U.S. Sen. John McCain has led a campaign to get President Barack Obama to pardonJack Johnson, though the president’s gesture would be more symbolic than anything of substance. For the trumped-up crime Johnson committed at the turn of the 1900s was unworthy of sending a man to prison in the first place.

In his chaotic life, Jack Johnson might well have committed real crimes that should have earned him a metal bunk behind prison walls.  Arrogant, defiant and outrageous, he was, people of the period said, the worst kind of Negro. He partied deep into the morning; he drank to excess; and he bedded white women.

The latter alone could get a black man lynched. Yet what angered white society most of all wasn’t that Johnson slept with its women but that this smiling, gold-toothed black man could beat any white man alive.

For that, Jack Johnson was unforgiveable — then and maybe now.

It might partly explain why, on the 100th anniversary of “The Fight of the Century,” not much is being said and written about Johnson or the fight, which galvanized Americans along racial lines like no other sports event in U.S. history.

Inside a ring in Reno, Nev., Johnson dispatched former champion Jim Jeffries, “The Great White Hope” who was coaxed into coming out of retirement, as easily as he did accepted conventions. Few black men lived their lives then with the swashbuckler’s spirit Johnson displayed. Still fewer dared to flaunt their disregard for Jim Crow the way Johnson did.

He was a man without fears, and some people would argue he was a man without morals or principles, an attitude that angered blacks almost as much as it did whites.

Yet Johnson never asked for anybody’s approval. He wouldn’t have known what to do with approval had he been granted it.  His DNA was wired differently than anybody else’s in this world. He had a reckless streak that drove him in directions that black men – and whites, too – did not dream of going.  He enjoyed the money, the fast cars and the fast lifestyle that money afforded him.

To ignore that aspect of Johnson’s life might be appropriate. In fact, it’s best that people do ignore it, because they would find it too difficult to appreciate a man who preferred living on the cliff’s edge, a man who faced down countless hurdles that sprouted in front of him.

What can’t be ignored, however, is Johnson’s greatness. In the bloody world of prizefighters, perhaps no boxer in history was his equal. Johnson was the first black man to wear the heavyweight champion’s belt, the tangible symbol of white superiority. He chased Tommy Burns around the world to win it in 1908, and white Americans did all they could to win it back.

It was at their urging that Jeffries left the alfalfa fields and returned to the ring. On July 4, 1910, he hoped to reclaim a crown he had abdicated upon retirement. His “Fight of the Century” with Johnson was the first sporting event on U.S. soil that divided blacks and whites. It was the first that touched off riots as a result of its outcome.

Not that any of that meant much to Jack Johnson. Those problems of race were left for others to sort out, not him. He wasn’t fighting Jeffries for the black race; he was fighting Jeffries because that what Jack Johnson did: He fought men inside a squared circle.

None of his fights caught the public’s interest as this one with Jeffries did, and none of his fights fueled a campaign that spirited Johnson off to federal prison.

Guilty of what?

Nothing, unless being black, bossy and brash were crimes that merited prison time. They weren’t crimes – not then and not now.  Sending a black man to prison was a typical injustice of the period, an injustice of the worst kind for a black man who refused to let others define him.

Johnson deserved more than what he got in life, and in death if his life can’t be made whole now, what good are laws when they can be misused as they were against Jack Johnson?

While asking blacks and whites to mourn him or to remember him today might be a pointless request, the pardon that McCain and others have sought for Johnson might make amends for America’s wrong. The power to pardon Johnson rests in a black man’s hands. Obama should understand how an injustice left to fester cheapens a nation and all it stands for.

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