In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese examines images of Black heavyweight boxers to map the visual terrain of racist ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of Blackness, masculinity, and sport. Looking closely at the “shadow archive” of portrayals across fine art, vernacular imagery, and public media at the turn of the twentieth century, shedemonstrates how the images of boxers reveal the racist stereotypes implicit in them, many of which continue to structure ideas of Black men today. With a focus on both anonymous fighters and notorious champions, including Jack Johnson, Saggese contends that popular images of these men provided white spectators a way to render themselves experts on Blackness and Black masculinity. These images became the blueprint for white conceptions of the Black male body—existing between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of violence. Reframing boxing as yet another way whiteness establishes the violent mythology of its supremacy, Saggese highlights the role of imagery in normalizing a culture of anti-Blackness.

The black prizefighter labored in one of the few trades where an African American man could win renown: boxing. His prowess in the ring asserted an independence and powerful masculinity rare for black men in a white-dominated society, allowing him to be a man--and thus truly free.

Louis Moore draws on the life stories of African American fighters active from 1880 to 1915 to explore working-class black manhood. As he details, boxers bought into American ideas about masculinity and free enterprise to prove their equality while using their bodies to become self-made men. The African American middle class, meanwhile, grappled with an expression of public black maleness they saw related to disreputable leisure rather than respectable labor. Moore shows how each fighter conformed to middle-class ideas of masculinity based on his own judgment of what culture would accept. Finally, he argues that African American success in the ring shattered the myth of black inferiority despite media and government efforts to defend white privilege.