SIXTEEN

OCTOBER 26, 1951

Joe Louis’s last fight. The champion bows out with a defeat, but his legacy will endure. The longest-reigning heavyweight champion, known as both “the Brown Bomber” and “the black Moses,” and Detroit’s most famous athlete, Louis shouldered the heavy burden of representing the African American community. During World War II he gave tireless support to the U.S. war effort and used whatever influence he had to combat discrimination in the armed services—while frequently being its target himself.

“Louis, greatest ring idol of our generation, apparently came to the end of the comeback trail as he lay on his back with his head sticking out over the working press seats,” the Detroit Free Press reported. “He shook his bruised face from side to side and blinked again and again. He tried vainly to bend up and get his legs off the rope so he could rise.”1 But he could not, and so ended the boxing career of Detroit’s Joe Louis, the greatest heavyweight champion of them all, at the fists of Rocky Marciano, who would in the following year take the heavyweight title himself and become the only heavyweight champion to retire undefeated.

When Joe Louis died in 1982, the entire city of Detroit mourned. In a pure coincidence, the Detroit chapter of the NAACP held its “Fight for Freedom” dinner at Cobo Hall that night, where Governor William Milliken declared that Joe Louis “symbolized greatness, especially for Detroit and especially for Michigan.” Mayor Coleman Young, who grew up in the same neighborhood, reminisced about the time Joe beat him out of a job on a horse-drawn ice-wagon. U.S. senator Don Riegle added, “I think Joe Louis symbolized the whole struggle of black people in our society.”² Today, the giant sculpture of his powerful black fist, Robert Graham’s four-ton Monument to Joe Louis, is easily the most recognizable symbol of the city.

Just moments before it was all over, Louis had gotten up one last time. A left hook to the chin had taken him down, but “like a big cat he rolled over immediately and took a count of eight on one knee.” He got up only to take hook after hook until the final right “landed on the Bomber’s bruised and puffed left cheek,” and that was it.3 The conclusions of many, maybe most, great boxers’ careers have followed this course: first retirement (which, in Joe Louis’s case, happened in 1949), an ill-advised comeback (1950), some defeats, some wins against opponents they would not have considered worthy a few years earlier, then the final knockout.

What was unusual about Joe Louis’s career was not its end, but what it had all meant. When he left the ring for good, his status surpassed that of any boxer who had come before him. Not only did he hold the championship for twelve years, longer than any heavyweight before or since, he had become a national icon, “the first universally embraced black American hero.”⁴ To many black Americans, he was a source of pride and of a heightened sense of self-worth; to many white Americans, particularly during the war years, he was both a great boxer and a patriot, allowing them to imagine themselves color-blind. “Under the stress of a national emergency, for a brief period,” Howard Bryant writes, “Joe Louis succeeded in erasing the color line.”⁵ For a while, then, he came to embody the height of what it could mean to be a black American—propelled in part by the political and economic forces that would ultimately lead to the achievements of the civil rights era.

Joe Louis might have been the first great athlete who fully shouldered the responsibility to represent “his race,” a burden never placed on white athletes. “Musicians were never proof that America was fair, because Lena Horne and John Coltrane didn’t have a scoreboard, a final buzzer that told you coldly and definitively if you won,” Bryant writes with regard to black ballplayers. “America liked that. Ballplayers were the Ones Who Made It. And being the Ones Who Made It soon came with the responsibility to speak for the people who had not made it, for whom the road was still blocked. The responsibility became a tradition so ingrained that it hung over every player.”⁶ Joe Louis, who inaugurated that tradition, was fully aware of its implications and yet accepted it with clear eyes and few illusions. To Sugar Ray Leonard, the undisputed welterweight champion, he was simply “the perfect example of the perfect man,”7 and to those who called him “a credit to his race,” sportswriter Jimmy Cannon responded that he was a credit “to the human race.”⁸

To appreciate the extraordinary developments that made Joe Louis, in his friend Frank Sinatra’s words, the man who exemplified “our national character and the ideals that motivate us,” we need to go back in time: to 1940, when Louis had already been champion for three years, and further back to 1908, when Jack Johnson became the first black world heavyweight champion.⁹ At the beginning of the twentieth century, most white boxers simply refused to fight black boxers for championship titles—certainly one way to avoid defeat. But Tommy Burns, a Canadian who lived in Detroit and won the title in 1906, had a different take on these matters, and he agreed to fight Johnson in Sydney, Australia, in 1908. To the dismay of white America, Johnson won and would go on to defend the title against a series of white challengers—a procession to which we owe the coinage of “the great white hope.”

