Root and Stokes grind down weary India to stretch lead beyond 100
Unflinching defiance of racial hierarchy
JOHN WIGHT writes on boxing’s racist past in Britain and US
A print representing the start of a boxing match between Tom Molineaux and Thomas Cribb, on September 28, 1811 at Thistleton Gap in Rutland.
[Public Domain] 
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’.”
More from this author
Mary Kom’s fists made history in the boxing world. Malak Mesleh’s never got the chance. One story ends in glory, the other in grief — but both highlight the defiance of women who dare to fight, writes JOHN WIGHT
The Khelif gender row shows no sign of being resolved to the satisfaction of anyone involved anytime soon, says boxing writer JOHN WIGHT
When Patterson and Liston met in the ring in 1962, it was more than a title bout — it was a collision of two black archetypes shaped by white America’s fears and fantasies, writes JOHN WIGHT
In the land of white supremacy, colonialism and the foul legacy of the KKK, JOHN WIGHT knows that to resist the fascism unleashed by Trump is to do God’s work
