Sugar Ray Robinson on the page is almost as elusive as he was in the ring. In the opening chapters of the autobiography that he completed with the assistance of New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson, Sugar states that he was born May 3, 1921, in Detroit’s Black Bottom. While the date of his birth is accurate (though it is listed as 1920 in Ring magazine, boxing’s bible), the location he gives is contradicted by a birth certificate that cites Ailey, Georgia, as his place of birth. Whoever filled out the certificate—and it could have been Sugar’s father, Walker Smith, Sr.—was only barely literate, since colored was misspelled “colerd.” He was named Walker Smith. His mother’s name appears to be Lelar, though in his book Sugar refers to her as Leila; her maiden name was Hurst. According to the certificate, Walker, Sr., is twenty-eight and a farmer and Lelar is twenty-three and a domestic. Gene Schoor, who wrote a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951, notes that Mrs. Smith was born August 25, 1900, which would have made her twenty-one at the time of Sugar’s birth, and was one of sixteen children. Walker, Jr., was the couple’s third child. And “Junior” would be the name Sugar would answer to as a boy.1
In his autobiography, Sugar writes that his parents were from Dublin, Georgia, which is about 130 miles northwest of Savannah. Both of his older sisters, Marie and Evelyn, were born on a farm not too far from Dublin. In 1980, Walker Smith’s funeral announcement states that he arrived in Detroit in 1916; Schoor reported 1917. If either is true, then he must have gone back and forth for the children to be born in the South, or he came alone and his wife came later. This region of Georgia at that time, mainly within Montgomery County, was well-known for three things: cotton, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching. During the post–World War I years, particularly 1919, the year Evelyn was born, at least ten black soldiers were lynched, half of them in Georgia. According to author Donald L. Grant, “Many of the demobilized black veterans continued to wear their uniforms, sometimes because they had no other clothes and sometimes because they were proud of their service. Many whites reacted savagely to this practice.” Countless numbers of black soldiers who had gone abroad to make the world “safe for democracy” returned home with a newfound spirit of freedom, only to be brutally reminded by the Klan and other white residents that nothing had changed. And to drive this point home, the Klan torched several black churches and lodges, burning them to the ground.2
With the cotton infested with boll weevils and the membership of the Klan increasing with each lynching, black farmers had few alternatives but to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Sugar’s aunt and her husband were among the migrants who moved north to Detroit looking for a better life. They found a place to live and settled in an area known as Black Bottom. This sector on the city’s east side was an outgrowth of the restrictive covenant that confined the movement of African Americans. It contained the most dilapidated houses and received the least services. Even so, it was an improvement over where its residents had lived before. Sugar’s aunt and uncle notified Walker, who followed them, gaining employment almost immediately as a ditch digger. “Pop was a wiry little guy,” Sugar recalled in his autobiography, “five foot seven and a hundred and fifty pounds, with a dazzling smile that lit up his dark brown face. And he was strong.” Much of Walker’s strength—and certainly his fatigue—came from wielding a shovel, digging out cellar shells for buildings. Resourceful and hardworking, he was soon behind the wheel of a shiny new black Ford Model T, tooling about town and “styling,” like sashaying while driving, just as his son would do years later in flashier automobiles: Cadillacs and Lincolns.
His father’s tastes for luxury notwithstanding, he managed to purchase train tickets for his wife and children to join him in Detroit. This act alone distinguished him from so many fathers who, once out of the grip of American apartheid, never looked back or gave a thought to those they left behind. Sugar wrote that he made the trip to Detroit in his mother’s womb, coming into the world a few weeks after their arrival. If they left Georgia shortly after he was born, that might account for his recollection that he was born in Detroit, not Ailey, Georgia. Or given Sugar’s penchant for invention, this was just another example of his remaking himself, his way of recalling his life the way he wanted it to be, not as it was. Blurring dates, events, even people came as easily, and was probably as necessary, to him as sidestepping a blow or counterpunching opponents with a wicked left hook.
