In the 1970s, Black and white media raised an alarm over “Black-on-Black crime,” drawing a line between law-abiding Black citizens and criminals who were making their neighborhoods unlivable. The narrative of Black-on-Black crime would become one of the leading alibis of the wars on crime and drugs, and it originated not with the Nixon or Reagan administrations but in boxing. Chapter 3 follows a cast of magazine writers – John Lardner, A. J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton – who taught the nation to root for the right kind of Black fighter against the wrong kind. Their stories showed advocates for the wars on crime and drugs how anti-Blackness could survive civil rights: It had to come wrapped in pro-Blackness.

This chapter explores Black masculinity and celebrity at the turn of the century through the lives of American statesman Frederick Douglass, educator Booker T. Washington, scholar/activist W. E. B. DuBois, fiction writer Charles W. Chesnutt, and boxer Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight champion. Johnson’s athletic accomplishments and diverse cultural interests, along with his uncompromisingly bold personality, set a new tone for Black masculinity in the first decade of the twentieth century. His celebrity status, mediated by his status as a Black man, provided him a public platform unprecedented for an African American man. On that platform, he embraced his Black working-class heritage, critiqued the dubious history and practice of colonialism, and unapologetically revealed his preference for socializing with white women. Johnson presented, in both his actions and his physical dominance of white men in the ring, the major issues, aspirations, and concerns in the lives and work of this quartet of Black men.