Word: molineaux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...story, going all the way back to Tom Molineaux, the prima inter pares of the American slave gladiators, who became the country's first heavyweight champion. Born on a Virginia plantation, Molineaux fought against the prime "black bucks" from other plantations while the masters wagered high stakes on the outcome. After he had beaten all comers and therefore was no longer of use to his master, Molineaux was given his freedom. He moved to New York and became the premier boxer on the Waterfront. Exhausting American competition, Molineaux then went to England to take on the English champion, Tom Cribb...
...British press denounced the tactic used against Molineaux, but the tactic itself was only an unsophisticated beginning. For black fighters were not only cheated in the ring; they were kept out of it. The Southern planters, who had found it as profitable and more entertaining than cock-fighting to pit their darkies against each other, found themselves in the shadow of black fighters such as Vesey, L'Ouverture, and Turner and did not wish to promote combativeness of any form among their slaves. How could they make their other slaves stand in fear if there were a black man amongst...
During the 96 years between the Molineaux-Cobb bout and Jack Johnson's first title fight, black heavy-weights found themselves locked out of the championship ring. But, if boxing became even more of a white man's game, it remained the poor man's game, it remained the poor man's game. The fighting Irish applied the same mixture of skill, showmanship, and exclusion to boxing that they did to the polities of the same period. (Sullivan, despie his boast, refused to meet Peter Jackson, the greatest of the heavyweight "Colored Boxing Champions of America.") Their boxers, like their...