Abstract
I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880–-1915 is a boxing historiography that looks at the lives of Black fighters who came of age during Reconstruction and early Jim Crow. Focusing on the 1880–1915 period, sports historian Louis Moore explores a significant moment in history, a time when White working-class manhood posed interesting challenges to dominant US ideas of race and masculinity.
Building on Theresa Runstedtler’s Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Runstedtler, 2012), which situates Jack Johnson’s rise within the context of Black working-class manhood, Moore offers a critical reading of the intersections of Blackness, masculinity, and sporting cultures. Runstedtler demonstrates how boxing was not only a way to earn a living but also a pathway to freedom. While affording Johnson the opportunity to escape the harsh conditions of menial work, boxing provided a stage where Johnson and other Black fighters rebelled against hegemonic notions of White manhood. Moore is in direct conversation with Runstedtler, although I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880–1915 concludes that not every action disrupted dominant ideologies. Some Black boxers also “purposely molded themselves in the image of the middle-class, not so much as a challenge to white hegemony, but as an assertion of their own autonomy” (p. 12).
Though embracing the methods of sports history, I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880–1915 contributes to the critical sociology of the race and sports paradigm because Moore centrally locates boxing culture as a political space to examine the constructions and performances of Black manhood during the Victorian Era in the USA. He properly places his analysis within its sociological and historical context, which informs his research questions and interrogation about boxing and the ideological power of race, masculinities, and labor. This intersectional approach is important to the critical sociology of race and sports because it allows Moore to theorize the spaces that Black working-class boxers occupied as complex sites where resistance, struggle, and creative human expressions of independence took place.
Moore advances the term colored sport by building on the work of Howard P. Chudacoff, who argued that bachelor subcultures provided alternative notions of manhood that differed from Victorian culture. Within this sporting-male culture, men gained their identities based on their participation in illicit pastimes, reflecting a contrast to respectability. Colored sport is an important intervention as it emphasizes a racialized distinction to Black bachelors who risked their lives every time they frequented White spaces of leisure. To navigate a White hypermasculine sporting context, Black pugilists created their own institutions that functioned as alternative spaces where claims of manhood could be manifested.
This book also builds on turn of the nineteenth century scholarship on Black middle-class manhood. These works include the writings of Martin Summers, Kevin Gaines, and Angela-Hornsby-Gutting who examine the ways in which Black men drew from White middle-class ideas of Victorian manhood to construct their masculine identities while maintaining their agency. Despite their ascription to uplift politics, Black prizefighters struggled in their attempt to hold down the race in the eyes of the Black middle-class and dealt with racist White news writers and boxers who denied them the opportunity to fight for the world heavyweight championship by drawing the color line.
Moore’s research narrative is guided by his textual analysis of turn of the century newspaper archives that focus on the life stories of Black fighters, adding to the sociology of sports literature on boxing, race, manhood, and labor. The text is made up of six chapters that are split into two sections. The first three chapters detail the ways Black men asserted their manhood through boxing and at the same time, how the Black middle-class dealt with their presence. The second half interrogates how White fighters, writers, and politicians used racism to control Black prizefighters’ claims of manhood. Moore makes three arguments. First, he argues that boxing provided Black men with an alternative to the racist job market that forced them into drudge labor. Second, he argues that Black boxers publicly performed manhood in a variety of ways that were understood as “manly” in sporting culture and if they chose, also performed acceptable hegemonic forms of middle-class manhood. Lastly, Moore argues that Black boxer success on a local and national levels disrupted the myth of Black inferiority.
