JULY 2026

Welcome to the TRIPLE FIGHT Library and Archival Center (TFLAC), a department of THE TRIPLE FIGHT MUSEUM (TFM), which began as a digital museum dedicated to preserving, organizing, interpreting, and applying history through primary-source evidence.

My name is Dan Perkins, founder of both TFM and TFLAC. I am delighted you are here and invite you to think of this site not simply as a digital library, but as a place of discovery, reflection, and thoughtful inquiry.

When I speak with audiences—whether in person or online—I am often asked two questions: Why did you begin collecting? And Why focus on the forty years represented in the collection?

The answer is surprisingly simple. I wanted to better understand the people, conditions, and events that helped shape the world we inhabit today. In my view, America’s emergence as a global power began during the 1890s and reached a remarkable zenith during the 1920s. The financial crisis of 1929 marked the close of one era and the beginning of another.

My journey began with boxing. During those four decades, boxing evolved from a largely peripheral and often illegal activity into one of the world’s most popular and influential sports. As I studied the sport, I became increasingly fascinated by the remarkable number of accomplished Black boxers competing not only throughout the United States, but also across the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and beyond.

Over time, I began noticing something far more significant. The stories unfolding inside the ring repeatedly intersected with struggles taking place beyond it. Boxing reflected international conflict, political change, racial tensions, social progress, and tensions over pursuits of opportunity, justice, and human dignity.

Those observations did not, by themselves, become THE TRIPLE FIGHT. They led to years of asking questions, comparing evidence, exploring relationships, and testing whether seemingly unrelated people, events, and places were, in fact, connected. Through that disciplined process of inquiry, a coherent interpretive framework gradually emerged—one capable of organizing and explaining recurring patterns within the collection.

That work eventually became THE TRIPLE FIGHT—the intersection of Fights in Rings, Fights Among Nations, and Fights for Equality and Justice—and ultimately led to the creation of THE TRIPLE FIGHT MUSEUM.

If you would like to learn more about why TFM exists, I invite you to visit our About TFM–TFLAC page. If you would like to understand how we preserve, organize, interpret, and apply history, I encourage you to explore the TFM Framework.

To see our methodology in practice, I invite you to explore our presentation of 1909, one of the most significant years in THE TRIPLE FIGHT. The page you will visit represents one of the six interpretive elements of the TFM Framework. It is not the complete six-part presentation of 1909, but an opportunity to experience how the framework is applied as our collections and presentations continue to grow.

We are building something both uncommon and enduring at the TRIPLE FIGHT Library and Archival Center. I hope you will return often as the collections expand, new discoveries emerge, and additional presentations become available on this — our new — platform, built to accommodate the full breadth of the TFM Collection. To see other aspects of our work, please visit tflac.triplefightmuseum.com.

Most of all, I hope our work helps you become a better reader of the human story and encourages you to pursue the good within yourself and your community.

TFM — IN THE FIGHT FOR GOOD.