Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was an apt title for the entire black race in America in the 1930s. In the eyes of white people, it simply did not exist. The New York Times’s boast that it printed ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, should have added ‘for white people’. When young Joe Louis was winning amateur boxing titles in the early ’30s, the outstanding black men in our country, like W. E. B. DuBois and A. Phillip Randolph, were non-persons to every white newspaper. Even famous entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson and Bojangles Robinson were ignored. For a black baseball player to play in the big leagues was unthinkable. The National Football League was no better, and as for the colleges, when a Southern college objected to playing Columbia with its one black player, New York’s great liberal arts college obligingly dropped him from the line-up.
It’s only against that backdrop of know-nothing, racial prejudice that the impact of Joe Louis can be understood. The heart of the Joe Louis Story is his historic break through the race barrier. Earlier in the century there had been another great black champion, Jack Johnson, but there was no way he could challenge for the heavyweight title in America. He had to chase the champion all over the world before finally catching up with him in Australia. There he beat on the hapless white Tommy Burns so fiercely that the police finally intervened at the end of the 14th round.
The myopic racism of the day was nakedly expressed by Jack London, at ringside to cover the fight for the New York Herald. ‘He is a white man and so am I,’ wrote this avowed socialist who preached international understanding (apparently for whites only). ‘Naturally I want the white man to win.’ And when Johnson’s hand was raised, London called on the undefeated ex-champion, Jim Jeffries, to come out of retirement to put this overweening black boy in his place. ‘But one thing remains,’ London begged in his post-mortem for the Herald, ‘Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farms and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.’
‘The Fight Between the White Champion and the Black Champion,’ as it was billed in Reno in 1910, was less a boxing match than a primitive tableau in bitter race relations. In Jeffries’s corner were all the previous champions, the impassioned Caucasians John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons and Gentleman Jim Corbett, who mouthed racist epithets at Johnson through the fight. When the hopelessly overmatched old champion finally went down for the count, a deathly silence fell over the crowd. As our bereft Jack London typed out his lead, ‘Once again has Johnson sent down to defeat the chosen representative of the white race . . .’ race riots were breaking out all over the country.
As a resented black champion in a rabid white world, Johnson did nothing to endear himself. In a time of uptight segregation, Johnson not only consorted with white women but flaunted them, lording it around Chicago in a chauffeur-driven open phaeton with two white women all over him. The entrance to his notorious nightclub Café de Champion displayed a blow-up photo of him lip-locking with his white wife. Her suicide, partly due to his having so many other white lovers, including a scandalous affair with his white 18-year-old secretary, provoked a lynch atmosphere with Johnson being railroaded to jail and jumping bond to escape to Europe, leaving behind the unwritten law of boxing: never again a black heavyweight champion.
It may have been unwritten in the 1910s and ’20s, but it was adhered to as faithfully as if it had been engraved in stone. After the gifted troublemaker Johnson held up his black middle finger to white America, there would be eight successive flour-faced champions through the 1920s to the late ’30s. The most frustrating example of a top heavyweight contender being denied his deserved title shot because of the wrong pigmentation was Harry Wills. When Wills knocked out a brace of white contenders and clearly outclassed the ‘Wild Bull of the Pampas’, Luis Firpo, famous for knocking Jack Dempsey out of the ring in the first round of their celebrated fight, the New York State Athletic Commission finally made Wills its No. 1 contender, ruling that Dempsey could not defend his title until he met Wills. Dempsey’s promoter, the same old foxy Tex Rickard from Johnson–Jeffries days, finessed that one by taking his champion to Philadelphia to face Gene Tunney. The white race was saved again.
As a young fight fan growing up in Los Angeles, I knew an impressive heavyweight by the name of George Godfrey. When I asked him about fighting in Madison Square Garden, in those days the pot of gold at the end of every boxer’s rainbow, he shook his head. ‘Only if I lost, son. My colour can’t win in the Garden.’ That was the hard truth when teenaged Joe Louis was coming out of the Bottoms, a ghetto within the ghetto in hard-times Detroit. When Joe’s discoverer, John Roxborough, the soft-spoken, community-minded numbers man from Detroit, and the hard-nosed numbers boss Julian Black in Chicago, brought their young amateur champ to the veteran trainer Jack Blackburn, Blackburn turned them down. A bitter ex-fighter still smouldering at the way the race barrier had prevented him from earning a decent living at his trade, Blackburn told them, ‘I don’t care how good he is. He’s the wrong colour. Bring me a white boy so I c’n make some money.’ It was only when Black promised the mean-spirited trainer $35 a week and expenses, sweet money in ’34, that Blackburn lucked into the job that would become his legacy.
