McCain asks Obama to pardon dead boxer

Last year's Republican presidential candidate John McCain is putting pressure on Barack Obama to announce a posthumous presidential pardon for Jack Johnson, America's first black heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson was convicted in 1913 of having a relationship with a white prostitute and subsequently spent 10 months in jail. He died in a car accident in 1946.
 
McCain, a boxing fan himself and long-time admirer of Johnson, has said: "The more I found out about him, the more I thought a grave injustice was done." And so on Wednesday, the 72-year-old senator attended a press conference on Capitol Hill with Johnson's great niece Linda Haywood to introduce a resolution urging Obama to pardon the heavyweight champion. Also present at the conference was filmmaker Ken Burns who made a 2005 documentary about Johnson and the Jim Crow-era of American racism.
 
Should Obama pay any attention to McCain's resolution it will be one of very few posthumous presidential pardons. In 1999, Bill Clinton pardoned Henry Flipper, a black lieutenant who was ousted from the US army on embezzlement charges in 1882, and last year George Bush pardoned Charles Winters who was convicted under the neutrality act for smuggling three aircraft to Israel during the 1948 Israeli Arab war.

Jack Johnson violated the 1910 Mann Act, which outlaws the transporting of women across state lines for 'immoral purposes'. It has since been amended but never repealed. The antiquated Act returned to the headlines a year ago when some lawyers thought it might be used against New York Governor Eliot Spitzer after he admitted booking a New York call-girl to meet him in a Washington hotel.
 
"We won't quit until we win," McCain has said of his fight for justice for Johnson. "And I believe that enough members, if you show them the merits of this issues, that we'll get the kind of support we need." As for the symbolic nature that a pardon from America's first black president would have, McCain says "it would be indicative of the distance we've come, and also indicative of the distance we still have to go." ·