Pegler’s fears infuriated the head of the NAACP, Walter White. White had been monitoring Louis closely and admiringly, viewing him as a rare black success story and as someone who could help break down racial barriers; he’d been assured that Louis’s brass were “strong race people” who wanted to build up the black community and would not tolerate mistreatment or segregation. Several prior mixed bouts had been held without any problems, White pointed out to the World-Telegram, including fights between blacks and Jews at the Polo Grounds, near the border of Harlem and the Jewish Bronx. “One wonders where Pegler has been keeping himself,” he wrote. The black press was also livid, charging that if race riots did ensue, people like Pegler would be to blame. Klansmen and professional southerners still fighting the Civil War were invariably behind such disturbances, said the New York Age; why would the black man start anything, when he knew the odds were always stacked against him? Already, Louis’s success appeared to have emboldened the black press. The Age complained that while Hearst’s Evening Journal routinely and offensively quoted Louis and his sparring partners in Negro dialect, it turned Carnera’s mangled diction into polished English.
Louis set up his training camp in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, thirty miles northwest of Manhattan. The site was a health spa, complete with a colonial house dating back to George Washington, run by one Dr. Joseph Bier. A potential black invasion of a largely white small town had initially generated some local opposition. But Bier ignored the complaints, and the town quickly reconciled itself to a windfall. Ever attentive to white sensibilities, Louis staged a four-round exhibition to buy the town an ambulance. “I’d be a mean sucker if I didn’t get behind that movement, in a town as nice as this,” he told the local paper. He also met members of the press, “who could see there was nothing of the show-off, comedy coon here,” wrote his first biographer, Edward Van Every of the Sun. Blackburn, meantime, hunted for giant sparring partners, just to get Louis in the habit of looking and punching up. One fled the camp after only a very short stint. “Mistah, I’se leavin’ while I kin still count ten,” he said. Harlem’s fight fans arrived in high spirits and fancy duds. Some just wanted to see, and worship, Louis himself. “What a spectacle,” a woman wrote in the New York Age. “A healthy dark beige youth, lovely to look at. Not a blemish on his saffron-hued skin.” The Louis seen by white and black reporters often seemed like two different characters.
Louis had his skeptics, who said he had yet to face anyone worthy. “Can he take it?” was the question they invariably asked. No critic was as insistent as Jack Johnson. To him, Louis was a slow, plodding counterpuncher; he didn’t stand correctly, threw his punches off-balance, couldn’t shoot a straight right. Blackburn had not taught Louis the fundamentals, Johnson said; Louis would not get by Carnera, and if he did, Baer would beat him in a few rounds. Of course, Johnson came to the topic with baggage; it could not have been pleasant to see himself derided constantly as Louis’s tarnished foil. And Louis was challenging two of Johnson’s most impressive credentials: the greatest black heavyweight ever, and the only black heavyweight champion. In addition, there was bad blood between Johnson and Blackburn. (The explanations for it varied: Blackburn, who fought or sparred with Johnson several times, was said to have humiliated him in the ring once before some of his girlfriends, or bloodied his nose once in a Philadelphia gym. Or Johnson had refused to run a benefit for Blackburn when he got out of prison. More recently, Johnson had supposedly tried to muscle Blackburn aside and train Louis himself. And Blackburn had grown increasingly willing to compare the two, and to say that Louis would have whipped him, sure.) Black America remained proud of Johnson and, to some degree, still admired him for thumbing his nose at the white establishment. But its goodwill waned once he took on Louis. Black commentators reminded their readers how Johnson’s misbehavior had set back black causes, and accused him of disloyalty, treachery, and jealousy. “Louis may not be as perfect a fighter as Johnson was and may never be,” wrote one. “But… Louis is making amends for the mistakes which Johnson made and is breaking down the barriers raised largely because of Johnson. … In the wake of Jack Johnson, our fighters lost all hope. In the wake of Joe Louis, our fighters seen [sic] another era.”
