Bill Richmond

Bill “the Black Terror” Richmond was “the first black boxer of international repute,” David Dabydeen writes in the Oxford Companion to Black British History. Richmond was born in 1763 to slave parents brought north by their master from Georgia. According to Michael Krenn in the African American National Biography, Richmond so impressed Maj. Gen. Earl Percy (later Duke of Northumberland) during the British occupation of Revolutionary New York that he was sent to England to study and apprentice as a cabinetmaker. There, Krenn writes, “Richmond found his real calling as a prizefighter.”