Sonny Liston was portrayed, quite openly and notoriously, as a beast. That was taken straight from headlines. I don't think it was a radical disjunction when you had this evolution - or devolution - of these Black American men as being on the one hand treated as if they were docile, and on the other hand, in the blink of an eye, being treated like they were brutal beasts who had to be restrained by any means necessary, up to and including mass incarceration and lynching.