In 1926 Theodore Tiger Flowers became the first African American boxer to win the world middleweight title. The next year he was dead, the victim of surgery gone wrong. His funeral in Atlanta drew tens of thousands of mourners, black and white. Atlantans would not grieve again in comparable numbers until Martin Luther King Jr. s assassination in 1968.
Flowers, whose career was sandwiched between those of the better-known black boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, was not America s first successful black athlete. He was, however, the first to generate widespread goodwill among whites,...
In 1926 Theodore Tiger Flowers became the first African American boxer to win the world middleweight title. The next year he was dead, the victim o...
