Joe Louis

Boxer

• Born: May 13, 1914
• Birthplace: Near Lafayette, Alabama
• Died: April 12, 1981
• Place of death: Las Vegas, Nevada

American boxer

World heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949, Louis was a hero to black Americans of all backgrounds. Although some maintained that a boxer should not have been so celebrated, Louis was perhaps more widely recognized and applauded by the black community than any other individual prior to the modern Civil Rights movement.

Area of achievement Sports

Early Life

Born in a sharecropper’s shack in the Buckalew Mountain region of east central Alabama, Joe Louis was the seventh of eight children of Lillie Reese Barrow and Munroe Barrow. In 1916, Louis’s father was committed to a hospital for the insane. Believing that her husband had died (in fact, he lived, institutionalized, for twenty more years), Mrs. Barrow married widower Pat Brooks, who had five children of his own. The couple had several more children. The combined families lived in Brooks’s small wooden house in tiny Mt. Sinai, Alabama.

In 1926, Pat Brooks got a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, and the family moved north to an ethnically mixed Detroit slum. Louis, already behind in his education because of inadequate schooling in Alabama, was placed in a class with younger children. He developed a stammer and became a loner. Officials assigned him to a vocational school, mistaking his difficulties for lack of mental ability.

Brooks lost his employment during the Depression, and Louis had to do odd jobs to help support the large family. At that time Louis began boxing at the Brewster Recreation Center, where he used the ring name Joe Louis for fear that his mother would find out he was boxing and insist that he stop. Instead, his new interest won her approval. When he quit school to get a job at an auto body plant, however, he had neither time nor energy to train properly. He temporarily gave up the sport after suffering a bad beating at the hands of a member of the 1932 Olympic team, but, with his mother’s backing, he soon quit his job to concentrate on the ring.

Life’s Work

As an amateur light-heavyweight Louis won fifty of fifty-four fights in the next year and was becoming known in boxing circles by early 1934. In April, he won the National Amateur Athletic Union title. Under the guidance of a man from Detroit’s black community, he then turned professional, using part of his earnings to provide for his family. Louis’s color might have delayed his chance to break into the big time; an earlier black heavyweight, Jack Johnson, had provoked the wrath of the white public prior to World War I through his enormous success as a fighter and his lifestyle outside the ring. According to Louis’s best informed biographer, Johnson’s controversial actions “confirmed the worst stereotypes of black behavior.”

Louis’s break came in early 1935 when New York ticket-broker and promoter Mike Jacobs took an interest in him. Unlike other promoters of the time, recalled Louis, Jacobs “had no prejudice about a man’s color so long as he could make a green buck for him.” Although Jacobs himself was not knowledgeable about boxing, he sought good advice about Louis and was impressed with what he saw and was told. The New York Times described Louis in 1935 thus:

He has sloping shoulders, powerful arms with sinews as tough as whipcords and dynamite in his fists. A slim perfectly modeled body, tapering legs, an inscrutable, serious face that reveals no plan of his battle, gives no sign whether he is stung or unhurt these are his characteristics. . . . Louis has about the most savage, two-fisted attack of any fighter of modern times. He doesn’t punch alone with one hand. He destroys with either or both.

Jacobs had as silent partners several Hearst sportswriters; therefore, favorable publicity began to grow not only in the influential Hearst press but also in other papers. Remembering the follies of Johnson, Louis’s managers were careful to cultivate the image of Louis as a model of middle-class propriety. He did not smoke or drink, he read the Bible, he was modest, and he was generous. He was indeed many of these things; in areas where his behavior was not exemplary for example, his profligacy with money and his pursuit of women he was discreet, and the image his managers sought to develop remained substantially intact. It was probably not true that John Roxborough, the man who first sponsored Louis’s professional career, intended all along for Louis to become a racial ambassador, but as Louis’s fame grew, he did become one.

After his well-publicized fifth-round knockout of former heavyweight champion Primo Carnera on June 25, 1935, Louis was being ballyhooed as the greatest gate attraction in boxing since Jack Dempsey. Less than three months later, Louis whipped another former champ and gained widespread recognition as the world’s best heavyweight, if not yet champion. Also in 1935, he married Marva Trotter, a young Chicago secretary; they had two children.

Louis’s march to the title received an unexpected setback on July 10, 1936, when he met the prominent German boxer Max Schmeling, a former titleholder yet a big underdog to Louis. In the fourth round, Louis was knocked down for the first time in his professional career. Schmeling won by a knockout in the fourteenth round.

Much of the white press seemed to be waiting for this chance to rejoice in Louis’s defeat. Racism, especially in the South, came through clearly in columnists’ analyses of the match, and Louis was now being called just another fighter. In Germany, the Nazi press was ecstatic. Louis’s managers scheduled Louis for other fights to keep him from brooding over his defeat. He kept on winning, and Jacobs got Louis a title bout with James Braddock in June, 1937. A journeyman who had held the title since 1935, the underdog Braddock fought gamely in their Chicago match but was clearly weakening by the middle rounds. Louis’s corner spotted this, and he was able to knock Braddock out in the eighth. Louis had become only the second black man to hold the heavyweight title and at twenty-three was the youngest champion in his division.

