Congressional Republicans have spent the first nine months of President Obama's term throwing everything but the kitchen sink at him. They've employed all manner of stall tactics to water down or thwart his most important initiatives, walked all over the pitiful, decaying carcass of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to exploit divisions in Democratic Caucus and even stooped to fanning the flames of racial hatred that reached a fever pitch this summer with vile displays at "tea parties" all across the country. Given that backdrop, one could hardly blame the president for being skeptical of any and all Republican proposals.
One proposal from, ironically enough, President Obama's adversary in the 2008 campaign, Senator John McCain, R-Ariz. has merit beyond mindless and disingenuous obstructionism. The president should act on resolutions passed by both houses of Congress and posthumously pardon Jack Johnson.
Johnson, for those of you who somehow manage to resist the charms of brilliant documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, was the first black heavyweight boxing champion, a man so reviled by the white community in the early 1900s that his success triggered race riots and an ultimately futile search for a "Great White Hope" to defeat him. Johnson's brash style and unstoppable talents so vexed the white establishment that federal authorities made a concerted effort to find any kind of criminal misconduct to pin on him. According to an article on ESPN.com, authorities railroaded him for transporting his white girlfriends around the country with him by exploiting an anti-prostitution bill called the Mann Act, since repealed.
First and foremost, Johnson should be pardoned simply to further discredit anti-miscegenation, a spirit that is apparently alive and well in the hearts of wretched bigots like Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell, who recently made headlines for refusing to marry interracial couples. No American should ever have his or her name lastingly tainted for enjoying love in one of its many diverse and wonderful forms.
The reasons for Johnson's pardon, however, extend deeper than that. After all, many Americans have at various points been convicted of bogus crimes without meriting a full presidential pardon. Primarily, Johnson should be pardoned because he did what many Americans of color have at one time or another had to the urge to do: he beat the living hell out of the chief representative of white supremacy.
Before Johnson pummeled him so badly that they had to stop the fight, former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries said that the only reason he would fight Johnson at the time an uncommon practice for a white fighter was "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro," according to an article in The Observer. Johnson's victory was the first of many events during the 20th century that finally began to dispel that putrid notion, relegating it only to the darkest of hearts.
President Obama should be able to empathize with Johnson, as he too delivered a right hook to bigotry and the notion that a black American could never rise to the highest office in the land. Obama's victory paralleled Johnson's in that he KO-ed the white supremacist elements of the country that now reside in the darker (and thankfully less populous) corners of the Republican Party, and inspired hope among millions of people who previously thought that their destinies were limited by the color of their skin. Obama's victory wasn't quite as satisfying as say, dealing Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck the broken jaws they deserve for being hate-spewing bile machines, but it was close.
Ultimately, Johnson should not be pardoned because he was a good man. In fact, there is substantial historical evidence in Ken Burns' documentary, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," that Johnson wasn't a very good man at all. He certainly was not as graceful, humble and heroic as legendary civil rights advocate and Dodger legend Jackie Robinson, who infamously broke Major League Baseball's color barrier. Johnson did, however, do an important service for our nation. He proved an ignorant and hurtful notion wrong, and did so in a decisive manner. He showed us all that no race is inherently superior to any other, and was more than happy to batter and bruise those that thought otherwise. For this, he deserves not only a full pardon from Obama, his most recent modern contemporary, but also a permanent and honorable place in our national memory.
