Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Someone calculated that more lines of type were set and more pictures published about the fight than for any other sporting event in a decade. Older sportswriters saw in Louis skills existing only in distant, gauzy memory; younger ones had seen the sort of boxing they had only heard about. Now they, too, would have stories to pass on. Louis had won no title, but that was a mere formality; all he needed was a chance. “The ring has a new marvel and the boxing writers are a bit shamefaced because they had referred to him merely as sensational, spectacular, and phenomenal,” Parker wrote. The fight had come off without a hitch or a hint of racial discord. “As orderly an assemblage as ever gathered for a snooty tennis match,” Louis Sobol of the Evening Journal called it. Some thought that whites had cheered Louis even more loudly than the blacks. The black press could say “I told you so”—and did. Sam Lacy of the Washington Tribune described whites and blacks leaving Yankee Stadium “all but arm-in-arm.” If so many black Christians had shown up at a white church, he surmised, there would have been a riot, leading him to conclude that sports fans emulated Jesus more faithfully than churchgoers did.

  It was, someone wrote, Harlem’s “first chance in ten years to let out a loud yell.” So jammed were the streets that a bus ride from 125th Street to 155th Street took an hour. Revelers flush with winnings lindy-hopped along Seventh Avenue, while one old woman walked up and down clapping her hands and singing “Go Down, Moses.” The few trees became roosts for young boys and girls. On St. Nicholas Avenue and 150th Street, a drunk proclaimed, “Look-a-here, folks, you is now on Joe Louis Avenue!” Vendors shouted, “Eat Joe Louis peanuts and get strong!” People struggled to no avail to name some precedent—Jack Johnson’s entry into New York after knocking out Jeffries in 1910, or the celebrations of Marcus Garvey, or the religious revivals of Father Divine—to which to compare the joy on the streets. It was Harlem’s biggest moment since it had become the capital of the Negro world, the Pittsburgh Courier declared.

  To great fanfare a few months earlier, Dempsey had opened a new restaurant on the fringes of Jacobs Beach, across from Madison Square Garden, a masculine, “gaudily meatish” place that came to embody the glamour of professional boxing. Now Dempsey offered to pay Louis to come by after the fight. Instead, Louis agreed to appear at the Savoy Ballroom at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue, where Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson were supplying the music. Twenty thousand people showed up, jamming the blocks from 139th to 147th streets. The crowd ultimately stormed the entrance, sending glass flying. One menaced white reporter from Chicago asked a policeman whether to flee. “You are as safe as at 42nd and Broadway,” the officer replied. “There will be no trouble tonight. These people are too happy.”

  Following the fight, Louis first returned to his temporary quarters on West 153rd Street, wanting only to sleep. “I’m tired of this handshakin’ business anyway,” he said. Roxborough also wanted to stay put, fearing that Louis’s fans would tear him apart. Only around three a.m. did they go out, after the police had determined that the crowds were manageable. As Louis entered the heart of Harlem, “all the noise that had preceded his advent became as a mere rattle of dried peas in a gourd.” Wearing a cinnamon-colored suit and a green necktie, he was soon in the spotlight at the Savoy. He stood silently, unsmilingly, as if the crowd were looking at someone else. Handed a portable microphone, he held it for a moment, then gave it back, forcing a columnist for the Amsterdam News, Romeo Dougherty, to pinch-hit for him. “Joe Louis is a fighter, not a talker,” Dougherty said. “But he wants to thank you for this reception. He wants to tell you he’ll try to bring you the world’s heavyweight title.” And then Louis left—without uttering a single word. At a press conference the following afternoon, he hardly said more, offering only what John Lardner called “a sort of lame-duck, Mexican currency smile.”

  A black professor at Atlanta University expressed fears that Mussolini would regard Louis’s victory as an insult to the Italian flag and use it as an excuse to annihilate Ethiopia. To the white press, though, its significance was more anthropological. “The American Negro is a natural athlete,” the New York Sun wrote. “The generations of toil in the cotton fields have not obliterated the strength and grace of the African native.” To the Mirror, Louis’s background actually diminished his achievement. “In Africa there are tens of thousands of powerful, young savages, that with a little teaching, could annihilate Mr. Joe Louis,” it said.

  Louis was now the champion-in-waiting. Everyone was talking about him. When Damon Runyon interviewed Alf Landon about politics, the soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee interviewed Damon Runyon about Joe Louis. Some of boxing’s more thoughtful observers began working to assure that nothing be thrown in his path. Louis, wrote Richards Vidmer of the Herald Tribune, was the answer to boxing’s prayers, someone who would electrify, cleanse, and elevate a sleepy, soiled sport. To compare him with Jack Johnson, he said, was “like comparing Lou Gehrig with Al Capone.”

