Joe Louis in Black and White

Joe Louis In Black and White Kegan Doyle t he Joe Louis story seems simple. He was born Joe Louis Barrow in Lafayette, Alabama in 1914, the son of a sharecropper named Munroe Barrow. In 1926, his mother, Lilie Barrow, moved the family to Detroit. He began boxing in the early thirties and after a brief, successful career as an amateur turned profes sional on July 4th, 1934. In 1937, he knocked out James Braddock to become heavyweight champion. There followed an almost 12 year reign as champion, in which he became the most revered athlete in America. In 1942, he joined the army, proclaiming, "We're on God's side." After a five year hiatus from fighting, he came back in 1946, with diminished skills, to diminished returns. He retired in 1948, undefeated as champion. Two comeback bids failed: he was beaten on points by Ezzard Charles and later knocked out by an almost apologetic Rocky Marciano. He spent much of his post-fight career living off, and almost destroying, his reputation—wrestling, endorsing products such as Chesterfield cigarettes, working as a greeter at a Las Vegas casino—and died in 1981. Yet the more one examines the Joe Louis story the more contradictions one sees. A laconic champ, a strong, inarticulate type who famously mumbled, "I always let my fists talk for me," Louis wrote three autobiographies, the last of which, Joe Louis, My Life Story, (1978) is a much more engaging, honest work than either the autobiography of the eloquent Jack Johnson (Jack Johnson-In side and Outside of the Ring) or that of the even more eloquent Muhammad Ali (The Greatest). An upright citizen, solid and virtuous in a manner pleasing to America's middle class, Louis had more links to America's underworld than any heavyweight champion of this century, save his close friend and fellow drug- addict Sonny Liston. Revered by white America as a figure of reconciliation, whose pickaninny rags-to-Manhattan riches life story seemed to prove that America was the world's great meritocracy, Louis was, for millions of blacks, a violent saviour, who didn't simply raise black pride but enacted fantasies of revenge, by clobbering white men—Braddock, Baer, Carnera, Conn, Nova, Schmeling and many more—to their knees. This paper contrasts Joe Louis's image in White America with his image in Black America. During the thirties and forties, writers established Louis as a kind of "Great Black Hope" for white America, all the while insinuating that their and by extension their nations' lionization of "The Brown Bomber" was a great step forward in race relations. At the center of this process was Paul Gal- lico. The most influential and eloquent sportswriter of his era, Gallico did more to establish the hegemonic image of Louis than any other writer. Undeniably, Gallico's and other white writers' visions and revisions of Louis—and the kinds of public attitudes they encouraged—represented a significant advance in white attitudes towards blacks. Yet the liberal vision of Joe Louis had and continues to have troubling implications. Nobody understood the problems of a simplistic sanctification of Louis better than Richard Wright. For Wright as for much of black America, Louis was a hero, a redeemer. Like Martin Luther King after him, however, Wright knew the dangers of hero worship, how it could deflect attention away from the ugly complexities of real social problems. Wright also understood that making Louis the paradigm of black male achievement could reinforce dangerous notions of black physicality and violence. Although his classic novel Native Son (1940) is not ostensibly about boxing, the character of Bigger Thomas should be understood as Wright's coded response to the Louis phenomenon. Formally, the novel is a boxing novel: in its violent rhythms and its compression of time and space. This "pugilistic structure" no doubt contributed to the novel's stunning popularity in a boxing-obsessed nation. Yet Wright uses this structure to provide an ironic commentary on Louis, black masculinity, ghetto life, and the myth of meritocracy. A CREDIT TO HIS RACE: JOE LOUIS IN WHITE AMERICA When Louis turned professional on July 4th 1934, race relations in America were tense—although somewhat more relaxed than a decade earlier. Remembered as the era of great white and black cultural synergy, "the Jazz Age" (according to F. Scott Fitzgerald's estimate the period between the May Day riots in 1919 and the stock market crash in October 1929) was also an era of urban unrest, moral panic, and paroxysms of xenophobic violence. 