Tonight’s black history moment connects two unlikely sports, swimming and boxing. Peter Jackson, of St. Croix US Virgin Islands was the first black swimmer to become a world boxing champion. If he was the first, there must have been others, no? Jack Johnson, the first “colored” boxer to win the world boxing championship in 1908 was also a swimmer.

That was several years after Peter Jackson’s career. Jackson won several swimming championships in Australia and taught swimming at the Cavill Swimming School in Sydney before winning the “Colored” boxing champion of the world in San Francisco, in 1883. The “white” champion, John L. Sullivan, refused to fight Jackson. “If God wanted me to fight Jackson,” said Sullivan, “he would have made him a white man.”

I think it’s interesting that it took 25 years for boxing to eliminate color lines that didn’t even exist in swimming during the same time period. We have a rich swimming history, indeed.