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Pardon in the works for late heavyweight champion Jack Johnson
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Jack Johnson.
Senate approves, now up to House!
63 years after his death, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson is as close as ever to being pardoned for a crime he probably didn't commit.
Johnson, born in Galveston, Texas in 1878, became the first black world heavyweight champion in 1908. He had to chase at least the last two champions around the world for at least a few years to get his opportunity.
Pardoning Johnson for his violation of the Mann Act in 1913 has been in the works for years. Ken Burns and PBS produced a film about him, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and fall of jack Johnson." Everyone involved hitched their wagons to Senator John McCain to get the pardon through the Senate but it just never happened.
Now it has. I have researched this myself and talked to a lot of old-timers and I believe Johnson was a pretty bad dude. However, he wasn't guilty of violating the Mann Act, which involved taking a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.
This is the charge former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer faced recently so he cut a deal and resigned. Spitzer found a girl through an escort service on the Internet and had her travel from New York to Washington D.C.
It has always been rumored to be a trumped-up charge. Johnson left America as a fugitive and would fight in Europe and elsewhere he was allowed by the local governments so as to maximize his meal ticket - the world's heavyweight championship.
Johnson is considered universally as one of the top 10 heavyweight boxers of all time. Some rate him in the top three, just behind Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali.
His career record was 73-13, (40 KO's), with eight successful world championship title defenses along with numerous exhibition bouts.
There is incredibly a lot of black and white film of Johnson fighting. He was both very flamboyant and notorious; His wealth allowed him to live to the extremes of his day,
Johnson died in 1948, at the age of 68, after a car accident in North Carolina.
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