Trump’s migrant fights idea echoes an ugly American tradition

“I bled from both nose and mouth, the blood spattering upon my chest.

“The men kept yelling, ‘Slug him, black boy! Knock his guts out!’ ‘Uppercut him! Kill him! Kill that big boy!’

“Taking a fake fall, I saw a boy going down heavily beside me as though we were felled by a single blow, saw a sneaker-clad foot shoot into his groin as the two who had knocked him down stumbled upon him. I rolled out of range, feeling a twinge of nausea.”

Ellison’s imagination was, however, rooted in fact. Battles royal were real — mostly in the South and mostly after the end of slavery, such as those the first Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, survived. Some human decency, and law, eventually brought down the curtain on what was unquestionably racist theater.

But Donald Trump, running again for the presidency, joked (or not — this is someone who wondered aloud whether injecting disinfectant into the body could cure people of the coronavirus) about reviving the show.

“I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea,’” said Trump, referring to mixed martial arts honcho Dana White at a speech last month to the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington. “‘Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants?’ I think the migrant guy might win; that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much.”

Who would? A race-based fight league? Even White, who has wrestled with charges of racist histrionics in the MMA company he oversees, drew the line.

Not that White was necessarily versed in the putrid history, but sports scholars have argued there have been few if any athletic events as outwardly racist as battles royal. They were born during slavery. They remained through Reconstruction. They flourished during the deconstruction of Reconstruction as a means of reestablishing at least the psychological strata of skin color in this country.

As Purdue University historian Randy Roberts wrote in “Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and The Era of White Hopes”: “Their sole function was to reinforce racial stereotypes. Like the blacks in minstrel shows, blacks in Battle Royals conformed to white expectations. Blindfolded or tied together, blacks were made to look more comical and less dangerous. It was difficult to take seriously one whose masculinity and dignity were so totally compromised. Emasculated before each other and the white audience, the black youths were given painful lessons about the nature of caste.”

We’ve learned over the years what Trump thinks of people of color, be we the progeny of enslaved Africans, born in Africa or the Caribbean, or the Latin American immigrants for whom Trump proposed his migrant fight league. Maybe we are to be owned still? Maybe we owe our provenance to excrement?

Or maybe those of us seeking a survivable existence by attempting to cross the southern border, a life-threatening endeavor, are, as Trump has pronounced more than once, anything but human. So why not put those of us so unfortunate in a pit from which to fight for consideration of a green card, or some other reason and right to be here, to be a cog in the American economic engine?

What was left for the winner of battles royal was the same thing, for the most part: a get-out-of-misery card, at least momentarily. Usually, that manifested itself as a few dollars at the end of the organized melee — or however much the bloodthirsty in attendance decided to toss on the floor, as if feeding beasts at the zoo.

An Aug. 2, 1898, Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle story about a battle royal was headlined “Won a Watch and Stole the Melon; Too Much Temptation for a Colored Fighter.” The report stated the winner of the battle royal won a gold watch, with a watermelon awarded for second place.

At least one survivor of battles royal, Tom Molineaux, born into slavery in late-18th-century Virginia, wound up fighting enslaved men from other plantations. Upon him vanquishing one fellow enslaved, Molineaux’s prize was his freedom, plus $500. He got the hell out of the racially vicious South and pursued a living as a professional pugilist in New York and eventually England.

It is amazing the battle royal lasted as long as it did. An article in the most recent edition of the Syracuse Law Review by lawyer Bennett Liebman noted that, in 1912, New York’s boxing commission banned “all matches or exhibitions in which more than two principals appear in the ring at the same time, commonly called a battle royal exhibition.”

Liebman added: “In practice, however, the battle royal was not so nondescript. It was an abhorrent spectacle.”

Despite being outlawed in some places, the human cockfighting continued. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University found accounts of the gory spectacles in newspapers decades after New York criminalized them. The museum’s collection includes a story from the Lubbock (Tex.) Evening Journal about a “negro battle royal” at a festival featuring square dancing, trick horse shows and carnival rides. It is dated Sept. 27, 1950. Another story, from Iowa in 1934, advertised a quintessentially American spectacle: a “negro battle royal” at a Fourth of July celebration.

We are almost a quarter of the way into this century. But there are those among us who would like to turn back the clock. Trump’s migrant fights idea is a regurgitation that represents just that. It is no laughing matter.