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Showing posts from October, 2022
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I present to you Illa Vincent, described in the Library of Congress’s online files as an “African-American wrestler,” although at the time this was published, 1910, he was most likely called Negro. I found this photograph while rooting around on the Library of Congress American Memory Web site. The photo may have been published in the Chicago Daily News , and the images (there are three or four others) reside with the Chicago Historical Society. I did a quick bit of research, on the Internet, and then over to the shelves for Arthur Ashe’s three-volume encyclopedia of black athletes called Hard Road to Glory ; neither yielded any information on this man. One day I’ll call the Historical Society; maybe an archivist will have something in her files. In the meantime Illa Vincent remains without a known story, and his image one of the many jewels of the Library of Congress.