Week 9: Boxing and Civil Rights

How has racism impacted on Boxing? What does Moore tell us about Boxing in the C19? What was the relationship between boxing and the Black freedom Struggle? The importance of Joe Louis. What was the historical significance of ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’?

Watch on BBC Iplayer the documentary ‘When we were Kings’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08pxq5j/storyville-when-we-were-kings

Class reading:

Moore, L. (2019). Race and Boxing in the Nineteenth Century. In G. Early (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 59-68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107415355.006

Roberts, R. (2019). Joe Louis: “You Should Have Seen Him Then”. In G. Early (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 173-184). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107415355.015

Ch2 “ Change is Gonna Come’, in Marqusee, Mike. Redemption Song : Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, Verso, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=5177371

 Further reading:

Erenberg, L. (2019). Echoes from the Jungle: Muhammad Ali in the Early 1970s. In G. Early (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 194-206). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107415355.017

Early, G. (Ed.). (2019). The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (Cambridge Companions to Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107415355

Grasso, John. Historical Dictionary of Boxing, Scarecrow Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=1598794.

Heiskanen, Benita. The Urban Geography of Boxing : Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=981687.

Smith, Andrew R. M.. No Way but to Fight: George Foreman and the Business of Boxing, New York, USA: University of Texas Press, 2021. https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.7560/319765