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I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1800–1915

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jay381

1945-2314

Stephen H. Norwood,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

Of all sports, boxing afforded African Americans the best opportunity to achieve public recognition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work examines the extent to which black boxers succeeded in challenging long-standing pernicious stereotypes of African American men as docile and childlike. It focuses on white resistance to overturning these images, as well as on divisions among blacks as to whether prizefighting contributed to or undermined racial uplift. Boxing was particularly important because the ring was one of the few public arenas that sanctioned black men's use of physical force. Louis Moore points out that black fighters often defeated white opponents in mixed matches. He also notes that African Americans were being closed out of organized baseball and barred from working as jockeys, an occupation in which they had attained prominence. Although there is important scholarship on the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, Moore provides valuable insight into the experience and impact of many other top-flight black boxers of the 1885–1915 period, including Sam Langford, Joe Jeannette, Sam McVey, Peter Jackson, Joe Walcott, Joe Gans, and, in a later period, Beau Jack.