This. It was a pretty common practice back in the day for families (especially black families) to shave 2-3 years off their children and for parents to shave 5-10 years off themselves when filling out census forms. This was much easier to do back in the day when people weren't born in hospitals as regularly as they are today. Back then it was also a common practice to register the child's birth late, so it was easier to get a little creative with the child's age. This wouldn't be easy to pull off nowadays.
A marriage certificate which would have relied upon a date given by a man who didnt know how old he was is proof of nothing. Liston wouldnt have access to the census of 1930 and 1940 and likely couldnt read them even if he did. Id believe a third party census taker before Id believe Liston. But this marriage license isnt Sonny anyway because he had started serving his prison sentence by this point.
No it wasnt and its one thing to shave a couple of years off, its entirely another thing to shave enough years of that you render a child non-existent in 1930... black families didnt “shave years off” in those censuses, they generally didnt keep records and didnt know. This wasnt uncommon for white families around the turn of the century either.
Black families reporting a kid's birth two or three years late was very common around the 1930's and even more likely for black families that lived in the countryside. If Liston was born somewhere between 1928-1930 it wouldn't be crazy for his mother to report his birth as 1932 or 1933, since I've seen even in modern times some parents register their child's birth extremely late. It was often used as a way for parents to get a few more years out of their kids before having to send them to school, since most states even back in those days had mandatory attendance laws that required children to start attending school by the age of 6-8. A perfect example would be my Grandfather, who was also a fighter and around Liston's age, since he was born in 1929, but his mother didn't report him or his older brother on the 1930 census, but in 1940 his older brother was listed as 13 and he was listed as 10. Sometimes parents would even go as far as reporting their children in another household. However, when they started releasing social security numbers it wasn't as easy for parents to pull this stunt and especially now with all of the modern Child protective agencies.
Some claim Liston was 28 and 29 when he beat Floyd Patterson and 40/41 when he lost to Ali in his next two fights.
You are missing the point. Census enumerators are on site when they record data. Therefore your argument that his mother simply reported his birthdate a few years later doesnt jive with the fact that he wasnt born yet in 1930 and his brother was six months old. Furthermore, again, black families, immigrant families, and the poor/rural families didnt simply record birthdates incorrectly as a matter of course, nor did they uniformly record them a “a few years later”. Birthdates were often recorded incorrectly because they were guesses/estimates due to poor record keeping and the fact that birthdays, particularly in poor families prior to the mid 20th century werent as important for record keeping or as celebrated as they eventually became. And frankly what would be the motivation behind this “stunt” as you characterize it?
I work in immigration, and if a person does not know the date of their birth, they usually record it as being the first of the month.
From my understanding from a televised documentary, Sonny's dad used to whip him, they went by the marks on a tree, when Liston was born as he had numerous siblings, hard to say.
If Sonny Liston was born during the latter part of 1930, it really isn't that much of a stretch to list him as being ten years of age at the time that the census taker showed up during 1940, especially if the Liston family didn't have solid birth documentation. - Chuck Johnston
Thst documentary was such bull****. It acted like his dad whipped him like a slave and said he carried the scars on his back the rest of his life. Go look at photos and films of Liston and tell me if you see whip scars all over his backx
