At the heart of the criminal charges on which heavyweight champion Jack Johnson was convicted in 1913 were his relationships with white women. He’d married a woman named Lucille Cameron, spurring her mother to charge that Cameron had been kidnapped. Those charges were dismissed when Cameron refused to testify, but another woman came forward and Johnson was convicted of violating a law prohibiting the transport of women across state lines.
On Thursday, Johnson was posthumously pardoned for that conviction by President Trump. It seems obvious now that an interracial relationship shouldn’t be the basis of sending someone to prison, but that wasn’t the case 100 years ago. At that point, many states (though not Illinois) had laws barring marriage between white and black people. (The Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia overturned remaining laws in 1967.)
Gallup’s polling on the subject goes back only to 1958, but at that point, most Americans disapproved of marriage between whites and blacks. That opposition was much higher among whites than blacks and remains higher among white Americans.
In fact, more than 1 in 10 white, non-Hispanic Americans told Gallup only five years ago that they still disapprove of interracial marriage.
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At the time, that was about 24 million people.
Only 3 percent of black Americans and 7 percent of Hispanics also disapproved of interracial relationships.
Who are those Americans that disapprove of interracial relationships? The General Social Survey asked Americans their views on that more restrictive idea that was in effect in the Jack Johnson era: Should such relationships be banned by law?
There’s little difference by political party, though independents have been generally less likely to support such a law. The real split was by age. In 1972, more than half of those aged 56 to 80 supported legally banning interracial marriage, at a time when only 60 percent of Americans disapproved of such marriages.
By 2002, the last time the question was included in the GSS survey, that age group had dropped to about 16 percent support for such a law. That same year, 29 percent of Americans told Gallup that they disapproved of interracial marriages.
At the time of Johnson’s arrest, opposition to relationships like his were the norm, not the exception. While they are certainly the exception today, though, they are by no means nonexistent. Johnson has become a part of history, but racial attitudes like the ones that contributed to his conviction haven’t.
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