He fought to be champion of the world. But battles against racism may end up being veteran boxer Kirk Johnson’s true legacy

DARTMOUTH, N.S.—There’s a heavy bag at the City of Lakes boxing gym that’s regretting showing up for work on this evening.

It’s the one heavyweight boxer Kirk Johnson is teeing off on right now, in the small gym in the basement of a Dartmouth community centre, as he runs through a tortuous drill on a chilly night.

For 10 furious seconds at a time, Johnson is a flurry of fists and feet moving in frenetic synchrony, a machine-gun thud-thud-thud of gloves on bag as sweat flies off his brow.

The bag suffers for this. It swings wildly, loudly on its chains, and when the whistle blows at the end of the 10 seconds, there are deep, painful dents in its surface.

Johnson stops the bag swinging and, breathing heavy — but not so heavy that he can’t talk some good-natured trash around the gym — towels off. Then he refocuses and rotates around the bag so he has clean canvas to work on when the whistle blows again.

It happens over and over. Hurt the bag. Talk some trash. Towel off. Repeat.

This is what Kirk Johnson’s “last dance” looks like.

This is a man who twice fought for the heavyweight championship of the world. Who was a world junior champion at 17. Who was an Olympic quarterfinalist in Barcelona in ’92. Who only lost twice in a 41-bout pro career spanning — so far — 28 years.

He can talk as much trash and hurt as many bags as he wants.

There are younger fighters in the gym — all of them, if the truth be told. But they defer to Johnson when he talks. A lion with a touch of grey in his mane is still a lion.

Other fighters understand there are no shortcuts to his decades of experience; that there is no substitute for the all the hours he has spent in the gym and in the ring.

But Johnson’s biggest, most important fight may have been one that occurred outside the squared circle. And when his time in the ring is over, it may not be the Vitali Klitschko or the John Ruiz title fights that people most remember him for, nor his vicious knockout of Oleg Maskayev.

Instead, the scrap they’ll remember may be the time Kirk Johnson took on the Halifax police department over the practice of racial profiling … and won.

The killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer in May of last year ignited a summer of multiracial, multinational protests highlighting the very same problems that Johnson himself faced almost two decades earlier when he launched his human rights case against the Halifax police — namely that Black people face systemic racism across this continent and much of that is reflected in police attitudes toward them.

It’s been 18 years since Johnson won that landmark case, in which the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission upheld his complaint that Halifax police were racially profiling when they pulled his car over for the umpteenth time in April 1998.

It’s been two years since, on behalf of that commission, criminologist Scott Wortley reported to the city of Halifax that Black people were six times more likely to be targeted by police street checks than white people, prompting police Chief Dan Kinsella to ban the practice and apologize to the city’s Black community, part of a turn away from street checks seen in jurisdictions around the country.

Johnson was in the midst of the summer Black Lives Matter protests in Halifax following the death of Floyd. He’s heard a lot of talk about changes. He’s cautiously optimistic, but he’s been around the block enough to know that it will take time, and that even the best of intentions can be diverted or forgotten.

When he watched the protests over the summer, he says he, like many, wasn’t just thinking about George Floyd. He was thinking about Breonna Taylor, shot to death by white police through the window of her apartment in Louisville in March of that year. And of Ahmaud Arbery, chased by three white men while out for a jog and shot to death in Glynn County, Georgia, in February. He even thought about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 over the suspicion that he offended a white woman.

“This should have happened a long time ago,” he says of the BLM marches. “People should have been aware of this a long time ago, because George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, they weren’t the first that were killed. We’ve had incidents of police brutality for a long time. We have racial incidents all the time.”

“My father said that’s been going on since the beginning of his time, since the beginning of his father’s time and his father’s father’s time.”

There’s a long history there, one that these days he tells his children — a 16-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter — and the classrooms to which he’s sometimes invited to speak.

What he adds to that history is his own experience as a reluctant activist, and his place in the struggle for better race relations, in the hopes that the telling of the tale might make the burden a little easier to bear for another generation.

“My father used to do stuff back then, hoping that his kids don’t have to go through the same thing that he went through,” he says. “Sure enough, I’m still going through the same thing that my father went through and then, even today, there are kids that still go through what I went through, and it is not acceptable at all.”

In the BLM marches though, he said he sees a glimmering of hope. White people who used to think Black people complained too much saw, by the millions, on their screens, a white police officer casually kneeling on an unarmed Black man’s neck until he was dead.

It opened a lot of eyes, Johnson thinks.

“This was real. This man killed George Floyd. The complaints we have are nothing but real complaints. And because a lot of people saw this on their screens? A lot of people got woken up because of that.”

There’s no direct lineage from his human rights case to the BLM movement; the latter would have happened without Johnson. But his human rights case marked the first time that a prominent figure — with accompanying media attention — stood up and established what Black Nova Scotians had been saying for years — that as a result of systemic discrimination in the province, police disproportionately targeted them.

The BLM movement that swept the globe brought those same issues to an unprecedented, worldwide stage. Johnson, looking at the big picture, says he believes that when people start listening, that’s the time to keep talking.

“Us as people, you know for a fact that we have a bad memory. When something tragic happens to us, we forget, and we’ll quickly slide right back into that same situation until it comes up again,” he says.

“So, these marches are good, but we’ve got to continue to do something to remind each other to treat each other fairly.”

“I’m just hoping that this movement stays alive. We can’t forget about this situation. We’ve got to talk about it all the time, hear about it all the time. People have to treat people with respect.

