Identifying the first Black world champion in the history of World Wrestling Entertainment is more complex. Depending on who you ask, that distinction could be attributed to the Rock in 1998, Booker T in 2006, or Kofi Kingston in 2019. This distinction can be subject to whether you require your first Black WWE champion to be unmistakably Black, i.e. have two Black parents (disqualifying the Rock), or to have won the original WWE Heavyweight Championship (disqualifying Booker T).
There are also Black world title reigns that WWE often acknowledges as firsts, such as Bearcat Wright’s reign with the world title of the Los Angeles-based World Wrestling Associates in 1963, and Ron Simmons’s world title reign in World Championship Wrestling in 1992—the first by a Black pro wrestler in a major national promotion.
All of this highlights the challenges of examining professional wrestling history through Black firsts. The modern world, nuanced understandings of race and ethnicity, and the incomplete documentation of Black pro wrestling history all contribute to the complexity of this endeavor.
Even before the world title reigns of Tiger Flowers and Seelie Samara in Charles Gordon’s small Massachusetts-based wrestling promotion in the 1930s, there was a prominent world wrestling champion of Black ancestry just after the turn of the 20th century. By virtue of this achievement, Clarence Eugene Bouldin may very well be the first legitimate Black world wrestling champion to be recognized as such on North American soil. Bouldin, however, lived in an era that contrasts with our own. He made every effort to conceal his Black identity due to the codified prejudices of the time, both inside and outside of the ring. As such, he was a Black world champion who had been impossible to detect without performing a mountain of investigative work.
When world light heavyweight champion Clarence “The Cuban Wonder” Bouldin made his debut at Perkins Park Rink in Akron, Ohio, in October of 1907, the Akron Beacon Journal credited the Cleveland resident as the attraction whose appearance explained why a surprising number of female fans were inside the venue. “Sprinkled through the audience were no less than a half hundred ladies, it being one of the largest turnouts of the fair sex ever seen here at a wrestling match,” noted the Beacon Journal. “The beautiful symmetry of the Cuban’s body—his wonderfully developed neck, shoulders, and back—caught their eye, and Bouldin had a host of feminine rooters.” It’s unlikely that a sportswriter at that time would have noted the female admiration directed towards a Black man’s physique in public, even if he was the world’s greatest pound-for-pound wrestler. In fact, a similar display in a Southern state could have resulted in Bouldin being lynched.