Traces Cummings, and One of President Roosevelt’S Sons
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John Muhs Hometown Hero?: Te Detroit Reaction to Joe Louis When heavyweight boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling squared of in Yankee Stadium on the evening of June 22, 1938, the stakes were high. New York had become a mecca for boxing enthusiasts, and 70,000 fans packed Yankee Stadium to make the fght the frst million- dollar gate since Louis defeated Max Baer in 1935. In attendance were former boxing champs Jack Johnson, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, and James J. Braddock. Also in the stadium that night were celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Gary Cooper, Duke Ellington, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, United States Attorney General Homertraces Cummings, and one of President Roosevelt’s sons. Despite the presence of the glitterati, the crowd was a smorgasbord of race and class. Te lower classes, including most of the 20,000 blacks in attendance, occupied the bleachers and upper-level seats, while the big shots and well-to-do appeared closer in. Hundreds more who couldn’t get a ticket sat atop roofops beyond centerfeld. Across the country, an estimated seventy million listeners, almost as many as those who listened to President Roosevelt’s formal speeches, gathered around radios to listen to the broadcast. Te rest of the world had its eyes and ears on Yankee 86 John Muhs Stadium as well. Foreign press gathered to write newspaper reports and to announce radio broadcasts in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. At around 10:00 p.m., just before the fnal introductions and opening bell, Ed Torgersen, radio announcer for NBC, simply said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Te two principals in the greatest bout in a generation are in the ring.”1 Te German Schmeling, considered by many to be the best heavyweight in the world afer knocking out the “Brown Bomber” from Detroit in their initial bout two years prior, had his sights set on Louis’s title belt, while Louis was determined to avenge what was at the time his only professional defeat. Te Louis-Schmeling personal rivalry was ferce and had deepened since their last encounter. Te defeated Louis, not the victorious Schmeling, was controversially given the opportunity to fght an aging and arthritic James J. Braddock for the heavyweight title in 1937, mostly due to his greater star power and ticket-selling ability. Schmeling and the rest of Germany, including future Schmeling admirer and associate Adolf Hitler, cried foul and accused the United States of corruption and greed. Louis went on to defeat the “Cinderella Man” Braddock to become the frst black champion since Jack Johnson lost his crown in 1915. However, he was not unanimously crowned the best prizefghter in the world, with his loss to Schmeling still fresh in people’s minds. Tus when Louis and Schmeling met in 1938, both fghters had something to prove. Yet the fght was far more than just a championship sporting event with palpable personal and racial drama. It was an international event with strong political overtones as well. Both prizefghters had become national standard-bearers. In the context of pre-World War II developments, it was a battle between fascism and democracy. On fght night, Schmeling was a lightning rod for anti-German sentiment in the United States. Walking out of the dugout to the ring, he was pelted by ashtrays, banana peels, and cigarette butts, despite an escort of twenty-fve policemen.2 Boxing historians have studied in depth the phenomenon of Louis’s rise to superstardom. Lewis Erenberg’s Te Greatest Fight of Our Generation 1 Lewis Erenberg, The Greatest Fight of Our Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136; David Margolick, Beyond Glory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 287-289. 2 Margolick, 293. 87 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History ofers a vivid portrait of Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, their careers, and their two epic fghts, shedding light on what these fghters represented to their nations and why their second bout took on such international importance. David Margolick also has written a comprehensive historical report of the Louis-Schmeling rivalry in Beyond Glory. Erenberg and Margolick both show how Louis went from being a hero of his race to being the frst black champion embraced by all Americans, an important step in United States race relations. Boxing historian Jefrey T. Sammonshas has given this phenomenon a regional fair in his essay “Boxing as a Refection of Society: Te Southern Reaction to Joe Louis.” But the extant research has paid little attention to Detroit citizens’ reaction to Louis at three key points in his career—the 1936 bout with Schmeling, the 1937 title fght against Braddock, and the 1938 Schmeling rematch. A city of immigrants with a