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.

About the Author
Louis Moore is an associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality.

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
"Immensely readable. . . . I Fight for a Living is essential reading for anyone interested in 'the shadow of the black fist' of racism that loomed over the ring well into the twentieth century, and the African-American fight for equal footing amidst the inception of modern boxing."--Slugfestboston

"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. . . . 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." --International Review for Sociology of Sport




Book Information
ISBN 9780252082870
Author Louis Moore
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm