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I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915

Online ISBN:
9780252099946
Print ISBN:
9780252041341
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915

Louis Moore
Louis Moore
Grand Valley State University
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Published:
15 September 2017
Online ISBN:
9780252099946
Print ISBN:
9780252041341
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.

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