She called herself the African Lioness, but there were no golden savannahs in South Carolina, only cotton fields, dead-end roads, and a professional wrestling business that chewed up souls like cheap cigars.
Sweet Georgia Brown was born Susie Mae McCoy in Cayce, South Carolina, in the heart of Jim Crow country, 1938. She entered the world with two strikes against her—Black and female—and she’d spend the next five decades trying to make sure the third didn’t kill her. When she stepped into the ring in 1958, it wasn’t for fame or glory—it was to fight her way out of the dirt. But pro wrestling is a crooked church. And for every sinner it forgives, there’s a saint it crucifies.
Brown was trained by The Fabulous Moolah and Buddy Lee—pro wrestling’s First Lady and her puppet master husband. They ran the women’s scene like a traveling carnival, complete with strongmen, snake oil, and backroom deals soaked in whiskey and sweat. If Moolah was the high priestess, Buddy Lee was the tax collector. Together, they didn’t just book girls. They owned them.
And Sweet Georgia Brown? She was one of their crown jewels. A natural athlete with a warm smile and fast hands, she worked crowds from Florida to Calgary, turning dive bars and armories into coliseums. She wrestled under the names Black Orchid, African Lioness, and the one that stuck: Sweet Georgia Brown—a name soaked in sugar and irony, because her life would be anything but sweet.
In 1963, she did what no other Black woman had done before—she won gold. The NWA Texas Women’s Championship. History was made in a Texas ring with sweat-stained ropes and a crowd that didn’t know whether to cheer or sneer. She beat Nell Stewart, a white woman with pedigree, to take the belt—and likely got more bruises in the locker room than she did in the match.
You’d think that would be her coronation. But wrestling in the ‘60s wasn’t just a show—it was a hustle. And for Black women? It was indentured servitude in spandex. According to her daughter, Brown was pimped out to promoters by Moolah and Lee, doped up and passed around like a receipt book. Her son would later push back on some of those claims, but even he admitted on Dark Side of the Ring that she was made to have sex with promoters. Whether the drugs were voluntary, the encounters consensual, or the pain masked with money is all lost in the cigarette smoke of kayfabe.
What we do know is that she kept showing up. Night after night. Territory after territory. Wearing a smile when the rest of her was screaming.
By the time she hung up the boots in 1972, she’d spent 14 years carving out a legacy with blood, tears, and the kind of grace that only comes from being broken and rebuilt again. And again. And again.
She didn’t retire into the Hall of Fame. She didn’t get the gold watch. She retired into silence. And then she died in 1989 of breast cancer—50 years old, no money, no parade, no curtain call. Just another woman the business used, buried, and forgot.
But history didn’t.
In 2019, when Vice’s Dark Side of the Ring peeled back the curtain on Moolah’s legacy, Sweet Georgia Brown’s story surfaced like a corpse in a river. Her children spoke—some with praise, others with fury. Michael McCoy defended his mother’s dignity, said his sister had an agenda. Then in the same breath, admitted she was passed around like a party favor in a sport that rewards silence and punishes rebellion.
This was pro wrestling at its ugliest. A seedy underbelly built on pain pills and promises, where the women weren’t just performers—they were pawns. And Sweet Georgia Brown was a queen stuck on a board that always started with the king in check.
You see, she wasn’t just the first Black woman to win a title—she was the first to survive long enough to do it.
They billed her as a novelty. A circus act. Something to gawk at between the white girls slapping each other in sequins. But she wrestled like a storm. There was nothing sweet about her when the bell rang. She hit like a woman who’d been told “no” her whole life. She slammed like someone who knew that history books don’t remember the polite ones.
The Fabulous Moolah always smiled through the storm, acting like she paved the road for women in wrestling. Maybe she did. But she paved it in blood, and a lot of it wasn’t hers.
Sweet Georgia Brown walked that road barefoot.
The industry has tried to clean up its history. WWE wants you to believe this is all sunshine and fireworks. And yet, Sweet Georgia Brown’s story is the ghost in the dressing room. The cigarette burn on the Hall of Fame plaque. The whispered truth behind every sanitized “women’s evolution” video package.
She should’ve been celebrated. She should’ve been protected. Instead, she was fed to the wolves and told to smile.
If there’s any justice left in this carnival of clowns, her name should be carved into every wrestling ring from Atlanta to Calgary. Not as a token. Not as a tragic footnote. But as a damn pioneer.
Because Sweet Georgia Brown didn’t break barriers. She blew holes in them.
And no matter how many gold belts they hang on the walls of Stamford, Connecticut, they’ll never polish away the rust she bled into the business.
Rest in power, Susie Mae McCoy.
Wrestling never deserved you.
