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Johnson himself had applied for a pardon in 1920, as he served a 10-month sentence for his 1913 conviction. Even the attorney general at that time noted that the law was intended to punish human trafficking, not consensual relationships.

When President Obama took office, many saw a natural ally in Johnson's cause, but he, too, stuck with the Justice Department's policy against posthumous pardons.

"Could you imagine what would happen, given the racial dimension of this, if a black president and a black attorney general had suggested a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson?" Burns told USA Today.

That black attorney general, Eric Holder, sympathized. There was "no question" that Johnson's conviction was a historical injustice, Holder told a New York television station in 2016. However, he said, there were "countervailing concerns about the way he treated women."

Reports and rumors of womanizing and physical abuse added an element of controversy that has only grown during the current era of #MeToo.

It seems piquantly appropriate, then, that Trump, whose language and alleged behavior have been targeted and condemned by the #MeToo movement, among others, would be the president to defy today's political etiquette on behalf of Johnson, who flamboyantly defied the racist politics of his day.

And I say that's OK. Considering the bizarro nature of Trumpian policies, as some of my Twitter followers sarcastically observed, if Obama had pardoned Johnson, Trump might well have tried to reverse it, just as he has tried to purge every other remnant of Obama's legacy.

Instead, a man who often has been criticized -- often with justification -- for racial insensitivity gets credit for granting the symbolic, yet still significant, pardon to Johnson. I have been a frequent critic of Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop style. But this time he scored a knockout.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.