He was a master teacher, and the 20-year-old prodigy was a master pupil. From mid-’34 to mid-’35 the Louis–Blackburn team had twenty-two straight victories, in the Midwest almost all knockouts, including two over the highly rated Lee Ramage. Roxborough and Black felt their boy was ready for New York. ‘Yes, but is New York ready for Joe?’ asked the old cynic Blackburn. Roxborough put in a call to Jimmy Johnston, the ‘Boy Bandit’, who ran boxing for the Garden. Roxborough told Johnston he had a fighter so good he should be fighting in the Garden.
‘Yeah, I hear he’s pretty good, but if he comes in here he’s got to lose a few.’
‘He’s undefeated, and we want him to stay that way.’
‘Look, I don’t care if he knocks out Ramage. He’s still coloured. Don’t you have any white boys out there?’
Roxborough hung up. Johnston had made a $10-million mistake. Nobody had told him Roxborough was black. Blackburn said, ‘I told you so.’ But he hadn’t figured on a most unlikely do-gooder, ‘Uncle’ Mike Jacobs, ‘Machiavelli on Eighth Avenue’. A ticket scalper from the age of 12, Jacobs had a genius for squeezing that extra dollar from the box office. He didn’t care whom he was touting – Enrico Caruso, the Barrymores, the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, the First World War. He made a million dollars from his concessions at military posts. He had no pretensions as a social thinker, but Jacobs’s sixth sense of what the public would and would not buy gave him an insight into society that was colour-blind. He knew his New York, he knew fight fans were tired of the mediocre white heavyweights after Tunney with their fixed fights and foul tactics. And maybe the times had something to do with it. Roosevelt and his New Deal promised social change if not revolution. Jacobs might still call African Americans schwarzes, but his favourite colour was green, and he smelled money in bringing to New York the devastating puncher who had captured the imagination of the Midwest.
This was a social experiment, and Louis’s managers were taking no chances. Determined to make Joe the un-Johnson, Roxborough let the press know his seven commandments: (1) He would never have his picture taken with a white woman; (2) He would never go into a nightclub alone; (3) There would be no soft fights; (4) And no fixed fights; (5) He would never gloat over a fallen opponent; (6) He would keep a ‘deadpan’ in front of the cameras; (7) He would live and fight clean.
Condescending rules, perhaps, but after the Johnson debacle the 20 year old was clearly on trial in the court of white public opinion.
One gets the feeling in history that the right man has a way of coming along at the right moment. George Washington in 1775. Abe Lincoln in the Civil War. FDR in the depression. Aside from his blistering talent in the ring, the man-child Joe Louis had exactly the right personality for the role he was thrust into – as an ambassador from the Negro race (as it was called then) to the white ruling class. Joe didn’t have to feign modesty or behave himself in public. He was naturally shy, especially as an uneducated youth from the Bottoms suddenly thrust into the limelight in Eastern society. It wasn’t his nature to lord himself over inferior opponents; his mother had raised him well. He was a mother’s boy. The first thing he did with that big advance from Jacobs was buy her a nice house and drive her there to show it off to her completely furnished.
At the same time he was never the Uncle Tom the white press was hoping for. He didn’t have to be programmed to act with dignity. It came as naturally to him as his punching power. Hyping his New York debut against the Italian giant Primo Carnera, a tabloid photographer brought him a watermelon as a prop and asked him to pose with it. ‘Sorry, I don’t like watermelon,’ Joe said. Polite but firm. His handlers smiled. They knew Joe loved watermelon. They also knew he could spot a black stereotype as quickly as a telegraphed right hand.
Overnight this totally unprepared 20 year old was thrust into a tense international conflict he knew nothing about. The Fascist dictator Mussolini was ready to invade the North African black nation of Ethiopia. There were Fascist sympathisers and ‘Save Ethiopia’ placards at the press conferences. It wasn’t the first time a prizefight had been identified with nationalistic fervour, all the way back to the early nineteenth century when the former slave from Virginia, Tom Molineaux, challenged the bare-knuckle champion Tom Cribb, even the august London Times had sounded the alarm: ‘The honour of the English nation is at stake.’
