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The sport of boxing’s historical roots in racism and slavery
THE GREAT and most famous anti-US slavery abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, railed against the way southern slave masters regularly pitted their slaves against those of other slave masters in boxing and wrestling matches and gambled on the outcome.
Douglass described these bouts as “safety valves, designed to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.”
In her magisterial work — Boxing: A Cultural History — Kasia Boddy reveals that “Douglass set up a school to teach his fellow slaves to read, but this had to be kept secret, ‘for they (the slave masters) had much rather see us engaged in these degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings’.”
This being said, Douglass recounts in his autobiography — Narrative of the Life — the time when as a slave he was hired out by his master to a particularly violent slaveholder named Covey as a field hand and was beaten and whipped to the point where he decided to retaliate with his fists.
“The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger,” Douglass writes.
“He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. ‘No, thought I, you need not; for you will come off worse…