The Smiths’ home on Canfield, just north of Black Bottom, and near Paradise Valley, was typical of the small homes in the area. It was a two-story yellow brick house, neat but not pretentious. The neighborhood’s citizens, many of them recent migrants from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, had begun coming to the city in droves since 1914, shortly after Henry Ford announced the possibility of earning five dollars a day in his automobile plants. The population increased astronomically, from 5,000 to 120,000, between 1910 and 1930. There were jobs for them in the factories, but mainly they were the hardest, most dangerous, lowest-paying, and most unskilled ones. But the majority of these new arrivals were not deterred by the onerous work, since they were used to spending long days under a blazing sun picking and chopping cotton. They were more deeply concerned about the restrictive covenant that kept them confined residentially in what was no more than a two-mile-square ghetto. Like Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, who came to Detroit with his family from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1923, residents knew practically every nook and cranny in the Bottom. Despite squalor and all of the inconveniences and hardships that segregation bred, there were also endless possibilities for those with a little spunk and savvy, which Young had in spades. In his autobiography, Hard Stuff, he wrote: “With all of the little enterprises we had going on, our family was never indigent. We did particularly well during Prohibition, which can be said for all of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. I never saw such prosperity in the black community—hell, in the city—as there was then.”3
Sugar’s recollection of the enclave was far less flattering: “Black Bottom was made up of wooden houses, mostly two-story, on flat, dusty streets.”
By now, Walker was working two jobs to take care of his family and to keep gas in his car. To his ditch-digging job he added cement mixing. Leila, who was a husky woman with a round, café au lait–colored face, found employment as a chambermaid at the fabulous Statler Hotel on Washington Boulevard. She never dreamed that her son would one day reside there as an honored guest.
When the couple was not at work, they spent time together in Walker’s car riding around town or dancing and drinking the night away at one of the many nightclubs in Paradise Valley.This section of the city, north of Black Bottom, stretched from Warren to Jefferson, though the hub of activity was near Gratiot, a main thoroughfare, around Adams and St. Antoine, where during that decade the 606 Horseshoe Lounge and the Plantation Club were among the city’s liveliest spots. Sugar was about nine years old in 1930 when the joints were jumping in the Valley and in the Bottom. Practically every bar along Hastings Street, the area’s main and most colorful drag, was alive and jumping with the blues and jazz. The Plantation Club, one of the Smiths’ favorite haunts, was located in the basement of the Norwood Hotel on Adams Street. At this elegant club the pair could sport their finest garb, sip champagne, and watch first-class floor shows featuring such performers as the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie Band, and vocalist Savannah Churchill.
Walter Norwood, a numbers man, was one of several enterprising black businessmen who took advantage of the city’s segregation. Another was nightclub owner Sunnie Wilson, dubbed the honorary mayor of Paradise Valley during these spirited times and who at one time had lived on Canfield near the Smiths. He recalled his first years in the community: “When I first came to Detroit (in 1927), I thought the city would be filled with black businessmen,” he said in his memoir. “Initially, I was quite disappointed because I believed these black northerners had more know-how than my southern friends in Columbia, South Carolina.”4 But after a few years in the Bottom, he noticed the change, and was able to enumerate place after place owned or managed by blacks. Coleman Young’s father was a very successful tailor, and there were funeral parlors, beauty salons, barbershops, and small grocery stores throughout the neighborhoods under black ownership. Anyone coming of age at this time could not help but be a frequent patron at one of Barthwell’s Drug Stores, where they would enjoy delicious milk shakes and sundaes.
Both Walker and Leila drank their share of whiskey and gin, according to Sugar, and this cut considerably into their meager earnings, precluding any successful investments or entrepreneurial endeavors. Their drinking was also a source of contention between them and, from Sugar’s perspective, pushed them apart. The decisive break occurred in 1927. One day Walker got up early, went to work, and when he came home that evening Leila and the children were gone. They had returned to Georgia to live with Leila’s mother. After leaving the children with her mother, Leila returned to Detroit and to a new job as a seamstress at General Linen and Supply, Sugar remembered. (This may have been the Supreme Linen and Laundry Company owned by Fred Allen, a close associate of Sunnie Wilson’s.) Located at 700 East Alexandrine, the company was a thriving business, and by the early thirties Allen was on the brink of building an empire. His dream came to an abrupt halt after he began to infringe on territory controlled by white gangsters. Union opposition was fierce, and Allen’s audacity and business venture ended one day when he arrived at work to find one of his employees drowned in a washing tub.5
Leila worked there long enough to earn the money she needed to return to Georgia a year later to bring her children back to Detroit. Thousands of black women, working as domestics in the city and the suburbs, had followed a similar practice in reclaiming their children from relatives who had helped them during a critical moment of instability. It’s possible to detect a little regret in Sugar’s memories of leaving the country to return to the Bottom, which he characterized as “bleak.” Farm life agreed with Sugar, and he seemed to even welcome the chores that put him in touch with nature and a menagerie of animals. To placate her glum son and to keep him out of mischief, Leila gave him a quarter when he was seven and told him to go and join the Brewster Center. The quarter was dues money for a month. Sugar was soon a “gym rat,” spending hours in the sprawling, two-story building at 637 Brewster between St. Antoine and Hastings that had opened only a few weeks before Sugar began attending on a regular basis. The facility had a swimming pool, a basketball court, Ping-Pong tables, and every conceivable game to keep his busy and adventurous mind occupied. Oddly, Sugar expressed no real interest in boxing, though he was blessed with quick feet and fast hands.