Two weeks before Louis fought Carnera, Baer was to defend his crown against Braddock in Long Island City. The twenty-nine-year-old Braddock was a tough, resilient journeyman who’d won and lost with a broken rib, a broken shoulder, a torn ligament, and an empty stomach. Once, too poor to reset a broken hand that was mending improperly, he rebroke it over someone else’s skull. The father of three young children, he’d quit boxing for a time and had been working as a longshoreman when his career was resuscitated with an unexpected victory over a veteran boxer named Corn Griffin. Braddock was soon back on relief. But then he won several important fights and became the top contender for Baer’s title. His story perfectly suited Depression America, and his longtime manager, Joe Gould, milked it shamelessly: Relief to Royalty was the title of Braddock’s authorized biography. Baer thought the match a joke, but Braddock, a ten-to-one underdog, won a decision. The “Cinderella Man,” Damon Runyon dubbed him, and the name stuck. The fight itself was a dreary affair. “Did you ever see a worse heavyweight championship fight?” one expert at ringside asked another when it was over. “Did you ever see a worse heavyweight champion?” the second man countered. Asked later how long Braddock would hold the title, Baer replied, “Until he fights somebody else.” Louis, who was sitting near ringside, started yawning in the third round, took a nap between the fifth and ninth rounds, and watched the end with a broad grin. “Do you mean those are the two best fighters in the world?” he asked Roxborough. “Shucks, I could lick ’em both in the same ring.”
Now Schmeling and the German promoters would no longer have to worry about fighting, or hosting, a “Jew.” But the black press quickly conjured up intricate racial explanations for why Baer might have thrown the fight, and why the outcome was bad for black America. The case wasn’t hard to make: Braddock was controlled by Madison Square Garden, which had been hostile to blacks. Worse, he held the title by a thread, and would be unlikely to risk it anytime soon, especially to someone so certain to take it away. Black skeptics predicted that the Garden would want Braddock to fight Schmeling or Baer again first, and not for at least a year. This way, Louis could beat both Carnera and Baer and still not get a shot at the championship until perhaps 1937. Then there was Hitler, who might not let Schmeling meet Louis. But before his fans could ponder their grievances, Louis had to get by Carnera. Some thought that a short puncher like Louis would have a hard time reaching Carnera—that was why Schmeling had consistently refused to fight him. “Next Tuesday night the most historic event in Negro boxing takes place,” wrote Ed Harris of the Philadelphia Tribune. White writers, too, recognized the enormous stakes. Should Louis win impressively, Joe Williams wrote, “he will have definitely qualified as the foremost American challenger, and the pure Nordics will have to take him and like him.”
In what was to become a tradition before every Joe Louis fight there, black fans from most major cities east of the Mississippi made their way to New York. By one estimate, three thousand people were coming from Detroit, many in a multicar caravan, with the flimsiest ones leaving first so that more sturdy vehicles could pick up anyone stranded en route. “See the Next World’s Heavyweight Champion Whip Carnera,” declared an ad in the black-owned Detroit Tribune, offering a package that included a train ticket, a fight ticket, and beer. One Detroiter even came by bicycle, setting a new cross-country record in the process. Harlem’s hotels quickly filled, and auxiliary housing, like the banquet room at the 135th Street YMCA, was hastily arranged. Harlem’s nightclubs—Small’s Paradise, the Cotton Club, the 1-0-1 Club, Brittwood, Club Ubangi—reported “skyrocketing grosses”; white fancies from Fifth and Park avenues who’d steered clear of Harlem after the recent riots had returned. A millinery shop on Seventh Avenue sold out all its straw hats. People trawled for b
ets, though there was little Carnera money; Louis was the favorite, seven to five. Were Louis to lose, the Baltimore Afro-American wrote, Harlem would be eating hot dogs for weeks. Pictures of Louis adorned “every ham-hock, fish-fry, and liquor joint” in Harlem. Anyone who had seen Louis fight or visited his camp was treated like an oracle. The New York Age and Chicago Defender planned fight extras. White interest was equally intense. The Mirror said Louis had as many white fans as Carnera did. Special trains would come from Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Boston, Buffalo, Toledo, New Haven, and Cleveland. On the eve of the fight, Mike Jacobs kept his ticket offices open until midnight. Fearing race riots, a Newark paper urged that the fight be canceled. The New York Police Department assigned 1,300 officers to the fight, including emergency squads with hand grenades and tear gas.