Louis had still to win recognition as a great champion. Erasing the stigma of his loss to Schmeling would help Louis gain this status. The two men met again on June 22, 1938. Since their first battle, Americans had come to understand much more about Nazism, and although Schmeling was not a Nazi himself, he was now seen as the representative of Hitler’s Germany. Louis, in contrast, had grown in stature and was perceived as a symbol of freedom. Now the crowd’s favorite, Louis at six feet two inches, was in superb condition, weighing barely less than two hundred pounds.

Louis, the aggressor from the opening moments, pummeled Schmeling thoroughly and was proclaimed the winner by a technical knockout scarcely two minutes into round one. Louis was now acclaimed virtually everywhere, even in the Deep South. He was an unusually active champion, fighting so often that one writer called his schedule the “Bum-of-the-Month Club.” Whether his opponents were “bums” in the ring or among the best of a poor lot of heavyweight contenders as Louis believed, Louis met no serious challenger until his eighteenth title defense, when he fought the recent light-heavyweight champion Billy Conn in June, 1941. Nearly thirty pounds lighter than Louis, Conn had public sentiment on his side. He used his superior quickness to outbox Louis through twelve rounds. Rather than fight cautiously (as his handlers were advising in the belief that Conn was winning on points), Conn continued to fight aggressively. Louis staggered Conn with several punches and knocked out the challenger with two seconds to go in round thirteen of what is still remembered as one of the classic heavyweight bouts. The Brown Bomber or the Dark Destroyer, the nicknames by which Louis was most often known, remained heavyweight champion.

World War II came when Louis’s skills were at their height. Although he could have claimed deferment from military service as the sole support of his mother and his wife Marva, Louis believed that it was his duty to join. In addition, to seek a deferment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor might have been disastrous for Louis’s image. Jacobs further improved Louis’s public standing when he arranged a January 9, 1942, title defense against Buddy Baer, the bulk of the proceeds to go to the Navy Relief Fund. Louis won and promptly enlisted in the U.S. Army. Praise for Louis was never higher; the white press now viewed him not only as a credit to his race and a great champion but also as a good American. His public statement that the United States would inevitably win because “We are on God’s side” became one of the most quoted patriotic phrases of the war.

Louis’s role in the Army, like that of many other celebrities, was to boost morale. He made goodwill visits to various bases and military hospitals and appeared in a few films, most notably This Is the Army (1943), starring Ronald Reagan. He also defended his title in 1942 for the benefit of Army Emergency Relief. From late 1943 to the end of the war, Louis was the star of a touring troupe of boxers that included the young Sugar Ray Robinson and other black fighters. Louis fought ninety-six exhibitions while in the service. In some ways his Army experience brought Louis added maturity; away from his managers, Louis had to confront Jim Crow on his own. His approach was that when off-post he would accept local conditions concerning segregation, but when on a military base he would insist on fair treatment for himself and for other black soldiers present.

In other ways, however, Louis remained much the person he had been. He continued his free spending habits, borrowing money from Jacobs and others while a federal tax bill in excess of $100,000 still hung over him. Jacobs’s bad advice and Louis’s divorce in 1945 compounded his financial problems. Although Joe and Marva Louis were soon remarried, the birth of a son in 1947 (the couple had previously had one daughter) gave Louis added financial responsibility.

By this time Louis’s ring skills had begun to erode, and after two title defenses in 1946, the first a much-anticipated but disappointing rematch with Billy Conn in which neither man recaptured his 1941 form, Louis found himself without a challenger who could help draw a profitable gate. After two victorious matches with Jersey Joe Walcott, another aging boxer, Louis, now fighting at about 215 pounds, found his reflexes slowing and announced his retirement early in 1949.

Continued financial problems drew him back into the ring. In September, 1950, he lost to the new heavyweight champion, Ezzard Charles, by a unanimous decision, beat several mediocre opponents, and on October 26, 1951, fought Rocky Marciano, ten years Louis’s junior and the most promising heavyweight contender. The clearly lethargic Louis suffered his first knockout since his first match with Schmeling fifteen years before. The Marciano fight was Louis’s last, save for a few exhibitions. His financial difficulties remained unsolved. He had outspent his income during his prime years and after the war as well, made poor investments, and by the mid-1950’s owed more than one million dollars in back taxes and interest. He made a brief, unfortunate effort to become a professional wrestler, earned some money from promotional appearances, and finally settled with the Internal Revenue Service to pay twenty thousand dollars a year on his back taxes. He never did succeed in paying them, and the IRS, while not forgiving Louis’s tax obligation, eventually quit trying to collect.

