Senate calls on Obama to pardon black boxer

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Thursday, 2 July 2009, 01:48

I was struck by an article in one of the US papers I bought the other day. It appears that the US Senate has passed a motion to pardon the late black champion boxer Jack Johnson who was sent to prison nearly a century ago because he dated a white woman. Johnson was convicted in 1913 of violating the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. It appears that the first attempt to convict him failed because he actually married the white woman in question so she was no longer a possible witness.

Johnson had been a thorn in the side of many white people, having won the heavyweight boxing title in 1908. The emergence of the first black heavyweight boxing champion sparked a search for the ‘great white hope’ but the chosen challenger, former champion Jim Jeffries, lost to Johnson. Jeffries had previously refused to fight Johnson several years before when the African American was the then challenger because of his race and decided instead to retire. However, on 4 July 1910 he re-emerged as the Great White Hope – and lost. The media reacted with outrage over the outcome of this fight, with some suggesting that this signalled the beginning of the end of white society. Race riots erupted across the country and several black people were killed.

It is perhaps not surprising that a racist white society sought to take down Johnson. What is much more surprising is that earlier attempts to pardon the former boxing champion failed. Last year it was the Senate which failed to support a House of Representatives motion. This time the Senate has passed a motion proposed by defeated Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

Yesterday’s blog was written in the total ignorance of the

two articles the Guardian was running on the exploitation of migrant workers by employers and the backlash that it is causing in its wake. This week Unite the Union is tabling a motion at Tesco’s AGM linking the company’s misuse of migrant workers to the rise of the BNP. Interestingly, several pension fund holders appear to be backing the motion.

I was reminded of the whole issue again today as I saw scores of migrant workers picking fruit and vegetables in the fields of central California. They scurried backwards and forwards to empty their trays of produce onto a waiting truck. I have no idea of the conditions these workers were employed on but I can guess that it is not great. Again, none of this is new. The Steinbeck exhibition described how landowners recruited Mexican workers in these very fields at the turn of the century only to use police and violence against them as they began to organise in a union for better wages and conditions. One of the problems many unions face today is the absolute refusal of most employers to allow newly arrived migrant workers to self-organise or even mix with British trade unionists in the workplace.