  But along with sympathetic portrayals, the starker stereotypes persisted. To the Hearst reporters, Louis was a kind of King Kong—an exotic creature, temporarily domesticated, available for public inspection. “You see him awake in bed,” went one description. “He lies there without moving. Photographers surround him, but he doesn’t even glance at them. Here you get a keener glimpse of the man—a tanned-skin throw-back to the creature of primitive swamps who gloried in battle and blood…. He never says a word. He is like a wild thing tethered by civilization—a wild thing that somehow doesn’t belong to civilization.” Even “friendly” stories could be painful. Louis was simply “a healthy Negro boy with the usual streak of laziness,” one writer said.

  Louis’s mother attended the fight, and afterward dished up a whole new set of biblical allusions, this time focusing on all the Delilahs and Jezebels in Harlem who were out to sap Joe’s strength. But for all the self-abasement, she also tried to shame America into treating her son properly. She knew he’d get his title shot, she said; white folks had always done right by her, because she’d always done right by them. And she’d taught Joe to do the same.

  Boxing’s color line, unlike baseball’s, had never been officially enforced. The sport was not so organized; it had no Kenesaw Mountain Lan-dis to preserve its prejudices. Rarely was the subject discussed in concrete terms, and even more rarely was it defended. The British press, perhaps less intent upon appearing enlightened, confronted things more explicitly. To Boxing, the raucous celebrations following the Carnera fight foreshadowed what might happen should a black man ever capture the crown. The Sunday Pictorial offered a Solomonic solution: a separate “colored champion of the world.”

  In the United States, Collyer’s Eye claimed it had learned from a “highly authoritative source” that a title shot for Louis had been ruled out at “a secret New York conclave,” both because he was black and, more critically, because his black management had refused “to cut in the fixers and politicians.” That the tip sheet, flying in the face of all evidence, regularly decried Louis as the ruination of boxing should have made anything it said suspect. But given the sport’s dicey tradition and America’s racism, the idea of such a decree, a “Protocol of the Elders of Fistiana,” was not so far-fetched, and the report prompted Walter White of the NAACP to voice his concerns to both the New York State Athletic Commission and New York governor Herbert Lehman; Roxborough and Black assured White that no such fix was in. Respected newsmen like Bill Cunningham of the Boston Post confronted the issue head on. “Louis deserves the right to go as far as he can,” he wrote. “If he’s stopped, here’s hoping that it happens cleanly in battle and not in the dingy offices of a lot of avaricious buzzards.” In the end, two mighty sins, prejudice and greed, had to square off before Louis and Braddock ever could, and this was even more of a mismatch than Louis and Carnera. The Chicago Tribune had it about right: Louis was supplying “vitamins C, A, S and H” to an undernourished sport. To Braddock, money would surely trump all other considerations, and neither B
aer nor Schmeling was exactly indifferent to it either. “Max isn’t interested in the title,” Joe Jacobs said of his client. “It’s money he wants and he can get more—much more—for fighting Louis than Braddock. Why, the bout will draw more than $750,000, and we’d be suckers not to fight for that kind of a gate.”

  The Daily Worker, which had begun covering sports largely to champion Louis, somehow saw racists and capitalists alike conspiring to block the black man. “If the Daily Worker really wanted to help an oppressed race, it might have warned Negroes not to be swept off their feet by the result of a prizefight,” countered the Amsterdam News. Other black papers agreed that the achievements of a W. E. B. DuBois or a victory in the Scottsboro case or a federal antilynching law mattered much more than any boxing match, and that for blacks to go overboard on Louis suited the white man just fine. But to more of them, there was nothing hyperbolic about the hoopla. “Each victory of Louis will be in effect as good as electing a Congressman,” Dan Burley wrote in the Associated Negro Press. And if Louis got a title shot, it would be like getting “a colored vice-president.” In the Baltimore Afro-American, Ralph Matthews puzzled over white caprice—that while one section of the country lynched a black man for sassing whites, in another section they would cheer him on.

  Suddenly, everyone wanted to give Louis advice. Bill Corum of the New York Evening Journal offered the cautionary tale of Kid Chocolate, the Afro-Cuban featherweight who’d been the King of Lenox Avenue until succumbing to loud clothes, bottles of gin, “hot cha brown-skin girls,” and “the heat of the Harlem moon.” “If [Louis] lets things inside of bottles STAY INSIDE OF BOTTLES, and for his business affairs secures the protection of an intelligent, honest lawyer instead of some racketeer, he may not die poor after a few years of leaning against a Harlem bar telling how great he used to be,” observed Arthur Brisbane, who predicted that it would take “two or three good fairy godmothers from the upper reaches of the magic Nile to take him safely through what lies ahead of him.” Black columnists warned of a different danger. “The white world of sports and the world at large will not deny or envy you any fortune, however large, if you spend it upon a Negro woman,” one cautioned. “But if you would lavish it upon some low-caste white woman the white world will rise in wrath and so would the Negro world.”

