Why Jack Johnson’s story is still important today

Jack Johnson, the first black man to become world heavyweight boxing champion, has been posthumously pardoned by President Donald Trump for a 1913 conviction for taking his white girlfriend across state lines.

Trump had said in April that he was considering the pardon after receiving a call from actor Sylvester Stallone.

“I am taking this very righteous step, I believe, to correct a wrong that occurred in our history and to honour a truly legendary boxing champion,” Trump said during an Oval Office ceremony, where he was joined by Stallone and boxers Lennox Lewis and WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder. “It’s my honour to do it. It’s about time.”

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“I’ve issued an executive grant of clemency, a full pardon posthumously to Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion of the world,” Trump said.

“He served 10 months for what many view as a racially motivated injustice.”

During the announcement, Hollywood actor Stallone - who famously depicted a boxer in the 1977 film Rocky- lifted his head upwards and said: “Keep punching, Jack.”

“Thank you all! Justice has been done!” he tweeted after the announcement.

Trump also made a jibe at former president Barack Obama, saying that many people “thought it was going to be signed in the last administration, and that did not happen, so it was disappointing for a lot of people”.

Obama had declined to pardon Johnson, “in part due to allegations of domestic abuse”, according to The New York Times.

Who was Jack Johnson and what was his ‘crime’?

The late boxing legend’s story is one of triumph and tragedy. The son of former slaves, Johnson was born in Texas in 1878 and made his professional boxing debut at the age of 20, after taking part in amateur and illegal boxing bouts while working in stables in Dallas and New York City.

He claimed the title of “World Coloured Heavyweight Champion” in 1903, before becoming overall World Heavyweight Champion in 1908, after winning a fight in Australia against a white boxer from Canada.

In July 1910, Jackson pummelled white boxer Jim Jefferies in Reno, Nevada, “a famous a victory that led to deadly race riots”, The Guardian reports.

Following that fight, authorities persecuted Johnson relentlessly. In 1912, he was arrested for taking a white woman across state lines for allegedly “immoral” purposes.

“The Mann Act, under which he was convicted, purportedly policed human trafficking and prostitution. In practice, it was often used to target blacks,” The Times reports.

In June 1913, Johnson was convicted by an all-white jury in less than two hours and was imprisoned for a year, effectively destroying his boxing career. He died in a car crash in 1946.

In 2015, Congress tacked on a provision to the Every Student Succeeds Act urging a pardon for Johnson, to “expunge a racially motivated abuse of the prosecutorial authority of the federal government from the annals of criminal justice in the United States”.

However, in 2017, then-president Barack Obama’s government refused the request. According to USA Today, the Justice Department has long resisted granting pardons to dead people, because it could “create a bad precedent, wasting scarce resources to restore civil rights to people who can't benefit from them”.

In April Johnson's great-great niece, Linda Haywood, said she was “elated” that Trump was considering a pardon.

“A lot of people are saying, 'Why does this matter? Who cares? He's a dead man. He's not going to know,” Haywood, 62, told CNN. "While that may be true, he still has living descendants. It matters to us.”