Why Jack Johnson’s story is still important

Donald Trump says he is “considering a full pardon” for Jack Johnson more than 100 years after the black boxer’s career as the World Heavyweight Champion was destroyed by a racially motivated criminal conviction.

The US president said in a tweet on Saturday that Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone had spoken to him on the phone about pardoning Johnson, a move that former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both resisted.

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”.

Johnson's great-great niece, Linda Haywood, says she is “elated” that Trump is 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.”