Twenty-five New York policemen on motorcycles met Louis when he crossed into Manhattan on the morning of the bout. He came with a fatherly admonition from Governor Frank Fitzgerald of Michigan, who clearly had Jack Johnson on his mind. “Your race … has been misrepresented by others who thought they had reached the heights,” he said. “You may soon have on your strong hands the job of representative-at-large of your people. Do that job well, Joe. Michigan will be proud of you.” On the radio, Fleischer predicted that Louis would win in seven rounds, but Joe Williams was among the skeptics. Go over the list of Louis’s victims, he said, and “you come across a lot of guys named Elmer.” Jack Johnson, too, had stuck to his guns: Carnera was bigger, stronger, and had a longer reach and more experience. “I don’t want him to beat him, but that’s the way it looks to me,” he said. To some degree, feelings fell along regional lines: New York was filled with doubting Thomases; not so Chicago and Detroit, where people had seen firsthand what Louis could do.
The crowd of sixty-four thousand at Yankee Stadium on the night of June 25 was nearly twice as large as the house for the Baer-Braddock fight had been, and the fourth-largest ever for a boxing match there, helping to produce the second largest gate ever for a nontitle bout, exceeded only by the Dempsey-Sharkey fight eight years earlier. Along with the cream of New York—“and a great deal of the skimmed milk”—were an estimated fifteen thousand blacks, dispelling the canard that they did not come to sporting events. Most sat in the bleachers, though Mike Jacobs took pains to keep too many of them from concentrating in too small a spot. Far from menacing anyone, the black fans were filled with high spirits and expectations. Whites with ringside seats came fashionably late. Among those spotted that night were Mayor La Guardia, Irving Berlin, Darryl Zanuck, Loretta Young, J. Edgar Hoover, and Babe Ruth. (Eleanor Roosevelt bought three tickets, but gave them away.) A thin, lanky young man, coat-less and hatless, came down the aisle, looking forlornly for an usher; it was Howard Hughes. There were also representatives of the black bourgeoisie: Walter White of the NAACP, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Duke Ellington, Ralph Bunche.
As the sun set, the outlines of hundreds of people clustered atop buildings overlooking Yankee Stadium could be seen. For a few fleeting moments, passengers on the Lexington Avenue subway pulling into the 161st Street station got a glimpse of the field, and inevitably some fight fan would yank the emergency cord to prolong the stay. There were more than four hundred press reservations, exceeding any fight since the second Dempsey-Tunney contest eight years earlier. For the first time, at least one reporter from a black weekly—Al Monroe of the Chicago Defender—got to sit with Runyon, Gallico, Walter Winchell, and other press luminaries. Even before he’d thrown his first official punch in New York, then, Joe Louis had already knocked down a barrier.
At around 9:55, Louis entered the ring. The vast crowd rose as one, greeting him with a roar. Louis himself was impassive, “as if he were waiting for a street car,” someone wrote. His demeanor was in complete contrast to Jack Johnson’s—proving, Heywood Broun maintained, the fatuousness of all racial generalizations. Louis paid little heed when Carnera climbed through the ropes, or when Braddock, Baer, Dempsey, and Tunney followed and took their bows. But when a black man in a tan suit entered, his bald head gleaming like a bowling ball (to one observer), Louis stared intently at him. It was Jack Johnson, who may have gotten a bigger ovation than anyone, and who heartily shook the hand to which his torch might soon be passed.
Louis’s debut was not the only one on the program that night. A short man in evening clothes named Harry Balogh was making his first appearance as ring announcer at a top heavyweight fight, and in a fashion that would quickly turn him, along with his stentorian diction, neologisms, and malapropisms, into another of boxing’s great characters, as integral a part of the local ring ritual as the timekeepers and the cut men. Balogh, too, was mindful that history was being made at Yankee Stadium tonight.
