Louis Moore
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041341
- eISBN:
- 9780252099946
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041341.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
The color line in boxing indicated who had and did not have racial privileges. In 1882, when John L. Sullivan won the heavyweight championship, he knew enough about race, power, and privilege to ...
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The color line in boxing indicated who had and did not have racial privileges. In 1882, when John L. Sullivan won the heavyweight championship, he knew enough about race, power, and privilege to proclaim that he would never fight a black man. Every white heavyweight champion followed Sullivan’s lead, until 1908, when Tommy Burns fought Jack Johnson. After Johnson beat Burns, the white press searched for a white hope to defeat Johnson. By 1912, however, without any credible white fighters save the race, white sportswriters turned Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford into “black hopes,” men that white writers believed had so-called “good black” qualities that whites could momentarily satisfy white men.Less
The color line in boxing indicated who had and did not have racial privileges. In 1882, when John L. Sullivan won the heavyweight championship, he knew enough about race, power, and privilege to proclaim that he would never fight a black man. Every white heavyweight champion followed Sullivan’s lead, until 1908, when Tommy Burns fought Jack Johnson. After Johnson beat Burns, the white press searched for a white hope to defeat Johnson. By 1912, however, without any credible white fighters save the race, white sportswriters turned Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford into “black hopes,” men that white writers believed had so-called “good black” qualities that whites could momentarily satisfy white men.
John C. Pinheiro
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199948673
- eISBN:
- 9780199380794
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199948673.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
1. With Congress unable to decide on Texas annexation before its summer recess, the elections of 1844 promised to double as a referendum on Texas. Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to ...
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1. With Congress unable to decide on Texas annexation before its summer recess, the elections of 1844 promised to double as a referendum on Texas. Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to choose carefully their positions and presidential candidates. This was less true of the new group of anti-slavery advocates: the Liberty Party. Democrat James K. Polk barely won the election, pledging to “reannex” Texas (which was accomplished before he took office), purchase California, and abrogate the Oregon treaty with Great Britain. Americans now recognized that any expansion outside of Oregon would come at the expense of Catholic Mexico. By 1845 the literature had shaped American views of their southern neighbor as a decrepit pseudo-republic cursed by despotism and superstition, complementing extant stories involving priests, nuns, and confessionals and fitting older ecclesiastical and theological arguments against the Catholic Church. By the time war erupted, Americans were accustomed to a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Saxonism that had become inseparable from Manifest Destiny sentiment, while giving them the most effective means of understanding their role in advancing republican principles. This rhetoric soon proved flexible enough both to support military conquest, the denigration of the enemy, and annexation and to oppose them.Less
1. With Congress unable to decide on Texas annexation before its summer recess, the elections of 1844 promised to double as a referendum on Texas. Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to choose carefully their positions and presidential candidates. This was less true of the new group of anti-slavery advocates: the Liberty Party. Democrat James K. Polk barely won the election, pledging to “reannex” Texas (which was accomplished before he took office), purchase California, and abrogate the Oregon treaty with Great Britain. Americans now recognized that any expansion outside of Oregon would come at the expense of Catholic Mexico. By 1845 the literature had shaped American views of their southern neighbor as a decrepit pseudo-republic cursed by despotism and superstition, complementing extant stories involving priests, nuns, and confessionals and fitting older ecclesiastical and theological arguments against the Catholic Church. By the time war erupted, Americans were accustomed to a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Saxonism that had become inseparable from Manifest Destiny sentiment, while giving them the most effective means of understanding their role in advancing republican principles. This rhetoric soon proved flexible enough both to support military conquest, the denigration of the enemy, and annexation and to oppose them.
Louis Moore
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041341
- eISBN:
- 9780252099946
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041341.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