Johnson was an outrage to white supremacist society not simply because he defeated white fighters but because he openly dated and married white women—at a time when black men could die for just looking at one. He was charged twice for violating the Mann Act, a federal law that made it a felony to transport across state lines “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The first woman he had allegedly “trafficked” was Lucille Cameron, his second wife—she refused to testify against him, and the case fell apart. He wasn’t so lucky the second time around, just a month later. Even though his affair with Belle Schreiber pre-dated the Mann Act, he was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to a year and a day in prison after she testified against him. Incidentally, the judge who presided over the trial was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the future commissioner of baseball who would make it his business to enforce the color line until the day he died.

Johnson skipped bail and, together with Cameron, he fled the country—first to Canada, then to Europe, South America, and Mexico. But the celebrity-exile life eventually got old, and in 1920, he surrendered at the Mexican border to serve his sentence. Johnson died in 1946; in 2018, he was posthumously pardoned by President Trump, apparently at the prompting of Sylvester Stallone, whose eponymous hero in the Rocky franchise bore some resemblance to Rocky Marciano, the boxer who ended Joe Louis’s career.10

Johnson’s preference for white women and his general refusal to conform to the moral standards of the day had certainly not endeared him to the white population, but he was not particularly popular with much of the black one, either. Hence, when Louis emerged as the leading black boxer of the 1930s, his trainer and manager set out to craft a very different image, one designed to prove that Louis was nothing like Johnson.¹¹ Not that this was a difficult task: Louis was a quiet-spoken, restrained man, fond of some affectations that would not have sounded out of place in an English country gentleman—for most of his career, for instance, he and his trainer referred to each other as “chappie.” Fond of fine clothes and attractive women, he quickly became a hero to the African American population—in no small part the result of his sovereign victory over the German boxer Max Schmeling in 1938, a fight so crucial to the history of sports and race that we have devoted its own chapter to it (chapter 20).

During the years of the Great Depression, when the economic collapse intensified the hardships of Jim Crow and Northern segregation alike, African Americans were in dire need of a champion. Joe Louis fought his first professional fight in 1934, and his name turns up over and over again in blues songs of the era: in 2001, the New York Times declared that, in fact, “Only One Athlete Has Ever Inspired This Many Songs.”¹² One heartbreaking story describes a black prisoner being led to the gas chamber in a Southern state, crying out, as he dies, “Save me, Joe Louis! Save me!”¹³ The novelist Richard Wright writes: “From the symbol of Joe’s strength they took strength, and in that moment all fear, all obstacles were wiped out.”¹⁴ In 1941, Joe Louis appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which tried to explain his significance to a white audience: “He was a living legend to his people: a black Moses leading the children of Ham out of bondage.”¹⁵ In the 1940 general election, both the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, and the Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, courted Joe Louis’s support to win over the black vote. Louis was persuaded to stump for the Republican, in part because of Willkie’s support for civil rights.¹⁶

Since he had won the title in 1937, white attitudes to Louis had gradually changed—the careful marketing, which included rules such as “never be photographed next to a white woman,” was paying off: “Only the soft-spoken and polite Louis, whose black managers drilled into him the importance of appearing even more polite, unthreatening and self-effacing than he naturally was, could have pulled it off. Louis thus became the only black man in America licensed to slug a white man and get rich doing it,” the New York Times wrote.17

