of money for it.”
This is the latest attempt at a Johnson pardon for McCain and King. A similar resolution didn’t make it through both houses of Congress in 2004. The House of Representatives approved a resolution last year urging then-President George W. Bush to pardon Johnson, who like Bush, grew up in Texas. The Senate failed to approve a similar measure and Bush didn’t pardon Johnson.
King feels that, given the historic nature of Obama’s presidency, that the time is now right for Johnson.
“He (Obama) obviously has some appreciation of African-American history,” King said. “Senator McCain obviously has a relationship, a good one, with the president. And this is not an ideological issue – it’s a human issue.”
Posthumous presidential pardons are rare, but they happen. In 1999, Bill Clinton pardoned Lt. Henry O. Flipper, the Army’s first African-American to graduate from West Point. He was forced out of the military in 1882 after white officers accused him of embezzling commissary funds.
Last year, Bush pardoned Charles Winters, who was convicted of violating the Neutrality Act in 1948 by helping transfer two B-17 aircraft to Israel.
Chances for the McCain-King resolution passing and Obama granting a pardon may also be enhanced by Washington’s eagerness of late to recognize and address historic wrongs. In 2007, Bush awarded the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American military aviators, the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Led by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., Republican and Democratic women in the Senate last month introduced a bill calling for the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) to receive the Congressional Gold Medal. The WASP were female aviators who helped in the World War II effort but were denied military status and benefits.
“I assume Johnson’s chances are excellent – he should be someone who’s appealing to President Obama,” Rivers said.