Will President Trump Pardon People Convicted of Marital “Race-Mixing”?

The President tweeted this afternoon that he is strongly considering pardoning the black legendary boxer, Jack Johnson, who was convicted in 1913 by an all-white jury of transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Johnson was convicted under the Mann Act, a federal law. Thus, the president has the power to pardon, even posthumously.

This a moment to think about a sea of racial laws that criminalized interactions—particularly marriages— between whites and people of other races.

Here is simply one of many cases that show the depravity America’s race laws: In State v. Jackson (1883), a Cape Girardeau white woman was indicted for having intermarried with Dennis Jackson, a person having “more than one-eighth part of negro blood.” 
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the indictment was valid because the criminal statute did not violate the Constitution. The court offered this despicable reasoning:

Nor is it one of the natural rights of man to marry whom he may choose. Under the Jewish dispensation persons nearly related by ties of blood intermarried, but in no Christian land are such marriages tolerated. The right to regulate marriage, the age at which persons may enter into that relation, the manner in which the rites may be celebrated, and the persons between whom it may be contracted, has been assumed and exercised by every civilized and Christian nation; and the condition of a community, moral, mental and physical, which would tolerate indiscriminate intermarriage for several generations, would demonstrate the wisdom of laws which regulate marriage and forbid the intermarriage of those nearly related in blood.

It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the issue (children) of a black man and a white woman, and a white man and a black woman, intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites, laying out of view other sufficient grounds for such enactments.

President Trump cannot pardon Mr. and Mrs. Jackson because they were convicted by a state court under state law. But while he scores a point by pardoning Jack Johnson, he can rehabilitate his tattered reputation for racist tweets and incitements-- for example, by retracting his racist "breeding" tweet from earlier this week (below, using a common animal metaphor for race-mixing laws, i.e., referring to non-white reproduction as "breeding").

Little Rock, Arkansas protest to keep anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.Commons) Photo at top shows a protest at the Arkansas statehouse in 1953 to keep in place a criminal law to prohibit "race mixing."