Copied over from the Barbara Bush thread, since I didn’t want to derail it.
The Washington Post has a story up on this and the original charge does seem like some serious racist BS. The House passed a bill asking George W. Bush to pardon him but it died in the Senate. John McCain (Sen-R) and Harry Reid (Senate-D) along with Peter King (House-R) and Gregory Meeks (House-D) asked Obama to pardon him in 2016.
So the pardon doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable.