Barbados Joe Walcott

CTL-E-7124 · Person · other · 1873–1935

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07996 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-7124.

Joseph Walcott was born on March 13, 1873 — BoxRec gives his birthplace as Georgetown, Demerara, in British Guiana, while the International Boxing Hall of Fame's biography gives Barbados — and he was raised in Barbados before shipping to Boston as a cabin boy about 1887. Not quite five feet two inches tall, with a reach that let him fight far larger men, the 'Barbados Demon' turned professional in 1890 under manager Tom O'Rourke and fought from lightweight to heavyweight: he lost title challenges to Kid Lavigne in 1897 and Mysterious Billy Smith in 1898, and in 1900 knocked out the heavyweight Joe Choynski. In December 1901 he stopped champion James 'Rube' Ferns in five rounds to win the world welterweight championship, the first Black fighter to hold that title. He lost it to Dixie Kid in April 1904 on a twentieth-round disqualification that was discredited when the referee was found to have bet on Dixie Kid; when the Kid left the division, Walcott was again regarded as champion. In the autumn of 1904 he fought celebrated fifteen-round draws with Sam Langford and, over twenty rounds, with lightweight champion Joe Gans — then accidentally shot himself in the hand, losing several fingers, yet fought on. He lost the championship outright to Honey Mellody in 1906 and retired in 1911. BoxRec's official accounting credits him with 87 wins, 24 losses and 24 draws, 57 wins by knockout. Nat Fleischer ranked him the greatest welterweight of all time. Walcott died after being struck by a car in Ohio in October 1935 and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991.

The record

• Also known as: Joseph Walcott, Barbados Demon, Black Demon

Notes

Sports Encyclopedia roster CTL-SPE-0439 — RECONCILIATION (stated in full): this record is the ORIGINAL Joe Walcott, the welterweight champion of 1901–1906. His graph name is 'Barbados Joe Walcott' by rule: the bare name 'Joe Walcott' belongs in this graph to CTL-E-7057, Jersey Joe Walcott (roster CTL-SPE-0457), the heavyweight who took his ring name from this man, and neither this record's name nor any alias uses the bare form. Variances shown, not blended: (1) birthplace — BoxRec and Wikipedia give Georgetown, Demerara, British Guiana, with his upbringing in Barbados; the Hall of Fame biography states he was born in Barbados. The description carries both openly. (2) Birth date — March 13, 1873 is carried; BoxRec also records an April 7, 1872 variant from a 1916 newspaper. (3) Title win — the five-round stoppage of Ferns is fixed; IBRO's history dates it December 15, 1901, Wikipedia December 18 — the description stays at month precision. (4) The 1906 Mellody loss — the Hall gives a fifteen-round decision, Wikipedia a twelfth-round stoppage; the description asserts only the loss. (5) Death date — BoxRec, the African American Registry and the IBRO death-certificate account give October 4, 1935; Wikipedia's lede gives October 1 — the description carries October 1935. (6) Record totals — BoxRec's official accounting (87-24-24) is carried in the description; its newspaper-decision accounting runs to 96 wins and 31 losses. Curator's Judgment (DRAFT): the Demon's record is foundational — a five-foot-one welterweight who knocked out a heavyweight, held a world title in the gloved game's first decade, and was still Fleischer's all-time welterweight fifty years later. The namesake edge to CTL-E-7057 closes the identity hazard that kept this man out of the graph through eight packets.

Relationships

• Joe Walcott — related to
  Namesake edge: Arnold Raymond Cream took the ring name 'Jersey Joe Walcott' in honor of Barbados Joe Walcott, the original welterweight champion he idolized — the namesake fact is stated in the Barbados Joe Walcott record (Wikipedia) and is documented in CTL-E-7057's own notes, which record that Jersey Joe 'took his ring name from the ORIGINAL Joe Walcott of Barbados.' The two men are distinct fighters of different eras and divisions and must never be conflated.

Sources

• International Boxing Hall of Fame. "(Barbados) Joe Walcott." IBHOF.com (excerpted from The Boxing Register, Roberts & Skutt, 1999). Accessed 2026-11-04. (primary source · build store)
• Wikipedia. "Barbados Joe Walcott." Accessed 2026-11-04. (build store)
• BoxRec. "Joe Walcott." BoxRec Wiki. Accessed 2026-11-04. (build store)
• African American Registry. "Joe Walcott, Boxer born." AARegistry.org. Accessed 2026-11-04. (build store)

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Record CTL-E-7124 · Combined Graph record U-07996 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 4 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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