Louis had other troubles. He and Marva Louis were divorced again in 1949; in 1955, he married Rose Morgan, the prosperous proprietor of a Harlem beauty salon. They separated in 1957, and by mutual consent the marriage was annulled. As before, Louis simply could not settle down but traveled extensively, played golf during the day when at home, and stayed out many nights. In 1959, Louis married Martha Malone Jefferson, the first black woman to be admitted to the California bar. She was bright and compassionate, sacrificing her own career to help Louis through some of his most difficult years. He had affairs with other women, became a cocaine user, and began to suffer paranoid delusions severe enough for him to be confined at the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital for several months in 1970. Martha Louis and Joe Louis Barrow, Jr., his son by his first marriage, agreed on treatment for Louis.

Although he was never completely rid of his delusions, Louis was able to drop his use of cocaine and lived a reasonably normal life in Las Vegas with Martha Louis and several children she convinced him to adopt. He was employed at Caesar’s Palace casino as a greeter, provided with a luxurious house and a handsome salary. According to Joe Louis Barrow, Jr., Louis was happy with his job, which consisted largely of being seen, shaking hands, and giving autographs. In 1977, Louis suffered a major heart attack followed shortly by a stroke. He was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life but was still able to make appearances at some Caesar’s Palace functions. He died at his home on April 12, 1981.

Significance

Joe Louis held the heavyweight boxing championship for twelve years, longer than any other boxer in his division. At his prime as a boxer, before World War II, he won acclaim that endured for decades. His skills were such that he was, arguably, the greatest heavyweight ever. During the 1960’s he was perceived by some blacks as an Uncle Tom, but he was recognized even by many civil rights activists as having done much for the cause of blacks in the United States in an earlier day. Boxing in the 1930’s had not been totally segregated as major league baseball then was; the mores of white society, however, certainly influenced the way the few prominent black boxers were perceived and made it more difficult for others to become successful professionals. In the white community, Louis won widespread acceptance as an American champion and a man of dignity. To his black contemporaries, who knew little but racism and financial deprivation, he was a symbol of hope and pride. “We all feel bigger today because Joe came this way” stated the Reverend Jesse Jackson in his eulogy.

Bibliography

Astor, Gerald.“ . . . And a Credit to His Race”: The Hard Life and Times of Joseph Louis Barrow, a.k.a. Joe Louis. New York: E. P. Dutton-Saturday Review Press, 1974. A well-written book, published when Louis’s mental illness made him more newsworthy than he had been in years.

Erenberg, Lewis A. The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis Versus Schmeling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Recounts the boxing match between Louis and Max Schmeling held on June 22, 1938, describing the significance of the event and of Louis’s victory in the ring.

Hietala, Thomas R. Fight of the Century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. Examines how the two boxing champions, Johnson and Louis, affected and reflected American racial attitudes during the first half of the twentieth century.

Louis, Joe, with Edna Rust and Art Rust, Jr. Joe Louis: My Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Written in the first person, this book is especially useful for its abundant photographs and supplement listing each bout in Louis’s professional boxing career.

Margolick, David. Beyond Glory: Joe Louis Versus Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2005. Tells the story of two fights between Louis and Schmeling, the first in 1936 and a rematch in 1938, where Louis emerged the victor, describing the political and social implications of the two sporting events.

Mead, Chris. Champion: Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985. Perhaps the best biography of Louis. Mead views Louis within the framework of American popular culture and places much emphasis on Louis as symbol. Also contains a helpful bibliography.

Monninger, Joseph. Two Ton, One Fight, One Night: Tony Galento Versus Joe Louis. Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, 2006. A narrative of a boxing match held in June, 1939, in which Galento defeated Louis, the long-reigning champion.

Nagler, Barney. The Brown Bomber: The Pilgrimage of Joe Louis. New York: World, 1972. This is another book published when Louis’s mental illness returned the former champion to the headlines. Written by a longtime boxing writer, it is useful for many phases of Louis’s career.

Roberts, Randy. Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes. New York: Free Press, 1983. A study of the great black heavyweight champion whose controversial career burdened Louis’s own. Johnson lived long enough to know and resent Louis.

Van Deusen, John.“Brown Bomber”: The Story of Joe Louis. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1940. Written at the height of Louis’s career, this book is a study in hero-worship. Van Deusen accepts the press agents’ portrayal of Louis without question, but his book is useful for its rather detailed descriptions of Louis’s fights.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: December 26, 1908: First Black Heavyweight Boxing Champion.

1941-1970: September 23, 1952: Marciano Wins His First Heavyweight Boxing Championship; February 25, 1964: Clay Defeats Liston to Gain World Heavyweight Boxing Title.

1971-2000: October 30, 1974: Ali and Foreman Rumble in the Jungle; November 22, 1986: Tyson Becomes Youngest World Heavyweight Boxing Champion.