“Ladies and gentlemen, before proceeding with this most important heavyweight contest,” he bellowed with exaggerated elocution and thes-pian formality, “I wish to take this opportunity of calling upon you in the name of American sportsmanship—a spirit so fine that it has made you, the American sporting public, world famous. I therefore ask that the thought in your mind and the feeling in your heart be that, regardless of race, creed, or color, may the better man emerge victorious! Thank you.” Some thought his oration long-winded and unnecessary, but one black paper said it “did more good than the army of blue coats, plainclothes-men, and ‘G’ men saturating the place.” In any case, it met with wild applause. Balogh then got around to introducing the fighters. “Oh, my goodness,” a woman in the crowd declared. “Louis looks like a little boy beside him.”
But when the bell rang, Louis suddenly matured, or, as Frank Graham wrote, was “transformed into a sleek and tawny animal.” Blackburn had instructed him to work first on Carnera’s belly; the Italian’s hands would then drop, and Louis could go for his head. He’d also told Louis to go slowly—to study the big guy for a round, hitting him once or twice just for luck. But Louis quickly tore a hole in Carnera’s upper lip, giving the Italian a grotesque, horrific look—“a red smile that didn’t make sense,” as one sportswriter put it. Carnera was too slow and stolid to defend himself. The carnage spilled over into the second and third rounds. Before the fourth, Blackburn told Louis to “ready that guy for the big splash,” and by the end of the fifth, he was patting Louis’s behind. “You have this boy right where you want him, so let’s get it over with,” he said. “You just drop old Betsy on that fellow’s chin, and we will start the parade for home.”
Louis went after Carnera mercilessly. A right cross sent him to the canvas for the first time, and quickly, there was a second time, and then a third. By now, blood was streaming from the Italian’s mouth, and cries of “Stop it!” rose throughout the stadium. As Louis reached back for his knockout blow, the writers reached for their metaphors. He measured Carnera as a tailor measured a bolt of wool, or as a tree surgeon surveyed a doomed oak. Gallico likened it all to a bullfight, with Carnera “heavy, menacing, brutish, dumb,” playing the bull, and Louis playing “every part, the cap man, the baderillos, the picador, and finally the matador.” It was terrible. It was also thrilling.
Finally, at two minutes and thirty-two seconds in the sixth round, the referee, Arthur Donovan, ended the bloodletting. The crowd rose to its feet, exhilarated by what it had just seen, which was just what many in it had come to see. Louis went to his corner, still expressionless, as his seconds slapped his shoulders. He stayed that way until his arm was held aloft, when he offered the photographers a fleeting and unpersuasive smile. He left the ring without a mark on his face, and $60,000 richer. He spotted the Detroit sportswriter to whom he’d made a promise to knock out Carnera in the fifth, and apologized. Jack Johnson entered excitedly. “Boy!” he cried as he grabbed Louis’s hand. “You’re the greatest fighter in the last twenty-five years. You’re going to be another Lil’ Arthur.” “Say, Jack, that Joe Louis is a second Jack Dempsey, isn’t he?” someone asked Dempsey himself. “Why not a first Joe Louis?” Dempsey repli
ed.
Without radio, keeping fans abreast of things took ingenuity. The Defender set up an elaborate relay system: Al Monroe described the action to a telegrapher, who transmitted his account to Western Union in Chicago, which called it into the Defender’s offices, where it was read to the crowd of ten thousand people amassed outside, then to another gathering at a local theater, then to a third assembly in Evanston, Illinois. In the meantime, the copy flowed into the Defender’s Linotype machines. Within twenty minutes of the knockout, newsboys were hawking copies of a special fight edition on the streets of Chicago’s South Side. It marked only the second extra in the Defender’s history; the first had been for the death of Booker T. Washington. In Detroit, there were public readings of the telegraph wire. (Hearts stopped until people realized that Louis had feinted rather than fainted.) The Detroit News reported “impromptu insanity” of “gargantuan proportions” on the city’s streets. “Bootblacks blacked brown shoes and browned black ones. Nothing mattered,” the Detroit Times wrote. A black policeman said he’d seen nothing like it since Johnson had beaten Jeffries twenty-five years earlier, but that this crowd was bigger and better-natured. “They’re happier over Louis,” he said. “They like him better.”
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