“And that’s what my case was about. They harassed me, and I made a complaint, and because of my status and my name at the time, I was able to make sure it didn’t go away. But not everybody’s like that. Not everybody’s going to have that platform. We need to make a change.”

In 1998, Johnson was a boxer on the rise. He’d begun training in Texas right after the Barcelona Olympics and, undefeated, with a 24-0 record, was steadily making his way up the rankings and staking out a claim as heavyweight title contender. In Nova Scotia, and especially in the predominantly Black community of North Preston, where he has his roots, he was famous and celebrated as a world-class boxer.

On the night of April 12 that year, Johnson’s 1993 black Ford Mustang, driven by his cousin Earl Fraser, with Johnson in the passenger seat, was pulled over by a Halifax police officer, ostensibly on the grounds that a sports car with Texas licence plates with two males in it was suspicious.

It wasn’t the first time Johnson had been pulled over. In fact, he would later testify to a Nova Scotia Human Rights inquiry that on his sporadic visits to Halifax while training in Texas — a cumulative three months spread out between 1993 and 1998 — he had been stopped by police a total of 28 times.

A police report made available to that inquiry showed 21 inquiries on Johnson’s car prior to that evening — all within the nine months prior to the April 1998 stop.

On this occasion, despite Johnson pointing out his valid Texas registration and insurance, Const. Michael Sanford impounded his car. On the following day, having determined that the registration and insurance were indeed valid, they returned it.

For Johnson — and for much of the Black community — this was an old story. They had talked about the police penchant for racial profiling for years. But this time, for Johnson, was one time too many. He had the profile, he had the money and, most of all, the determination to do something about it.

That kicked off a legal process that spanned the next five years.

He filed a complaint under the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act alleging that Sanford and the Halifax Regional Police had discriminated against him.

“I feel that I was pulled over and harassed by Constable Sanford on the evening of April 12, 1998, because I am a black man,” wrote Johnson in his complaint.

“When that case happened. I could have walked away,” says Johnson now. “They (Halifax police) were saying Sanford was right in everything he did. And (I) was right in everything (I) did.

“How could I be right? I got two tickets. How can I be right? I was there for two-and-a-half hours and I couldn’t leave on my own free will. How can I be right? You took my car? How can I be right? You’re embarrassing me in front of everybody. So, if I’m right, why did I get punished?”

In later testimony, Sanford denied knowing the race of the Mustang’s occupants before stopping it and denied that race had anything to do with his actions that night. The Nova Scotia’s human rights chairman, Philip Girard, wasn’t buying that. In his decision in December of 2003, Girard wrote: “I find Constable Sanford did not display the reasonable tolerance and tact required of someone in his position and I infer that race was a major factor in this professional failing.”

And later in his decision: “Constable Sanford’s mind appeared closed virtually from the outset and remained that way for the rest of the evening and thereafter. I infer that the tragic lack of communication which caused Constable Sanford to fall into error was the result of the police officer’s use of a racial stereotype of black male criminality.”

When the dust cleared, Johnson’s complaint was upheld. Girard found that Sanford discriminated against Johnson, and also held the Halifax Regional Police liable for failing to properly supervise Sanford. He called on the police to begin collecting race-based statistics on their vehicle stops and recommended that racial sensitivity training be made mandatory for all police employees.

He also decreed the Halifax Regional Police should establish a scholarship in Kirk Johnson’s name to be given annually to a North Preston resident.

“For the Black community, what was really important about that was here was this high-profile person who had the means and, shall we say, the public profile to challenge front-on what was happening,” says Isaac Saney, who is the director of the Transition Year Program at Dalhousie University in Halifax and teaches Black studies.

“It validated what had been the general experience of people of African descent in this province. The fact that racial profiling would take place, the harassment from the police. They were clearly (establishing) that there were unspoken — but very clearly articulated — colour lines in this province.”

“Kirk Johnson is important because he establishes for the first time that what had been happening to the Black community, what African Nova Scotians had been saying for a very long time, was the actual reality.”

Canadians, says Saney, have the conceit that Canada is not the United States, that the problems of segregation, of racial inequality, of disproportionate incarceration of Blacks and Indigenous peoples don’t exist here, or if they do at a far lesser extent than south of the border.

“Here’s this person who’s challenging for the pinnacle of boxing titles — here’s a contender who everybody knows, here’s this person who, you’d think his international profile would insulate him from this racism, right? But it doesn’t.”

“And here’s this boxer who was fed up and took a stand not only for his own personal integrity, but for the integrity and rights of the African Nova Scotian community.”

That boxer, for his part, remains a reluctant spokesperson.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not no gigantic, big-time activist. I want that to be known, that I’m not no big-time activist,” says Johnson. “I’m not Martin Luther King or Muhammad Ali.”

“Am I trying to be them? I’m just trying to do the best I can do.”

Now, years after his human rights case, night after night in the gym, putting in the sweat to tack one last good year onto a storied boxing career, he maintains merely that he was fortunate enough to be in a position to do what so many before him could not — plant his feet and take a big swing at the heavy bag in front of him.

At 48, Johnson hasn’t fought a pro bout in 10 years. He knows that makes him long in the tooth for a boxer, and that his stature in those circles is not what it once was.

But he never did take a lot of punishment as a boxer. And he’s in great shape; he looks good, he’s moving fast and hitting hard, and he figures he’s still got four or five good fights left in him. At least.

And when he hits that bag hard enough … it moves.