As a heavyweight champion, he was clearly a powerful figure, but unlike Johnson, he did not openly mock racialized societal rules and expectations, and thus defied the pervasive stereotypes that declared black men to be either submissive fools or dangerous savages. While cartoons and caricatures of their days portrayed Louis and Johnson in similar racist ways, Louis’s demeanor and his steady rise as a supremely gifted athlete chipped away at the narrative about black boxers that had been established around Johnson.¹⁸ To be sure, plenty of whites watched Louis’s ascent with worry and suspicion. Along with his many admirers, Father Charles Coughlin, Detroit’s notorious anti-Semitic and white supremacist radio host, was ecstatic when Louis lost his first fight to Max Schmeling, in 1936, the German boxer who was the darling of Hitler and the Nazis. Coughlin declared the outcome a “wonder, appealing to all.”¹⁹ But the tide was slowly turning, and more and more people embraced Louis as an American champion.

Louis himself took his position as “the black Moses” very seriously: “If I ever do anything to disgrace my race, I hope to die,” he declared, and he worked hard throughout his life to oppose the very racism that had forced him into his role.²⁰ In 1941, while lobbying for increased funding for work on race relations, he told Roosevelt that “the hardest fight I ever had was against prejudice and discrimination.” His activism was not only a matter of principle, but also a concrete fight to improve the material conditions of millions of black Americans living in a state of poverty made more abject by discrimination: “We were protesting the rats and the rat bites that the babies got because the houses were so rundown and the landlords wouldn’t make repairs. You know, I was a grown man, but I’d get tears in my eyes when I’d see those babies with rat bites all over them. I’d cry even more about the babies I didn’t see because they were dead.”²¹ While he is talking generally here, he may well have been thinking about Detroit and the conditions in Black Bottom, which he would have known well.

Joe Louis did speak for his race, but he also saw himself as a proud American. It was this combination that, along with his stunning prowess in the ring, helped him to gain acceptance and admiration across much of white America. It is important to note, particularly in light of those who now view him as a sellout or a dupe, that he wasn’t under any illusions as a patriot:

I think about America often. I know how beautiful it is, how rich it is. I know because I’ve been through practically all of it. I even know better because I’ve been all over the world. Don’t like to take unnecessary pride in myself, but I’ve seen it all. And because I’ve seen it all, I get sick sometimes way deep down inside myself. There is so much here. Can’t there be a way we can share it? It makes me sick to see people, because they’re black, catching so much hell. Something is wrong with that. I know I caught hell all during my career because I was black…. The people would all be there looking at me, expecting much of me. I felt weak and disappointed in myself because I couldn’t do more. It gave me a bad feeling. I don’t know how to get rid of rats, or get proper seats on a bus, or help you from busting your bladder because they won’t let you use a “white” restroom.22

In Europe, the Second World War began in 1939, but Hitler only declared war on the previously neutral United States after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. As the nation finally entered the global conflict and mobilization began, Louis wanted to do his part. Cynics might suggest that Louis could not afford to remain aloof in the way Jack Dempsey, another heavyweight champion, had during World War I—Dempsey had paid a price for this decision, included being labeled a draft dodger by the New York Times, but he had been quickly forgiven after the war.²³ A black champion might not have been treated as generously. But strategic considerations aside, there is no reason to doubt that Louis sincerely wanted to serve the country. When one journalist asked him why he was risking his million-dollar championship title for nothing, he shot back: “I ain’t fighting for nothing, I am fighting for my country.” When a black journalist quizzed him about his support for a country riven by racist injustices, his laconically brilliant answer was: “Hitler won’t fix them.”24

The war against the Nazis created a new political environment in the United States. The enemy was not just openly racist and anti-Semitic; Germany was explicitly staking its quest for dominance on spurious theories of Aryan superiority. It became increasingly difficult to deny the ideological kinship between Nazism and U.S.-style white supremacy—a kinship that may well have delayed the U.S. entry into the war in the first place. If America wanted to fight Hitler effectively, the country would be forced to face up to the obvious contradictions at a time when black political movements were beginning to gain strength, creating considerable anxiety in the process. Detroit, in the meantime, was re-tooling for war, re-fashioning itself from Motor City to Arsenal of Democracy—a process that drew more and more workers to the city, creating ever-worsening conditions for them, particularly with regard to housing.