Young Joe had to deal with a hostile American press, with two of the most famous columnists, Arthur Brisbane and Westbrook Pegler, both devoted racists, warning of the riots that would erupt if ‘an American coloured man’ is allowed to face ‘the Italian military reservist’. The canny Mike Jacobs actually played up the racial tension to fill Yankee Stadium that long ago summer evening. The announcer, Harry Balough, felt obliged to beg the overwrought audience not to satisfy the doomsday warning of Brisbane and Pegler: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, before proceeding with this most important heavyweight contest I wish to take the liberty of calling upon you in the name of American sportsmanship, a spirit so fine it has made you, the American sporting public, world famous. I therefore ask that the thought in your mind and the feeling in your heart be that, regardless of race, creed or colour, let us all say, may the better man emerge victorious. Thank you.’
When Louis destroyed his Goliath in less than six rounds, the multitude of Italian Americans and an official cheering section from Benito himself quietly folded their Il Duce banners and stole away. Next morning newspapers across the country signalled the breakthrough: the first time the name of a black man appeared on their front pages. Years later Joe would remember that night as the best he ever had. ‘If you was ever a raggedy kid and you came to something like that night . . .’
Louis’s sudden fame may have been a milestone on the road to racial equality, but the press still was not ready to accept him for what he was, an exceptional young athlete, not yet articulate but basically intelligent and increasingly aware of the awesome responsibilities being thrust upon him. Sportswriters still saw him as a Caliban, a savage, a subhuman force. In describing Joe’s victory, a writer for International News Service set the tone: ‘Something sly and sinister and perhaps not quite human came out of the African jungle last night . . .’ The celebrated sportswriter Grantland Rice seconded the motion, describing Joe as a ‘jungle killer’, and the eminent sports columnist Paul Gallico weighed in with, ‘He lives like an animal, fights like an animal, has all the cruelty and ferocity of a wild thing.’
Against this wall of prejudice, the real Joe Louis kept breaking through. There was a quiet decency about the young man that belied all the heavy-breathing ‘ferocious black panther’ metaphors. He was a world-beater, but he wasn’t a man-eater. If black pastors were building their sermons around their new messiah, they weren’t alone. A Time magazine cover hailed him as the Black Moses. And in the most publicised fight since Dempsey–Tunney, against the quixotic ex-champion Max Baer, even when announcer Harry Balough introduced Joe with his backhanded ‘Although coloured, he stands out in the same class with Jack Johnson and Sam Langford . . .’ the fans in Yankee Stadium gave Louis a welcome at least the equal of Baer’s. That had never happened in America before. And when Louis hit Baer so hard in the fourth round that the fallen fighter decided to hoist the white (some said yellow) flag, he surrendered with a characteristic quip: ‘When I get executed, people are going to have to pay more than $25 to watch it.’
The political symbolism of the great heavyweight championship was never more applicable than in the Louis–Schmeling series. Another ex-champion, Max Schmeling was considered over the hill when Mike Jacobs dug him up to meet Louis, already hailed as ‘the uncrowned’ heavyweight champion. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were so upset at the prospect of a member of the Master Race being humiliated by an American ‘of the mongrel race’ that they tried to short circuit Schmeling’s challenge. They also urged him to give up his Jewish New York manager, Joe Jacobs (no relation to Mike). But Schmeling stood up to his Führer. He was a professional, and Jacobs had made a lot of money for him in America. When he landed in New York on the Bremen there were Jewish pickets to greet him, and when Louis went into training there were German–American Bundists with swastikas. There was also a country-club atmosphere at his training headquarters. The hard-nosed Jack Blackburn was disgusted. Celebrities from both coasts overran the place. And beautiful women. The columnist and later TV host Ed Sullivan introduced Joe to golf, and Louis spent hours chasing little white balls. He had his white fans with him that night back in Yankee Stadium, but for the first time he was less than perfect. After jabbing, he kept dropping his left hand, exposing his chin to Schmeling’s straight rights. Fighting with courage but in a losing cause, young Joe was down and out for the first time in his life.
In seclusion with the shades drawn in his apartment in Chicago a few days later, he had lost everything except his sense of humour. Without saying much, he always had a way with one-liners. Asked if he’d like to see movies of the match, he said, ‘No, I saw the fight.’