1919 bore witness to some of the largest and bloodiest race riots in American history. By 1923-24, the Ku Klux Klan had its largest membership ever, with estimates of membership ranging from 4 to 8 million (Jenkins 211). Although relations did improve in the late twenties, the Depression created the potential for class and racial conflict on an unprecedented scale. By 1933, between 25 and 40% of African-Americans in large cities were on relief, 3 to 4 times the number of whites (Franklin 421). According to Franklin and Moss Jr. in "Atlanta in 1935, 65% of African-American employables were in need of public assistance, while in Norfolk no less than 80% of the group were on relief" (421). Fearful of revolt, America's hegemonic classes were wary of any action that might, in Richard Wright's phrase, "uncover dynamite." Why then was Joe Louis allowed to happen? Why was Louis allowed to transgress the color line? Why was the man who came to be known as "the Dark Destroyer" permitted to raise the spectre of the scandalous Jack Johnson? The color line had been redrawn in 1915—the year Jesse Willard defeated Johnson for the championship—and had been strictly "respected" by Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney throughout the twenties. A number of factors explain Louis's surprising ascent. After the lucrative "Golden Decade" of the twenties, in which boxing rose to challenge baseball as the masses' spectacle of choice, the sport had fallen into steep decline and by 1934, its finances were in ruin, and its public image was tarnished. Not only did the consuming classes no longer have the money to spend on sport—but there was a paucity of heroes inspir ing them to do so anyway. Promoters were receiving a rude lesson in the mad dening caprice of collective desire: they could not simply impose "superstars" from above. Although each new champion was tirelessly sold to the public, none caught on because none possessed Dempsey's combination of skill and charisma. Tunney alienated fans by being too much the intellectual out of the ring—reading Shakespeare between sparring sessions—and by being too much the scientist in it. Those who followed were even more uninspiring: Max Schmeling was a foreigner; Jack Sharkey, dubbed the "sobbing sailor," was a mediocre complainer; Max Baer, a hedonistic clown; James Braddock, a bland workman; Primo Carnera, a circus freak.3 In short, boxing was not only losing money, but something more important, something that it had fought long and hard to keep: authenticity. Every boxer's nightmare is to end up as a wrestler; boxing's nightmare is that it will become equated with wrestling. Boxing needed a fighter who combined awesome physical skill with an aura of honesty and decency. Joe Louis did exist, but it was necessary to invent him. Louis's management team, Julian Black and John Roxborough, themselves both linked to the Detroit numbers racket, knew that Louis had to seem non threatening and clean to receive a chance to fight for the title. The memory of Jack Johnson—his flamboyance, his golden grin, his white women—still troubled the American psyche. Roxborough published the seven command ments he had made Louis swear to: -Jo e was never to have his picture taken with a white woman. -H e was never to enter a night-club alone. -H e would not participate in any soft fights. -H e would not participate in any fixed fights. -H e was never to gloat over a fallen opponent nor speak negatively about him before or after the fight. -He was to maintain a deadpan expression in front of the cameras. -H e was to live and fight clean. (qtd. in Bak 74-75) Combining Franklinesque do-goodism with Jim Crow racism, this list re veals that Roxborough understood the depths of white neurosis. White America feared (and was fascinated by) the black male body—its sexuality, its violence, and it dreaded black self-confidence, the possibility that victorious gloating might prove contagious. It feared too the power of black language. Early press reports Louis invariably emphasized Louis's shyness, taciturnity, and ostensible stupidity. For Gallico, Louis was "an ordinary colored-boy, slow-thinking, emotionless" (qtd in Jaher 163). Roxborough's list also suggests an age-old fear of popular culture itself. What America demanded from Louis—and what Roxborough seemed to deliver—was a kind of transparency: that nothing Louis said or did should transgress, be unreadable, ambiguous. Ironically, the silent champion drove writers to linguistic excess. In 1936, even before Louis had become champion, Damon Runyan wrote, "It is our guess that more has been written about Louis in the past two years than about any living man over a similar period of time, with the exception of Lindbergh" (Mead x). More often than not, writers indulged in the usual stereotypes of blacks and boxers. Outside the ring, Louis was a simple man-child, barely conscious of his environment. Inside it, Louis was an animal—a jungle pan ther stalking its prey, a thing of instinct, not thought.

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