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Thursday, April 02, 2009

The Great "Black Hope," Jack Johnson May Get His Due (100 years later)...........Thanks To Another Maverick, Sen. John McCain



Courtesy of The Kansas City Star:

GOP's McCain, King seek pardon for late boxing champ Jack Johnson
By WILLIAM DOUGLAS
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.

McCain, R-Ariz., and King, R-N.Y., unveiled a congressional resolution Wednesday 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. Many whites reviled him 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 canvas and take his title. However, 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 think 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, Cuba, in 1915.

"We need to erase this act of racism," McCain said.

King, a recreational boxer and conservative lawmaker from Long Island, said 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 a 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."



For the article in its entirety, click on the link below:


GOP's McCain, King seek pardon for late boxing champ Jack Johnson

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