complex racial history that keenly felt both the economic boom of the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s, Detroit is a bellwether city for historical events of early twentieth century America. With large mainstream newspapers and a black press of its own, the city where Louis spent his late childhood and got his start as a boxer is the focus of this essay. Te Detroit area has been home to a large German-American population from the early nineteenth century to this day. Te frst immigrants came early in Michigan’s history when the state was promoted as an ideal home for farmers and settlers, in an attempt to promote population growth. Detroit was also one of the centers of the twentieth-century demographic shif that brought hundreds of thousands of poor Americans, black and white, north from the Jim Crow South. Racial tensions in Chicago during the twentieth century at times led to violence, with two notable riots in 1943 and 1967. With such a history, the city is a ftting place to study the competing pressures of patriotism, racial identity, and ethnic pride in the context of an international sporting spectacle. Joe Louis is an especially interesting case, as Louis was a participant in the so-called “Great Migration” and was in many ways an everyman of the generation, with his humble beginnings, down-to-earth persona, and desire to serve in combat in World War II. Despite this hometown appeal, the Detroit newspapers were unwilling to recognize Louis as the city’s frst black national hero. Indeed, contemporary reporters did not trumpet his standard-bearing qualities, neither in the build-up nor the afermath of his marquee bouts. Te complex 88 John Muhs ethnographic dynamics of the Motor City inhibited the local media’s willingness to recognize the racial or political implications of Louis’s three most important fghts. Te tempered media response therefore provides insight into the political tensions and the ethnic sensitivities of the times, both local and international. Joe Louis’s Early Life and Career Born on May 13, 1914, near Lafayette, Alabama, a small town in the Buckalew Mountains, Joseph Louis Barrow was the seventh of eight children of a sharecropper named Munroe Barrow and his wife, Lillie Reece Barrow. Joe Louis never knew his father. Barrow was placed into an institution for the mentally disabled when his son was only two years old. Lef to raise the whole family and work the farm, Louis’s mother married Pat Brooks, who helped the family keep afoat. In Alabama, a young Louis was oblivious to racial tensions and inequalities. He even played marbles with the white landowner’s sons on their way to separate, segregated schools. However, Louis’s mother, stepfather, and older brothers had all known of the growing number of lynchings and heard rumors of better living north of the Mason- Dixon line, with promises of factories with good jobs, electricity, movies, automobiles, and streetcars.3 In 1926, when Louis was twelve years old, the entire family, including Pat Brooks and his eight children, Lillie Reece and eight of her own, packed up their meager possessions and joined millions of other southern blacks in their northward migration. Te Brooks-Barrow family moved to Detroit, Michigan, the industrial home of the booming automobile industry, and settled into a house of their own on Catherine Street in the growing black neighborhood on the city’s eastside. Here Louis, just like many rural southerners who settled in big cities, saw his frst trolley, fushed his frst toilet, and turned on his frst electric light. Te family lived relatively well for a while. Teir home was crowded, but Brooks worked as a street cleaner and Louis’s older brothers all made good money working in the Ford plant. Soon, though, the family fell on hard times when the Great Depression hit and his brothers and stepfather lost 3 Joe Louis with Edna and Art Rust, Jr., Joe Louis: My Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 4-9. 89 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History their jobs. Louis said of this time, “For the frst time in my life I remember being hungry.” At the suggestion of one of his Dufeld Elementary School instructors, who said, “Tis boy should be able to do something with his hands,” Louis entered an all-boys vocational school, where he helped his family by building tables, cabinets, and other furniture to be used in the house. Hoping to start her son on a path that would lead to a career in music, one of a few careers that could bring a black man relative prosperity at the time, Lillie Brooks bought Joe a cheap violin and paid for weekly lessons. Tis pursuit was short-lived, however, as Louis broke the violin over the head of a neighborhood boy who called him a “sissy” for playing the instrument.4 At the age of seventeen, Louis began skipping his lessons without telling his mother and instead accompanied his friend Turston McKinney to Brewster’s East Side Gymnasium.