The complexities of the shifting ideological landscape posed a conundrum for black community leaders: Should they act as good Americans, suspend the internal fight and support the war wholeheartedly, in the hope of being rewarded later—driven by a trust and optimism for which U.S. history had given no cause? Should they demand the end of segregation and Jim Crow in exchange for support? Or should they refuse to take part in the war altogether, as at least one activist, Lewis Jones, decided to do (refusing to be conscripted into a segregated military unit, Jones was sentenced to three years in prison).²⁵

During the summer of 1941, when Roosevelt was increasing arms expenditure in the expectation that the United States would join the war, A. Philip Randolph, America’s most powerful black trade unionist as the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the first leaders of the civil rights movement, created the March on Washington Movement, demanding that black workers be hired in the expanding defense industries, which were burgeoning in Detroit more than anywhere else. Unemployment was still sky-high after the Great Depression, and black workers were the last to find jobs. But Randolph’s threat to bring one hundred thousand demonstrators to the capital delivered significant results: in June 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, creating a Committee of Fair Employment Practices, charged to ensure that all federal agencies involved in defense procurement should operate without discrimination as to “race, creed, color or national origin.”26 Private defense contractors in the sector were obliged to comply with the order as well. This was the first time that the U.S. government had created a policy explicitly designed to promote equal economic opportunity. The idea of the march laid the foundation for subsequent campaigns that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Randolph, fittingly, was one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver the “I Have A Dream” speech to an audience of a quarter million—the same speech he had first given in Detroit, during the Walk to Freedom.²⁷

As the United States entered the war, most of the black leadership settled on a policy known as “the double V”—victory abroad and at home. By committing fully to the war effort, so the idea went, African Americans would earn the country’s respect as equal fellow citizens, leaving them well placed to obtain concessions on civil rights after the war.²⁸ To people such as Lewis Jones, the very fact that the U.S. armed forces remained segregated made this collaboration an outrage. And in fact, the U.S. secretary of war openly argued that integration would be destabilizing, since blacks allegedly did not show the military initiative of whites and segregation was “an established American custom.”²⁹

African American ambivalence with regard to the war effort was not just about Jim Crow, segregation, or other racist injustice. In 1941, the main theater of the war was Europe, and African Americans had fewer cultural ties to Europe than white Americans who would frequently identify with their ancestors’ country of origin. More importantly, black Americans remembered their hopes of more equal treatment after loyal service during World War I, hopes quickly dashed when the war was over.³⁰ In sum, the U.S. government had a dire need for a man with the profile and charisma of Joe Louis to bring black citizens on board.

He was never sent to the front lines—he was too valuable an asset for that. Instead, Joe Louis agreed to a charity fight, a rematch against Buddy Baer, with whom he had a bit of unfinished business—half a year earlier, the six-feet-seven-tall Baer had knocked Louis out of the ring, even though Louis beat the count and Baer was disqualified later in the match. The rematch was scheduled for January 9, 1942, with all the proceeds to go to the Navy Relief Society. This was particularly notable as the navy was known to be extremely reluctant to recruit African Americans, and Louis took his share of criticism from a number of civil rights activists—why work to the navy’s benefit, of all outfits?31 In the end, however, it was probably a smart shaming strategy: Louis knocked out Baer in the first round and presented the Society with a check for $89,092.01—almost $1.5 million in today’s money. Three days later, he joined the armed forces and became a national hero.

