President Obama Please Pardon Jack Johnson

We the undersigned would like to rectify the following wrong,

The Justice Department is refusing to back a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight boxing champion who was imprisoned nearly a century ago because of his romantic ties with a white woman.

In a letter obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, the department%u2019s pardon attorney, Ronald L. Rodgers, told Rep. Peter King that the Justice Department%u2019s general policy is not to process posthumous pardon requests. In cases like Johnson%u2019s, given the time that has passed and the historical record that would need to be scoured, the department%u2019s resources for pardon requests are best used on behalf of people %u201Cwho can truly benefit%u201D from them, Rodgers wrote.

The letter was in response to one that King, R-N.Y., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had sent to President Barack Obama in October urging a pardon. In that letter, the two lawmakers noted that both houses of Congress has passed a resolution calling for a presidential pardon and said they hoped the president would be eager to %u201Cright this wrong and erase an act of racism that sent an American citizen to prison.%u201D

Rodgers wrote that notwithstanding the department policy, Obama still has the authority to pardon whomever he wishes, %u201Cguided when he sees fit by the advice of the pardon attorney.%u201D

And he did cite two cases of posthumous pardons: President Bill Clinton%u2019s 1999 pardon of Lt. Henry O. Flipper, the Army%u2019s first black commissioned officer, who was drummed out of the military in 1882 after white officers accused him of embezzling $3,800 in commissary funds; and President George W. Bush%u2019s 2008 pardon of Charles Winters, who was convicted of violating the Neutrality Act when he conspired in 1948 to export aircraft to a foreign country in aid of Israel.

In Winters%u2019 case, Rodgers said, the pardon request was not processed by Justice%u2019s Office of the Pardon Attorney, due to the department%u2019s posthumous pardon policy.

King said in a telephone interview that he and McCain probably will continue to urge Obama to issue the pardon.

%u201CWhat they%u2019re doing here is bucking it back to President Obama,%u201D King said. %u201CSo I would respectfully urge him to grant the pardon. This is the president%u2019s call.%u201D

The White House had no immediate comment on whether Obama would consider the request.

When he unveiled the resolution in April, McCain said he was sure that Obama %u201Cwill be more than eager%u201D to issue the pardon.

A hundred years before Obama was elected the nation%u2019s first black president, Johnson, a native of Galveston, Texas, became the first black heavyweight champion, on Dec. 26, 1908, after police in Australia stopped his 14-round match against the severely battered Canadian world champion, Tommy Burns.

That victory led to a search for a %u201CGreat White Hope%u201D who could beat Johnson. Two years later, Jim Jeffries, the American world titleholder Johnson had tried for years to fight, came out of retirement but lost in a match called %u201CThe Battle of the Century,%u201D resulting in deadly riots.

In 1913, Johnson was convicted of violating the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. After his conviction, he fled the country, but agreed years later to return and serve a 10-month jail sentence.

In 2004, the Committee to Pardon Jack Johnson, which filmmaker Ken Burns helped form, filed a petition with the Justice Department that was never acted on. His 2005 documentary, %u201CUnforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,%u201D explored the case against the boxer and the sentencing judge%u2019s acknowledged desire to %u201Csend a message%u201D to black men about relationships with white women.

Previous News  Mon October 19, 2009

The White House refused to indicate Monday whether President Obama will issue a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the African-American boxing champion convicted in 1913 for dating a white woman.

Jack Johnson's 1910 defeat of Jim Jeffries, the "Great White Hope," sparked riots.

The House of Representatives on July 29 unanimously passed a resolution urging Obama to grant a pardon; the Senate passed a similar measure by a voice vote on June 24.

The push for a rare posthumous pardon has been spearheaded for years by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Rep. Peter King, R-New York, two of Congress' top boxing enthusiasts.

"It is our hope that you will be eager to agree to right this wrong and erase an act of racism that sent an American citizen to prison," they wrote Friday in a letter to Obama.

Johnson, the first African-American to win the heavyweight title, was convicted for violating the Mann Act, which outlawed the transportation of women across state lines for "immoral" purposes.

He served 10 months in prison on charges "brought forward clearly to keep him away from the boxing ring, where he continued to defeat his white opponents," McCain and King said.

Almost a century after Johnson's conviction, his compelling saga has continued to capture the interest of sports writers, civil rights activists and historians. It provides, they agree, a unique window into American politics and culture at a time when Jim Crow-style racism reigned supreme.

Johnson was first arrested for breaking the Mann Act in 1912, four years after winning the heavyweight crown. That case fell apart, but investigators soon after charged him with a similar offense involving a woman he had dated years earlier.

Justice Department lawyers argued it was a "crime against nature" for him to have a sexual relationship with a white woman.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later to become the first commissioner of Major League Baseball, set Johnson's bail at $30,000, the equivalent of more than $660,000 today. When a bail bondsman showed up, Landis jailed him, too, according to an account that filmmaker Ken Burns relays in his documentary "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson."

An all-white jury convicted Johnson in less than two hours.

"Mr. Johnson was perhaps persecuted as an individual, but ... it was his misfortune to be the foremost example of the evil in permitting the intermarriage of whites and blacks," one of the prosecutors later said.

Johnson's real crime, in the eyes of many, was committed on July 4, 1910, when he successfully defended his boxing title against Jim Jeffries, a white boxer who came to be called the "Great White Hope" because many white fans saw him as the best chance to wrest back a boxing title from the African-American champ.

Johnson beat Jeffries, who had come out of retirement for the fight, before a stunned, almost entirely white crowd in Reno, Nevada.

Race riots followed. More than 20 people were killed and hundreds were injured. Most victims were black.

So when they "couldn't beat him in the ring, the white power establishment decided to beat him in the courts," Burns said in his documentary.

Johnson fled to Europe in 1913 while free on appeal. But after years of fights overseas, including the eventual loss of his title in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, Johnson came home. He turned himself over to U.S. authorities at the Mexican border in 1920 and served 10 months in prison.

He died in a car wreck in 1946.

"Back then, if you were black and you were told that you did something wrong, you really had no recourse," Linda Haywood, Johnson's great-niece, recently told CNN.

"You just accepted what was done because black people were basically powerless and voiceless. Jack may have been a rich boxer, but he couldn't fight the system."

McCain and King introduced resolutions calling for a presidential pardon in 2005 and last year. McCain, who says he made a mistake by once voting against a federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., sees the pardon as a way to right an old wrong.

"The Jack Johnson case is an ignominious stain on our nation's history," he said on the Senate floor in the spring.

"Rectifying this injustice is long overdue. [The resolution recognizes] the unjustness of what transpired, and sheds light on the achievements of an athlete who was forced into the shadows of bigotry and prejudice."

John Arthur Johnson (March 31, 1878 %u2013 June 10, 1946), better known as Jack Johnson and nicknamed the %u201CGalveston Giant%u201D, was an American boxer, the best heavyweight of his generation and the first black world heavyweight boxing champion (1908-1915). In a documentary about his life, Ken Burns notes, "For more than thirteen years, Jack Johnson was the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth.