Review: I Fight for a Living
If you have an interest in the intersection of sports and civil rights, Louis Moore is a great follow on twitter. He has deeply researched the topic, continues to do so, and communicates what he finds very well. I Fight for a Living is his research about black boxers in America in the late 1880s. If you want to know about the roots of segregation, bombast, and personal branding in American sport, this is a good place to start.
Moore has a pro-equality point of view, and he does not shy from racial interpretations of this history. But the historical record doesn’t make that hard. Sports talk wasn’t shy about throwing racial cards on the table, and neither were the fighters and promoters themselves. If you think sports has been free of racial controversy and protest, this is a fine demonstration that we’ve been arguing about it since around the time the phone was invented (no correlation implied).
Recommended.