Mandingo fighting is a fictional type of combat sport in which participants are specially bred black slaves, forced to fight to the death in the fictionalized Antebellum South in the Quentin Tarantino film *Django Unchained *.

While the term "mandingo fighting" was created for the film, the authenticity of the practice itself has been debated.

It is impossible to prove that organized fights to the death never occurred, but there is no evidence that such fights ever took place.

Historians contend, furthermore, that they are unlikely to have ever occurred, if for no reason other than their economic impracticality.

Other types of organized fighting of slaves, however, were not unheard of.

One bare-knuckle boxer named Tom Molineaux famously won $100,000 for his master and his own freedom after a fight with another slave. He went on to a boxing career in Great Britain and Ireland as a freedman, becoming the first black American to compete for the heavyweight title.