Sport: Black Moses

(See Cover)Next Monday night 27-year-old Joe Louis is to defend his Heavyweight Championship—for the 19th and maybe the last time.

This time the challenger for Joe Louis’ crown is a student of yoga, 26-year-old Lou Nova who has boasted that he is a Man of Destiny, that he will knock out the Champion with his “cosmic punch” (straight from the seventh vertebra, center of balance), and the aid of his “dynamic stance,” his controlled breathing.

Probably about 50,000,000 radio-fight fans* will listen in for good reason. Not only is Lou Nova about as likely to beat Joe Louis as any challenger now afoot, but even if Joe Louis wins—and the chances, as always, are better that he will than that he won’t—it may be Joe’s last fight. Recently reclassified 1-A by a Chicago draft board, the Brown Bomber will probably join the Army next month.

As a soldier, he may get a furlough to fight now & then during the next 18 months, as Bummy Davis, Fred Apostoli, Steve Belloise and other enlisted men have done. But Broadway fightmongers last week predicted that Joe will do what he has always hoped to do: retire undefeated champion of the world—as Gene Tunney did, but without benefit of Shakespeare.

If Joe Louis’ fistic career terminates next week, ten fabulous years of a big coffee-colored boy’s life will end. Ten years ago, Joe Louis Barrow was a Detroit ragamuffin, toting ice for fly-by-night icemen to earn a few pennies to keep his feet in shoes. Transplanted from an Alabama cotton patch at the age of 12, the strapping, slow-thinking boy, only two generations away from slavery, had found himself a misfit in city schools where his classmates were nearly half his age. He never got beyond the fifth grade.

On city streets, Joe got along better. When his gang started something, Joe finished it. One day in 1931, one of his pals persuaded him to go to the Brewster St. Recreation Center (a settlement house in the heart of Detroit’s “black bottom”). There Joe learned to box. At first he disliked it, preferred handball. But within a year, Joe Barrow was the best fighter in the Center, won a silver cup as the most outstanding novice light-heavyweight in Detroit’s Golden Gloves tournament.

Two years later Joe reached the final in the light-heavyweight division of the National Amateur boxing championships at Boston. By that time Joe had come to the attention of dignified, college-bred John Roxborough (recently indicted and charged with connections with the numbers racket). Roxborough, son of a reputable Negro lawyer and angel of Detroit’s black belt, had helped put a dozen colored boys & girls through the University of Michigan.

At that time Roxborough was on the verge of backing another up-&-coming Negro light-heavyweight, John Henry Lewis of Arizona. But after seeing Joe box a few rounds, Roxborough forgot about John Henry. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked the shy, shambling kid. “Joe Louis Barrow,” the kid replied. “That’s too long, I’ll just call you Joe Louis.”

Colored Trinity. Out of gratitude for a loan of a few thousand dollars—made a couple years before when he was in a tight squeeze—generous, square-shooting John Roxborough gave Julian Black, Chicago ex-gambling-house operator, a half interest in Joe. Meanwhile Roxborough grew fond of the good-natured, easygoing lad, took him home, taught him to brush his teeth, take a bath, eat with a knife & fork. He got Joe a job as an unskilled laborer at the Ford Motor plant, dressed him in castoffs, gave him $5 a week for spending money.

After a year of personal grooming (during which time Joe’s terrific fists knocked out nearly every amateur he faced), Roxborough took his protege to Chicago, got wily Jack Blackburn, onetime Negro lightweight, to groom him for a professional ring career. “Joe didn’t like to fight at first,” says Blackburn. “But he was a natural fighter, easy to teach, and he learned more about the fight business in a month than most fighters learn in six months.”

For one who disliked fighting, Joe Louis did pretty well. In the winter of 1935, six months after his first professional match, New York boxing promoters already had their eyes on him. One of them was shrewd Mike Jacobs, Broadway ticket speculator, who was looking for an up-&-coming heavyweight to fight giant Primo Camera for the benefit of Mrs. William Randolph Hearst’s pet charity, the New York Milk Fund.

Jacobs succeeded in signing up Joe Louis. Whereupon Roxborough, Black & Blackburn, assisted by the Hearst press, began a promotional buildup. Because they knew whites (especially those who buy fight tickets) like Negro fighters virtuous, and remembering the stigma that still clung to colored fighters as a result of Jack Johnson’s flamboyant wenching when he was world’s heavyweight champion (1908-15), Louis’ brain trust decided that their boy was going to be pure.

Black Moses. Though Joe Louis is no saint, the build-up worked for four reasons : 1) the astuteness of Joe’s managers; 2) the promotional genius of Mike Jacobs and his Hearst henchmen; 3) the change in the U.S. attitude toward Negroes since Jack Johnson’s day; 4) Joe’s naïveté, natural reserve and disinterest in liquor and tobacco. By the time Louis climbed into the ring to fight Camera, he was a living legend to his people: a black Moses leading the children of Ham out of bondage.

Race-proud Manager Roxborough, pleased with his puppet, continued to use Louis as an ambassador of racial good will. He advised Joe to treat his opponents with unusual deference, inside the ring and out. He forbade him to have his picture taken with any white woman, or ever to enter a cabaret alone. When Joe was caught speeding at 90 m.p.h. along a Chicago boulevard, Roxborough took away his driving license, has never since permitted him to drive a car (one of Joe’s brothers has since been his chauffeur).

Louis learned his part so well he soon ceased to be a puppet. Today, after four years of monopolizing the world’s heavyweight championship, he is not only the idol of his race but one of the most respectable prizefighters of all time. From the sorry pass to which a series of second-raters had brought it (Sharkey, Camera, Baer, Braddock), he restored the world’s championship to the gate and almost the vigor that it had in Dempsey’s day.

He did other notable things: he took on all comers, fought 20 times in four years, was never accused of a fixed fight, an unfair punch, a disparaging comment. “I want to fight honest,” he has often told newsmen, “so that the next colored boy can get the same kinda break I got. If I ‘cut the fool,’ I’ll let my people down.”

All this did not make Joe Louis a dramatic figure but it stored up treasure in Heaven and on earth for Joe Louis and his people. Joe makes no pretense of being a leader of his race. He knows his limitations. He is a good and honest fighter and a simple-minded young man. But intelligent Negroes are grateful to him for remaining his own natural self and thereby doing much to bring about better racial understanding in the U.S.—doing more, some of them say, than all the Negro race-leaders combined.

The Good Lord. When he first took up boxing—and spent for his weekly lessons the 25¢ his married sister Emmarell gave him for scrubbing her floors every Saturday—Joe’s churchgoing mother threw up her hands in horror. “I jes’ gave him up in the hands of the good Lord,” she says.

In the good Lord’s hands, Joe Louis has earned close to $2,000,000 in purses (split 50-50 with his managers after all training expenses have been paid). He owns three apartment houses in Chicago, blue-ribbon saddle horses, a 477-acre farm 20 miles outside Detroit. Joe has bought himself an annuity which should bring him $11,000 a year, starting in 1944. He has put his baby sister Veunice through Howard University, supports 27 assorted kinfolk in Detroit alone. The good Lord has also seen to it that Joe’s head be sculptured for posterity, like that of Booker T. Washington and other Negro idols.

Because of his deadpan, most white folks assume that Joe Louis is a lugubrious fellow. Actually, he is as mischievous as a child. “When he was a kid,” his mother grins, “I near wore his backside out with a strap. He slept in the same bed with two of his brothers and it was worth my life to keep them out of devilment.” Away from the spotlight, which he loathes, Joe still likes his simple fun. Early mornings at training camp, he often routs everyone out of bed by pulling off their blankets. Jogging along the country roads, his tongue runs as fast as his legs.

When Marva Trotter, a socially ambitious Chicago stenographer, married Joe six years ago, she hoped, like most wives, to make him over. But Joe Louis, still an unsophisticated, overgrown kid, steadfastly refused to go high-hat. He still won’t go to the theater, read books, talk politics. But he can talk till the cows come home about swing bands, baseball, golf and his saddle horses, Flash and Annabelle White Star.

While Marva likes to hobnob with the Negro upper crust in Manager Roxborough’s palatial French Provincial house, Joe prefers the company of his old pals. A few days after he won the world’s championship from Jim Braddock in 1937—while Negro society was burning wires to get him to their salons—Joe was in Detroit, sitting on a dirty curbstone, eating apples and arguing with the boys about his prowess as a softball player.

Joe’s loyalty to his old gang was a rock on which his marriage nearly foundered. To please one pal, he sank $30,000 in the Brown Bomber softball team; to please another, he sank $42,000 in the Brown Bomber Chicken Shack, a Detroit eatery. He has been known to pay a check for $1,000 after his “secretary” (another pal) entertained some frisky friends in a Har lem cabaret.

Loyalty has also kept Joe in the ring. He wanted to quit three years ago, after he had his revenge on Max Schmeling for the humiliating licking the German gave him two years before. He didn’t, because he felt he owed something to Roxborough, Black, Blackburn and Jacobs, the men who made him. But after the. Nova fight, with a uniform on his big, supple back, Joe may let the title go and be satisfied to defend his country.

*Except for President Roosevelt’s last two broadcasts,Joe Louis’ prize fights have attracted the largest audiences in U.S. radio history.For his second Schmeling fight in 1938, 63.6% of U.S. radio owners turned in.For President Roosevelt’s last radio talk, 72.5% tuned in.