Slave gladiators in antebellum south?

[Cretaceous Bob]

Originally Posted by hellboy30

Have you ever heard of Haiti? Nat Turner? John Brown? There were most certainly quasi-military organizations PRIOR to the Civil War. Kansas-Nebraska had a lot of those folks at war with the anti-slavery folks. And in many of the states they had Committees of Safety and Vigilance, which were nothing more than pro-secessionist groups of bullies who would intimidate Unionists just prior to the war.....even earlier, these groups would look for any abolitionists & would either tar & feather them or worse. They also looked out for the local communities when it came to worries about another Nat Turner type of rebellion. I didn't think that part of the movie was too far-fetched at all.

Edit: Welcome, by the way! Thanks for dropping in & posting!

Yeah, quasi-military organizations and general violence certainly. But I said proto-KKK, not proto-military organizations. Those armed border conflicts and thus the Civil War as a whole started because the sort of acts that the men in that scene would do was an acceptable part of the culture of the South and unacceptable to the culture of the North.

The KKK hid their identities because they wanted to continue those acts in an environment that now found them unacceptable: Reconstruction and Federal occupation.

So these people wearing hoods in the deep South before the Civil War implies that what they are doing is unacceptable to the South at large, which doesn't make any sense at all considering the impending gigantic war and the severe change it would bring to the country and the South in particular. The point of the KKK was to restore the white supremacy ways that dominated the South before the Civil War (or, in other words, the period of time that Django takes place in).

The hoods are clearly just a writer transposing one historical fact to an earlier time, mixing pre-Civil War and post-Civil War expressions of Southern racism in a completely nonsensical way. These different organizations (the KKK and guerilla/terrorist/raider groups) are outlets of the same source sentiment and are the result of the environments they took place in, and in turn are each inextricably tied to the times they took place in.

[hornj]

On the whole issue of slaves being forced to have gladiator-like fights, here is a journal article directly on this topic. It argues that there were times when slaves would engage in boxing matches, but they actually wanted to participate and some said they did not try to escape because they loved the boxing so much.

jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25759558?uid=3739776&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=2 1101885649147