Chapter one explores the transition of boxing from proletariat to prizefighting and its development to a form of work as opposed to disreputable leisure. Thomas Fortune, for example, was one of the first Black journalists to see the changes in manhood and race relations. Fortune saw Black boxer Peter Jackson’s success in the ring as an opportunity to give Blacks a claim to physical manliness and equality. Moore notes that Jackson’s appeal to the Black press and Black middle-class was largely due to his embodiment of respectability and redeemable qualities aligned with uplift politics. In chapter two, Moore continues his discussion of Black prizefighters in relation to uplift politics and respectability through the story of boxer Joe Gans. Advancing Kevin Gaines’ suggestion that “elite blacks celebrated the home and patriarchal family as institutions that symbolized the freedom, power, and security they aspired to” (p. 47), Moore demonstrates how even when Black fighters attempted to align themselves with these values, the Black middle-class critiqued their individual failures and used them as scapegoats to assert their own claims of racial equality. The final chapter in this section reveals the pervasiveness of White entitlement in controlling boxing and Black fighters. In Los Angeles for example, the success of Black-owned boxing clubs over White gyms was deemed a racial problem. To combat this, White city officials intervened by using health concerns to justify the temporary closure of the United and Manhattan Clubs. Bobby Dobbs was one of those Black gym owners who was forced to close his establishment and opted to move to Europe because of its perceived relief from US racism. This relief was limiting as Moore importantly notes Dobbs’s recognition that a Black man in England was well liked only if he acted right and behaved himself.
In section two, Moore makes clear that the heavyweight championship stood as a symbol of White supremacy. John L. Sullivan, a racist White heavyweight champion, understood this, drawing the color line throughout his entire career to deny Blacks an opportunity to compete for the crown. Ironically, when Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion, he opted to only fight White men. In response to Johnson, Moore demonstrates how the White press developed the idea of Black hopes, which were Black boxers who performed the role of docile negro and ascribed to patriarchal White middle-class values. Moore reminds readers that when Black hopes such as Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford were no longer needed the White press went back to representing them as savages. Chapter five excavates the ways that White writers turned the Black body into a nonthreatening sambo to calm the fears of their White readership. Though Black boxers demonstrated new capabilities through their muscular bodies, White writers argued that it was in fact brains that made the White man superior. White superiority nonetheless stood on shaky grounds, prompting city and state politicians to ban boxing contests, temporarily putting Black boxers out of work and forcing some to retire or seek alternative means of employment. Moore highlights Sam Langford and Sam McVey as Black fighters who were directly affected by Wisconsin’s ban in 1914 and illuminates how McVey problematized the color line and loss of wages as a violation of his civil rights. Moore concludes his text by reminding readers that the structural forces of racism, poverty, and societies’ denial of Black masculinity remain today.
Though beyond the scope of his intervention, his brief mention of the role Europe played in the lives of Black boxers who traveled overseas to evade the horrors of racism in the US is not further examined. This presents scholars however, with an opportunity to interrogate the transnational dimensions of boxing politics, culture, and history. Post-revolution Cuba is an example of this, where many Afro-Cuban fighters migrated to Mexico to continue their professional careers. Most notably, José “Mantequilla” Nápoles and Ultiminio “Sugar” Ramos present sports scholars with an opportunity to study the impact of the Cuban Revolution on the migration of professional boxers to Mexico and interrogate how at times Afro-Cubans disrupted as well as reinforced Mexico’s racial project of mestizaje while also making claims to manhood. Nonetheless, Moore’s text is an excellent addition to the literature on sports and will greatly benefit scholars interested in the sociology of race and sports.
I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880–1915 is a fantastic and necessary contribution to the critical sociology of the race and sports paradigm, advancing conversations on boxing, race, masculinities, labor, and sports cultures. The strength of Moore’s work is that it complicates turn of the century boxing history and demonstrates how sporting spaces are politically charged in moments of political transformation. During this historical moment of international expansion, nation-building, rise of modern industrial economies, and White male Victorian sports culture, boxing functioned as a tool for reinforcing and challenging racial and masculine ideological projects. Moore’s book unveils the multiple ways Black boxers performed Black masculinity that both challenged and utilized representations of the middle-class to assert their own constructions of manhood. These versions of manhood were fluid and their claims to racial equality produced discursive and ideological assaults to White supremacy. By contextualizing fighting as both labor and a tool to challenge dominant ideologies, Moore broadens scholarly understandings in the sociology of sport and Black studies about the ways in which Black boxers asserted their agency by using sports as a medium to evade a racist job market and their success in the ring to disrupt the myth of Black inferiority.