Hitler and Goebbels were singing ‘Deutschland Über Alles’. They sent the Hindenburg for Schmeling, and he flew home to a hero’s welcome. Goebbels greeted him at the airport with a Wehrmacht band, a troup of SS honour guards and a chorus of ‘Heil Hitlers!’ The Führer gave a gala reception for him where they watched film of the fight titled ‘Schmeling’s Victory – A German Victory’. Hitler ordered Goebbels to dress it up as a feature documentary, and it played to enthusiastic audiences all over Nazi Germany. It was the best PR for Der Führer since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
How Louis, rather than Schmeling, got the title shot against the ageing and vulnerable champion, Jim Braddock, is a story of wheels within wheels, most of them spun by that master spinner, Mike Jacobs. Goebbels and Hitler worked like big-time fight promoters to bring the Braddock–Schmeling fight to Berlin. Braddock’s manager, Joe Gould, told me of a phone call he had from Schmeling, who put Goebbels himself on the phone. The Reichmeister for Propaganda told Gould he was prepared to give him whatever he asked to deliver Braddock in Berlin. Joe said he wanted $500,000 in cash in a New York bank. ‘No problem,’ said Goebbels. And eight first-class tickets to Germany, suites in the Hotel Adlon and training expenses. No problem. And one American referee and one British referee. No problem. Anything else? ‘Yes,’ Gould told me he told Goebbels, ‘and I want you to let all the Jews out of the concentration camps.’ ‘Goebbels hung up,’ Gould said. Like all those Jacobs Beach managers, Gould knew the hustle. He knew he had Jacobs and Louis over a barrel. All he wanted, to pass up the Schmeling fight already signed and announced in New York, was 10 per cent of Louis for the next ten years. Done deal. Just one of those nasty little things that would contribute to Joe’s woes in the post-war years.
When Joe knocked out Braddock, the old champion who had nothing left but pride, the ghost of Jack Johnson was finally laid to rest. While there were cheers for Braddock’s courage, the 20,000 blacks in the nosebleed seats and the even larger white audience spreading from ringside, gave Louis a colour-blind ovation for the greatest heavyweight fighter they had ever seen. New champions usually like to rest on their laurels for a while, but the first time someone called Joe ‘Champ’ that night, he said, ‘I don’t want nobody to call me champ till I beat that Schmelin’.’ So the stage was set for the most politically charged heavyweight championship fight in the history of the ring.
Between Louis–Schmeling I in 1936 and the rematch two years later, the skies had darkened. Germany had swallowed Austria, there was a Berlin–Rome–Tokyo Axis, little Czechoslovakia was threatened, the vilification of Jews intensified. The democratic world had come to realise that Hitler meant every apocalyptic word he had written in Mein Kampf. So Louis–Schmeling II was seen as nothing less than the war to come. Democracy v. Fascism. Good v. Evil. If Schmeling won, Hitler’s fervid theories of a Master Race would be reaffirmed. A victory for Louis would recharge the hopes of everyone who yearned for an order of decency and an end to man’s inhumanity to man.
That may sound like hyperbole, but in those almost hysterical pre-war days, both sides of the Atlantic looked on Louis and Schmeling as the flag bearers for their respective countries and political systems. It was the first (and surely the last) time in history that the heads of both nations would personally impress upon their fighters the magnitude of the coming conflict. Hitler placed his hand on Max’s shoulder and reminded him of his responsibility to prove the superiority of the Master Race by knocking out the black savage again. FDR took time from his pressing day to invite Louis to the Oval Office, feel his muscles and say, ‘Joe, these are the muscles we need to beat Germany.’
The kid from the Bottoms who had earned just $59 in his first fight only four years before, literally had the world on his shoulders. As if he needed further motivation, in his training camp his backers would read quotes allegedly from Schmeling expressing his confidence that a white man could always beat the inferior ‘nigger’. Actually these were Goebbels inspired; later the basically decent Schmeling would deny to Joe that he had ever made such statements. But at the time Joe admitted that while he had never felt any animosity for any of his previous opponents, this time he not only had revenge in his heart but a fire in him to defeat a mortal enemy.
When Louis destroyed Schmeling in the first two minutes of the first round, his biggest victory may have been the cheers that rose from everybody when he entered the ring. And 70 million fans glued to their radios across the country were rooting for him too. Never again would the colour line be drawn on the most celebrated of boxing titles. Joe Louis had opened the door through which would pour the thousands of world-class athletes who have become household names, from Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays to Jim Brown and Emmett Smith. As he did so often, Heywood Broun in the New York-World Telegram summed it up best:
One hundred years from now some historian may theorise, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi prestige began with a left hook delivered by a former unskilled automotive worker who had never studied the policies of Neville Chamberlain and had no opinion whatever in regard to the situation in Czechoslovakia . . . but . . . exploded the Nordic myth with a bombing glove.
