Description
The black prizefighter labored in one of the most 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 actually 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 even as the use of their bodies to transform self-made men. The African American middle class, meanwhile, grappled with an expression of public black maleness they saw related to disreputable leisure relatively than respectable labor. Moore shows how every fighter conformed to middle class ideas of masculinity in accordance with his own judgment of what culture would accept. In spite of everything, he argues that African American success in the ring shattered the myth of black inferiority regardless of media and government efforts to defend white privilege.
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