Two Republicans lawmakers in Washington are urging the president to pardon Jack Johnson, the magnificent boxer who was convicted 98 years ago on a trumped-up morals charge in Chicago. Johnson was found guilty of violating the Mann Act, a federal law that prohibits the transportation of people across state lines for the purpose of immoral sexual activity. Johnson’s case involved an alleged prostitute with whom he was said to have had a relationship.
Johnson’s real offense — his only offense — was to be a proud, take-no-guff black man who openly consorted with white women, marrying three of them, in an era when such behavior disgusted and threatened too many white people to be safe. It is telling of those times that just two years after Jackson was convicted, D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” was released, a thoroughly racist depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction in which interracial sex was presented as a particularly appalling danger."
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