108 years after racially motivated trial, court docket for Black heavyweight champ Jack Johnson goes public
Jack Johnson #JackJohnson
CHICAGO — The building hasn’t seen a trial in months, so to have a jury verdict suddenly pop up on the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse docket last week was unusual enough.
Then there was the date the verdict was returned: May 13, 1913.
That was the day an all-white jury in Chicago convicted Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson of federal charges of transporting a white woman across state lines, a case that would later be held up as a deplorable example of institutional racism in early 20th century America.
Johnson was posthumously pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2018. But it wasn’t until Friday that the paperwork — along with images of some of the handwritten documents from Johnson’s trial — were officially entered into the court’s electronic court docketing system, marking a final chapter in a sensational saga that garnered international headlines 109 years ago.
U.S. District Court Clerk Thomas Bruton said presidential pardons are typically scanned and entered electronically onto a case when they come in, making it part of the official record. But in the case of Johnson, there was nothing to attach the pardon to, leaving the clerk’s office in a bit of a quandary.
The clerk’s ledger for federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis includes the case caption, “United States vs. John Arthur Johnson, alias Jack Johnson,” and a charge, “Vio of White Slave Traffic Act.”
“When I got this from the White House there was nowhere to go with it,” Bruton told the Chicago Tribune on Tuesday. “I wasn’t going to just put it in a vault somewhere and sit on it.”
So Bruton instructed one of his deputies to do some research, and what he came back with was startling. At the National Archives center on the city’s Southwest Side, not only were there several digitized images of the trial court’s original handwritten ledger, but also an image of the jury verdict form and the scrawled signatures of the 12 people who convicted Johnson.
“It was pretty rare for them to have this from a case this long ago,” Bruton said.
Included in the ledger for federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was the case number, 12-5066, a caption, written in flowing cursive, “United States vs. John Arthur Johnson, alias Jack Johnson,” and the charge, “Vio of White Slave Traffic Act.”
Below that were two pages of entries from various court dates in Johnson’s case, along with the clerk’s fees at the time, including 25 cents for the filing of the indictment and a dime for an attorney filing a notice of withdrawal.
Creating an electronic docket for Johnson’s case did come with one glitch. The system only counts the last two digits of the year a case was filed, so there was no way to distinguish it from cases filed in 2012, Bruton said.
He also hesitated — if only for a moment — posting the jurors’ signatures, which typically is not done because of privacy issues. In this case, the panel’s members are long dead.
“I don’t think jurors’ security is an issue anymore,” Bruton said.
Nicknamed the “Galveston Giant,” Johnson was a legendary boxing figure and became the sport’s first Black world heavyweight champion at the height of the Jim Crow era in 1908 when he knocked out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. Two years later, after Johnson retained his title by beating a white former champion, Jim Jeffries, deadly riots erupted across the country.
Johnson was also a larger than life figure outside the ring, ruffling feathers with his flamboyant partying and dating white women in a time when interracial sexual relations were still taboo.
His legal troubles in Chicago began to ramp up in October 1912 after the mother of a white woman he was dating went to the police and complained that Johnson had brainwashed her daughter, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“How can I help it if the girl is crazy about me?” Johnson was quoted by the Tribune as saying. “I am going to pick my own girls, and nobody is going to dictate to me either.”
The stories soon led to ugly racist incidents. A huge crowd gathered at State Street and Walton Place, where a figure labeled “Jack Johnson” dangled from a telephone pole. “Nobody seemed to know who had hanged the negro pugilist in effigy,” the Tribune noted, “and no effort was made to remove it.”
The woman at the center of those allegations, Lucille Cameron, refused to cooperate with authorities. On Nov. 7, 1912, however, Johnson was arrested on a federal indictment for bringing a different white woman from Pittsburgh across state lines, an alleged violation of the Mann Act.
“Johnson Arrested, Weeps and Pleads When Handcuffed,” blared the Tribune headline.
Six months later, an all-white jury deliberated for just an hour and 38 minutes before finding Johnson guilty, according to the Tribune’s account. The story described Johnson as having an “air of indifference” during the trial, but that his “smile faded as the clerk pronounced the word guilty.”
The lead prosecutor on the case, Harry Parkin, told reporters the verdict would “go around the world” as an example of the dangers of “miscegenation.”
“This negro, in the eyes of many, has been persecuted,” Parkin said, according to the Tribune. “Perhaps as an individual he was. But it was his misfortune to be the foremost example of the evil in permitting the intermarriage of whites and blacks. Now he must bear the consequences.”
Johnson was later sentenced to a year and a day in prison, but fled to Canada with Cameron, whom he’d married while free on bond. He remained a fugitive for seven years, traveling from Europe to Mexico, where he fought bulls and ran a bar called the Main Event.
Johnson returned to the United States in 1920 and turned himself in. He served about a year in federal prison and was released in 1921. He died in 1946 in an auto crash in North Carolina, after storming out of a diner where he’d been asked to sit in a rear section reserved for Blacks.
The push for a posthumous pardon for Johnson, led by his great-great niece, gathered steam over a number of years, finally landing Trump’s attention in 2018 after actor Sylvester Stallone and other celebrities drew awareness to the case.
Bruton said Tuesday his office was thrilled to be able to add a final note to such a historic case. It’s also a reminder of how far the judicial system has come, he said.
“To look at what the court was like then and now look at where we are today, it’s refreshing,” Bruton said.