(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- While there's a lot of focus on the pardons issued by Donald Trump in his last hours in office, a 2018 presidential pardon has been formalized in the racially charged case of boxer Jack Johnson from more than a century ago.
The clerk of the Chicago Federal District Court only recently got a copy of the posthumous pardon Trump issued for Johnson two years ago.
The flamboyant and defiant Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion and was despised at the time for, among other things, dating white women.
An all-white jury convicted him of breaking a federal Jim Crow-era law that was used to discourage interracial relationships. Johnson ultimately served about a year in federal prison.
With the 2018 pardon finally in hand last week, Clerk Thomas Bruton needed to find and attach court documents.
Much to his surprise, he said, the documents had been digitally preserved in a federal archive on Chicago's Southwest Side.
Bruton says the court documents can help us better understand the nation's racial history and how it relates to the challenges we still face.
“It’s a reminder of far we’ve come, and it’s a reminder of what we were then and what we are today,” he said.
Johnson died in 1946.
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