Thus began Joe Louis’s tour as a goodwill ambassador and propaganda tool. His message was crafted to African American sensibilities. Posters portrayed “Pvt Joe Louis” in army uniform wielding a bayonet. The tagline read: “We’re going to do our part … and we’ll win because we’re on God’s side.”³² The language of faith played well to deeply religious black communities, and the noble private appealed to all demographics in a way a black officer might not have. As Randy Roberts writes: “The poster itself suggested Louis’ iconic status. At a time when the government censored, and mainstream newspapers commonly refused to print pictures of black soldiers in uniform, let alone shots of them holding up rifles, Louis’ image—in uniform, armed and aggressive—was slapped up on the walls of recruiting stations and government buildings in every section of the country. The tag line as well as his accepted persona had deracialized his image, transforming him into a symbol of patriotism. And not just black patriotism—American patriotism.”³³ More boxing matches organized to support the war effort followed. By his own account, Louis lived at the barracks the way other black soldiers did, and while earning the rank of corporal, he refused to accept a higher rank offered to him.³⁴

Joe Louis’s deep ties to Detroit, now the industrial center of the war effort, probably made him an even more effective spokesman for the war. But in some ways, the most significant contribution that Joe Louis made to the war was financial, promoting government bonds that were funding the military. To that end, he gave speeches, made radio appearances, and starred in government-sponsored films about his life, produced in Hollywood and designed to persuade black America that this war was their war as well, never mind racial segregation in the country or its armed forces. The Negro Soldier (1944), produced by Frank Capra, is one of the most notable of these films—it was shown to almost every single African American soldier, and to significant numbers of white soldiers as well, to good reviews. Following race-based conflagrations in several major cities, not least the Detroit riot of 1943 (see chapter 19), the documentary took pains to replace the established Hollywood “Sambo” stereotypes of African Americans as lazy, foolish, and comical with an image of African Americans as thoughtful, patriotic, and brave. Langston Hughes declared it the “most remarkable Negro film ever flashed on the American screen.”35

The army organized national tours for him where he would display his boxing skills to army base audiences—tours that also, however, gave him the opportunity to express his own views on segregation, which he did frequently. At one such gathering in Detroit, he caustically proclaimed that if blacks were given “an even break in the army we would show the world how to win this war.”³⁶ He openly criticized the policy of not admitting welleducated blacks into the officer class, most notably in the case of Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, whom he spent time with at one army base.³⁷ And on one famous occasion, at Camp Sibert in Alabama, decades before Rosa Parks’s famous protest, he joined the bus queue labeled “White Only” and refused to move to the black line—which promptly had him facing arrest.³⁸ Did he allow himself to be co-opted by a war machine that could not have cared less for the civil rights of African Americans? Perhaps, but he said his piece, he quietly and not so quietly held to his convictions, and he became a hero to much of America in the process—the first black man to do so in the history of the country, it has been asserted over and over again.

There is, however, a danger of overstating the degree to which white America accepted and respected Joe Louis. It is not surprising that the individual who was permitted to become America’s first black hero was an athlete, because, much as it had done with music, the country had begun to carve out sports as one of the few niches where African Americans were allowed to excel. Neither is it a coincidence that it was a boxer: Major League Baseball would not be integrated for several years to come. As Howard Bryant observes:

Integrating team sports was a much greater threat to segregation than the rise of a fighter…. Team sports foreshadowed an integrated society, for if blacks and whites could live together during six weeks of spring training and six months of the baseball season, why not side by side in the classroom, the foxhole, or on Main Street? “We sent the Harlem Hellfighters to France to fight with General Pershing,” Russel Honoré said. “And when they got there, the Congress of the United States said, ‘Don’t let them fight,’ because if you do, they knew they’d want to come back and have social justice.”39

