Dempsey comments on Langford - 1950

Good post!
Sams manager Joe Woodman lived to a ripe old age and passed in 1969.
I wonder what he had to say?

 

Interesting. Dempsey doesn't sound particularly racist there. Hmm.....

 

"Negro"

"tricks"

"Sam"?

Really? Not Racist?

 

negro is a term that I have heard on tv used by I think harry carpenter to describe a boxer so considering Dempsey comes from a different social era I don't think you can consider that a really racist term for the time of the comments. would I use the term negro no but then now we know it would be wrong and may cause offence

 

Oh come on Seamus, everyone called black people" negroes" in 1950 including themselves.
It started to become unacceptable in the mid 1960's.

"It started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s. The turning point came when Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase black power at a 1966 rally in Mississippi. Until then, Negro was how most black Americans described themselves. But in Carmichael's speeches and in his landmark 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, he persuasively argued that the term implied black inferiority. Among black activists, Negro soon became shorthand for a member of the establishment. Prominent black publications like Ebony switched from Negro to black at the end of the decade, and the masses soon followed. According to a 1968 Newsweek poll, more than two-thirds of black Americans still preferred Negro, but black had become the majority preference by 1974. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times abandoned Negro in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, even the most hidebound institutions, like the U.S. Supreme Court, had largely stopped using Negro."




What's racist about calling him by his name Sam?
The word "tricks" conjures up what to you?
If Dempsey wasn't one of your hobby horses ,I'd say you were on a wind up.

 

Seamus style still giving 'em fits.

 

Pretty much true. Most of the older blacks who were raised being referred to as negro or colored even after the black power movement, went to their graves rejecting the word black being applied to themselves.

 

classic



The most interesting thing about the quote is that Dempsey places them both in Chicago, sometime when Dempsey was a youngster.

I don't think either of them fought in Chicago, as far as the official record goes, until Dempsey-Tunney 2.
I might be mistaken.
Is it possible they were training for/fighting bootleg fights, at a time when boxing was barred in that city ?

 

Seamus , you are so noble ! Can you not understand we are PRODUCTS
of OUR TIMES ? Worse than being a "racist" is someone who accuses
an innocent person of being a "racist"....RACISM works both ways sir !!!

 

He said fine man. Langford was a well liked fellow.

 

Langford taught boxing in the gyms in Chicago in the late 10s and early 20s. Dempsey was in Chicago (passing through) several times during 1918/1919/1920.

 

what do you mean, OUR times?

 

I needed a leg operation because of an injury but someone suggested i go back to Africa because that's where the Knee Grows

 

Ignoramus negro is what black people wanted to be called in that era