I Fight for a Living Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915

"Many sports history books in which authors analyze race focus on professional team sports. The history of professional team sports does not represent the full scope of the sporting experience, particularly for African Americans, and particularly during segregation. . . . In I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880 1915, Louis Moore writes about African American male boxers who not only fought but earned a living in the decades before and after the turn of the century." --Journal of African American History
"Immensely readable. . . . I Fight for a Living is essential reading for anyone interested in 'the shadow of the black fist' of racism that loomed over the ring well into the twentieth century, and the African-American fight for equal footing amidst the inception of modern boxing."--Slugfestboston

"I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880-1915 is a fantastic and necessary contribution to the critical sociology of the race and sports paradigm, advancing conversations on boxing, race, masculinities, labor, and sports cultures. . . . By contextualizing fighting as both labor and a tool to challenge dominant ideologies, Moore broadens scholarly understandings in the sociology of sport and Black studies about the ways in which Black boxers asserted their agency by using sports as a medium to evade a racist job market and their success in the ring to disrupt the myth of Black inferiority." --International Review for Sociology of Sport