“The first time I ever showed my mother I was fast with my hands was when there was a fellow about twenty years old visiting in our flat,” he told a newspaper reporter. “I was seven. This fellow got to sparring with me and I slapped him on the side of the face. He got mad and everybody in the room was amazed, but not my mother. She just laughed and said, ‘Play with a puppy and he’ll lick your mouth.’ This made everybody else laugh, especially the man that got slapped.” One day at the gym he watched as boxers worked out in the ring; he was so fascinated that he was unable to go on about his business. He was even more fascinated by a big young man who could turn a speed bag into a blur of motion and who stalked his opponents without expression. “You know who that big kid is?” someone asked Sugar, and then quickly answered his own question, “That’s Joe Barrow.” Within a few years, Barrow would change his name to Louis, and the powerful young giant would become the heavyweight champion of the world.
“Joe Barrow was the big hero in the neighborhood,” Sugar recalled. He had demolished nearly all the amateur fighters he met, knocking them out without breaking a sweat. Barrow lived only a few blocks from Sugar, so it was easy for Sugar to keep tabs on him, to wait outside his idol’s house and to grab his boxing equipment and carry it for him. According to Joe, “Little kids on my block followed me around all the time. There was one kid in particular who seemed to know my schedule. He’d be there, Johnny-on-the-spot, asking to carry my bag. I felt embarrassed and silly and proud, but anyway I let him carry it to Brewster Center for me. When he moved to New York, I missed him. He was a real nice kid. His name was Walker Smith. Later they changed his name to ‘Sugar’ Ray Robinson.”6
Like Sugar, Joe was a son of the South, born in Alabama. He landed in Detroit along with his stepfather, Pat Brooks, and eight siblings in 1926. They lived in an eight-room house on Macomb Street before moving to a tenement house on Catherine Street. By the time Joe was a teenager, he was working on a horse-drawn wagon, delivering fifty-pound blocks of ice. After his deliveries he would head straight to the gym, and Sugar would be there waiting for him. The same routine was followed each day when Barrow completed his workout and headed home: Sugar would be right there to tote Joe’s bag and to badger him about boxing, begging him to show him a few punches.
Never an enthusiastic student, Sugar couldn’t wait for the bell to ring signaling the end of the school day so that he could hustle over to the center. When he wasn’t at the center, he could be found on a playground, showing off his ability to walk on his hands. It was nothing for him to walk a whole city block on his hands, and he did it several times to amuse Joe. Once while walking in this manner, he cut his hand on a piece of glass.
Rather than tell his mother about the accident, he kept it from her until the next day. By then his middle finger had swollen to twice its size. A doctor told his mother that the finger might have to be amputated, but she refused to consider such an alternative. Another doctor informed her that the finger was infected all the way to the bone and that scraping it might be sufficient. It was, but it would cost her twenty-five dollars, a hefty sum on her meager salary of ten dollars a week. She borrowed the money, and Sugar’s finger was treated.
While playing baseball, which was Sugar’s favorite sport (the Detroit Tigers were his favorite team), he received another injury that would mark him for life. “One day a fastball hurled by a burly pitcher caromed off the worn mitt and slammed into his face. That is the only kayo on [Sugar’s] record. He was quickly revived, and a few stitches were taken in his lip.”7
To help make ends meet, Sugar delivered the Detroit News, sometimes assisted by his older sisters. If Sugar paid much attention to the contents of the papers he sold, it was most likely to the sports pages. There’s little chance he kept abreast of political events or labor conflicts, even at the Ford Motor Company, where security forces and the Dearborn police killed five unarmed hunger marchers in 1932. But he must have noticed the increased number of blacks moving into the Bottom, many of whom had their dreams bashed immediately, since the Depression limited employment opportunities. The only businesses flourishing in the Bottom were the numbers racket, bathtub gin distilleries, and other illegal enterprises. Leila was lucky to earn the ten dollars a week from her work at the laundry, but soon she began to think about greater opportunities farther north. So when a friend of hers in New York City wrote to her of being able to make a better living there, she didn’t hesitate. “Children,” she announced suddenly one week, “pack your bags—we’re moving.” On the Sunday following Election Day in 1932, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt the president-elect, the family boarded a bus to New York City for a new deal.