Details

ISBN-10: 0252082877
ISBN-13: 9780252082870
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publish Date: 09/11/2017
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.50" H

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

Paperback

Price: $27.95

Overview

The black prizefighter labored in one of the few trades where an African American man could win renown: boxing. His prowess in the ring asserted an independence and powerful masculinity rare for black men in a white-dominated society, allowing him to be a man–and thus truly free.

Louis Moore draws on the life stories of African American fighters active from 1880 to 1915 to explore working-class black manhood. As he details, boxers bought into American ideas about masculinity and free enterprise to prove their equality while using their bodies to become self-made men. The African American middle class, meanwhile, grappled with an expression of public black maleness they saw related to disreputable leisure rather than respectable labor. Moore shows how each fighter conformed to middle-class ideas of masculinity based on his own judgment of what culture would accept. Finally, he argues that African American success in the ring shattered the myth of black inferiority despite media and government efforts to defend white privilege.

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Reviews
"Many sports history books in which authors analyze race focus on professional team sports. The history of professional team sports does not represent the full scope of the sporting experience, particularly for African Americans, and particularly during segregation. . . . In I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880 1915, Louis Moore writes about African American male boxers who not only fought but earned a living in the decades before and after the turn of the century." –Journal of African American History
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Details

ISBN-10: 0252082877
ISBN-13: 9780252082870
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publish Date: 09/11/2017
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.50" H
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