Already an icon in our contemporary culture, Joe actually polished his image when his reaction to Pearl Harbor was to enlist in the army. Sportswriters no longer described him as black or subhuman. Now he was a great American patriot and, with the possible exception of FDR, the most famous man in the country, if not the world. He donated his entire purses for two title defences, against tough opponents Buddy Baer and Abe Simon, to benefit Army and Navy Relief, giving them over $110,000, for which the government expressed its gratitude by taxing him on the income as if he had put it in his own pocket. That twisted judgment, with compound interest over the years, would contribute to his post-war calamities. But in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Joe’s stature continued to grow. At the Boxing Writers Association dinner, the charismatic former Mayor Jimmy Walker praised Joe for risking his title for service charities: ‘You laid a rose on the grave of Abraham Lincoln.’ At a Navy Relief Dinner in Madison Square Garden, when the presidential candidate Wendell Willkie said we would win because God is on our side, Private Joe Louis went him one better: ‘I’ve only done what any red-blooded American would do . . . we will win because we are on God’s side.’
President Roosevelt sent him a telegram to congratulate him on his choice of words, the slogan over Joe’s picture became a favourite recruiting poster and ‘Joe Louis Named the War’ became a popular poem featured on the front page of the multimillion circulation Saturday Evening Post. In later years he would be put down by Ali and others more militant of being an Uncle Tom, but in his own quiet way, Louis stood up to racism in the army. He refused to give boxing exhibitions for his fellow GIs unless the audience was desegregated. When he heard from Jackie Robinson that he and other college graduates had been denied access to Officers Training School, Joe went over the head of his commanding officer to get them admitted. Never part of the civil rights movement, he might be considered its one-man forerunner.
When Branch Rickey, emulating Mike Jacobs, finally gave Jackie Robinson a chance to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers, almost the first thing Jackie said was that he wouldn’t have been there without Joe Louis. ‘He’s been an inspiration to all of us. He made it easy for me and all the other fellows in baseball.’ He went on to say that Rickey must have been thinking of Joe Louis when he decided to let him play big league baseball.
Jackie Robinson was on his way up to the Hall of Fame. But for his mentor, Joe Louis, after that resounding crescendo at the end of the Second World War, it was all downhill.
After having earned millions in the ring, over $600,000 for the second Billy Conn fight alone, Louis came out of the war not only dead broke but with that IRS monkey on his back. With the clock running on the interest, it built to a million dollars, and counting. It wasn’t all the IRS’s fault. There were costly divorces, easy-come-easy-go generosities, self-indulgence, 50 per cent to his managers, Mike Jacobs’s share and that under-the-table 10 per cent to Jim Braddock. You could make a case that every time he fought he was giving away 110 per cent of himself. Even so, for America’s favourite son in the war years, it was a bitter pill. When he had to wrestle for a living, an IRS agent grabbed his $500 cheque at the box office. When his mother died and left him $600, the IRS took that too. F. Scott Fitzgerald could have had Joe in mind when he wrote, ‘Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.’
Addicted to drugs, reduced to shilling for Caesars Palace and hounded by the merciless IRS almost to the end of his life, Joe Louis became practically a forgotten man to the civil rights generation and the throng of cocky young baseball, football, basketball and boxing millionaires today. But for all their exploits, Emmett Smith, Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds aren’t going to be buried at Arlington. And there’s a very good reason why Joe Louis is there. He taught white America a lesson it would never forget. He taught black America, so long denied, its sense of dignity, that hope was on its way.
The night Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling on the eve of the Second World War, spontaneous parades erupted all over America. A democratic carnival. Placards held high proclaimed, ‘Joe knocks out Hitler!’ An interracial celebration. The old radical slogan ‘Black and white / unite and fight’ had suddenly become social reality. ‘He was a credit to his race,’ wrote the epigrammatic sports columnist Jimmy Cannon, ‘the human race.’ The Reverend Jesse Jackson paraphrased that at Joe’s funeral: ‘Joe Louis came from the black race to represent the human race.’
So on his birthday, 20 April, let us all make the pilgrimage to Joe’s resting place at Arlington, at least in spirit, place a rose on his grave and pledge ourselves to the complete achievement of social democracy in America, still a work in progress.
[2003]