{"id":179074,"date":"2018-05-24T21:13:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T02:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/24\/another-stopped-clock-moment-3\/"},"modified":"2018-05-24T21:13:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-25T02:13:00","slug":"another-stopped-clock-moment-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/05\/24\/another-stopped-clock-moment-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Stopped Clock Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Trump has <a href=\"https:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/news\/trump-posthumous-pardon-jack-johnson\">granted a posthumous pardon of former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">For more than 100 years, Jack Johnson\u2019s legend as the first black heavyweight boxing champion has been undisputed, but his legacy had been tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">His battles against white opponents, in the ring and outside of it, gave rise to \u201cThe Great White Hope\u201d play and movie and he came to be lionized as a barrier breaker.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But the criminal conviction from 1913 that most would find abhorrent today \u2014 for transporting a white woman across state lines \u2014 haunted Johnson well after his death in 1946 and motivated politicians and celebrities for years to advocate for a pardon, however symbolic.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">On Thursday in the Oval Office, Johnson posthumously found an unexpected champion: President Trump.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Although his own record on civil rights has come under question, often harshly, Mr. Trump, flanked by boxing champions and Sylvester Stallone, the actor who brought the case to his attention, signed an order pardoning Johnson.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The president called Johnson \u201ca truly great fighter\u201d who \u201chad a tough life\u201d but served 10 months in federal prison \u201cfor what many view as a racially motivated injustice.\u201d Mr. Trump said the conviction took place during a \u201cperiod of tremendous racial tension in the United States.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Still, in Johnson, Mr. Trump found a way in one swoop of the pen to stake a claim on civil rights and rebuke his predecessor, Barack Obama, for not taking action on an issue that seemed in line with the principles of fighting injustice that he had championed.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Though other presidents passed up the chance to pardon him, Mr. Trump noted that the last resolution in Congress calling for the pardon was while Mr. Obama was in office, in 2015.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cThey couldn\u2019t get the president to sign it,\u201d Mr. Trump said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s not surprising that Obama did nothing about this: he was parsimonious in his pardons, and he was remarkably timid regarding any issue that involved the intersection of bigotry and law enforcement.<\/p>\n<p>FWIW, I give very little credit to Trump for this:&nbsp; As a casino owner, he&#8217;s made a lot of money from boxing, and he has long of history of being involved with the sport, so for him, it&#8217;s about boxing, not race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Trump has granted a posthumous pardon of former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson: For more than 100 years, Jack Johnson\u2019s legend as the first black heavyweight boxing champion has been undisputed, but his legacy had been tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction.His battles against white opponents, in the ring and outside of it, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[573,407,526,374,503],"class_list":["post-179074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-donald-trump","tag-justice","tag-law-enforcement-misconduct","tag-politics","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179074"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}