World War II did mark a turning point in American race relations, and the seeds of the later civil rights movement were planted in the 1940s—some of them by men like Joe Louis who had to walk the tightrope of respectability. But that did not mean that a man like Louis would be allowed to excel beyond the confines of boxing. In 1948, Louis, $500,000 in debt to the IRS (including taxes he owed on sizable sums he had donated to the Navy Relief Society), wanted to acquire a Ford dealership in Chicago—selling the same cars he had helped build in the 1930s when he worked at the River Rouge factory. Henry Ford II asked for feedback from his dealers and regional managers, and thirty-five pages of the correspondence are preserved among the papers of Walker A. Williams, Ford’s sales manager in the 1940s.⁴⁰ The letters are a shocking read. District manager Johnston reports that “we feel certain that we would lose all of the State of South Carolina’s business which would involve over 400 units a year in normal times and where we now enjoy a very favorable relationship,” and that “many present good Ford owners would never buy another Ford product.” Houston weighs in: “Believes Ford Motor Company would be boycotted in the South.” Indianapolis worries that “whispering campaign might be started by competition.” Pennsylvania is “bluntly told that this would be construed as supporting Harry Truman and the other left-wing groups, in an election year, and that it would definitely give us bad public re-action, as they don’t given a ‘damn’ for Harry Truman. For your information a recent Gallup Poll shows the South to be the most conservative of all sections of the country so far as communists and left wings are concerned.”

Some of the letters seem touched by a smidgen of bad conscience. Thus, Dearborn’s district manager writes: “If we do not have anything to gain from a business standpoint, then in our opinion we should not make such an appointment. If, on the other hand, other factors should be given consideration such as human relations, constitutional rights or some such factors, then we would probably have to change our decision.” Others don’t even try. Alabama’s “Mr. Lloyd strongly recommended that regardless of any circumstances, that we do not appoint Joe Louis, or any other negro, as a Ford dealer anywhere in the United States and that we keep the Ford business a white man’s business.” New Orleans: “Ford business is a white man’s business and we do not want any negroes in it. Frankly, if we had a negro in the organization and it so happened that the writer was thrown into contact with the individual at a conference, meeting or presentation of Ford products, he would not attend.”

Whether it was because Ford would lose business in the South, or because appointing a single black dealership would signal Ford’s alliance with “communists of leftwings,” or because respectable white dealers from the South would refuse to attend conferences, or because the competition would exploit it, or because Ford would be seen to side with Harry Truman and the civil rights legislation that was beginning its long march through Congress, one thing was clear: Ford could employ African Americans, but it certainly could not allow them to become employers in turn. If the “first black American hero” was going to find the money to pay his taxes, he had to return to the ring.

The “Freeman Field Mutiny” of 1945 is another case study both in how much and how little things were changing. Rather than a single protest, the “Mutiny” comprised a series of protests that would eventually see black officers arrested 162 times, some of them more than once—all in response to their determined opposition to Colonel Robert Selway, who insisted on segregating officer clubs in clear violation of a War Department’s ban on discrimination. The black officers of the 477th Bombardment Group, which moved from Selfridge Field near Detroit to Kentucky and eventually to Freeman Field, Indiana, refused to bow to escalating threats, including a court-martial for “disobeying a direct order by a superior officer in time of war,” punishable by death. More than a hundred of them were flown to Kentucky, detained behind barbed wire for ninety-four days. Black newspapers soon got wind of the story, the NAACP got involved, and in the end, 104 officers received letters of reprimand, three were court-martialed, and one was convicted—it was not until the 1990s that the air force set aside the conviction and rescinded the reprimands.41 As Daniel Haulman points out, this story, which is often hailed “as a forerunner of the modern Civil Rights Movement, in which peaceful nonviolent resistance resulted in the desegregation of facilities,” is a more ambivalent tale: the immediate result was the removal of every white officer from the 477th—the air force would rather see an all-black unit than an integrated one.⁴² And yet, the Freeman Field Mutiny was almost certainly crucial to the eventual integration of the air force in 1949, four years after the Tuskegee Airmen risked their careers and their lives.

One of the ringleaders of the uprising was Coleman Young, an experienced labor organizer and the future mayor of Detroit.⁴³ And on December 12, 1979, it was Coleman Young who opened the Joe Louis Arena, where the Red Wings played for forty years. Joe Louis died before the city could organize an event honoring him in the place named after him, and it is now demolished. But not far from where it stood for forty years, Joe Louis’s giant clenched fist, suspended by steel cables from its pyramid frame, continues to sway in the wind.