  One of black boxing’s greatest figures, Sam Langford, was by then nearly blind, but as he walked along Lenox Avenue the day after the Carnera fight, even he could feel something in the air. “Harlem’s got some money today,” he laughed. Louis left for Atlantic City. Though the trip was ostensibly secret, five thousand fans awaited him there. They stormed the store where he was buying shoes, forcing him to try on a pair in his car. That night, one thousand young boys staged a tin-can torchlight parade in his honor. Then he left for Detroit, thwarting plans to throw a triumphant welcome for him by sneaking into town.

  THE MORNING AFTER LOUIS STOPPED CARNERA, Schmeling and Machon sat down for breakfast at Schmeling’s training camp near Berlin. In two weeks he would fight Paolino Uzcudun. But as Schmeling read about the New York fight in the newspaper, he lost his appetite. At some point he would have to confront this Louis. So would Nazi Germany.

  In German athletics as in Germany generally, blacks had always been scarce, more objects of curiosity than of disparagement or discrimination. Their very novelty had often made them, quite literally, a form of public entertainment—as actors, circus performers, athletes. Before Hitler gained power, Box-Sport wrote about black boxers only rarely and benignly. But the Nazis had always been contemptuous of blacks, in and out of athletics. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had dismissed the civil rights movement as part of a Jewish conspiracy. In his first public speech in Berlin in 1928, he lamented that German culture and music had been “negrified.” To him, the Negro and the Jew were in cahoots to destroy Aryan values.

  Such sentiments spilled over into sports. In November 1930, the Angriff bemoaned how the black American boxer George Godfrey had been booked for fights in Paris and London. At least the Americans, “out of a healthy spirit,” had rejected the black man, it said. The approving reference to Jim Crow America was not unusual. “In every Negro, even in one of the kindest disposition, is the latent brute and primitive man who can be tamed neither by centuries of slavery nor by an external varnish of civilization,” the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte declared. The Nazi press had kind words for lynching, for The Birth of a Nation, for the Ku Klux Klan. To Hitler and his followers, the wrong side had won the Civil War; Gone With the Wind was to become one of the Führer’s favorite movies. When the Nazis pushed for separate compartments for Jews on German trains, they cited the American South as precedent.

  After the Nazis assumed power, racial purity became national policy. Blacks lost their jobs. Africans from former German colonies had their identity papers taken away and replaced with “alien” passports. “Negroes don’t have anything to grin about in National Socialist Germany,” was how a Nazi teacher reprimanded a schoolboy named Hans Massaquoi, the son of an African man and a German woman. Jazz—called “jungle music” or “Niggerjazz”—was banned. Underlying the contempt was the usual empirical data and “scientific” theory that led to the sterilization of the five hundred to seven hundred offspring of the French-African troops who occupied Germany after World War I and their German mothers— the so-called Rhineland Bastards. As a German paper put it, one mustn’t let their cuteness now deter the important task of keeping German blood pure.

  Obsessed with racial matters as they were, the Nazis paid close attention to race relations in the United States, and two themes dominated commentary on it. The first, sparked no doubt by feelings of inferiority and competitiveness, ridiculed how, in what they disdainfully called “the world’s freest country,” blacks were discriminated against in every conceivable manner, no matter if the white man were a sewer worker and the black man the heavyweight champion of the world. What rankled the Nazis wasn’t the unfairness, however, but the hypocrisy: how America sanctimoniously lectured the rest of the world about tolerance, when it was so deeply discriminatory itself.

  Indeed, the second theme was praise for raw, unvarnished American racial prejudice, however it was expressed. Nazi Germany and the United States were really brothers under the skin, this theory went, with Germany steadfastly upholding doctrines that America secretly shared but from which subversives—invariably Jews and Communists—had led it astray. America should just come clean and embrace its racist tendencies, the Nazis urged, for given the natural inferiority of blacks, these tendencies were biologically ordained and historically just. “This law is not inhumane,” a 1933 report from a German correspondent in the United States explained. “It’s a necessity for America, because otherwise the American race would become a mixed race. The Negro here will always remain a second-class human being. He might be allowed to serve the white man, but he’ll never be allowed to become a real American.” This principle, rather than coarse stereotyping, provided the lens through which the Nazi press initially viewed Joe Louis. It acknowledged his talent—Box-Sport called him “uniquely and colossally dangerous”—and even credited him with a certain dignity; while blacks were ecstatic when Louis won, it noted, Louis himself remained cool and reserved. But Louis—Nazi journals routinely referred to him as the “Lehmgesicht,” meaning “clay face” or “loam face”—should certainly never be champion and would become so only if America sacrificed its racial principles for its own ego, just as it had by allowing blacks onto its Olympic team in 1932.

  Box-Sport quickly bought into the new racial order. In a November 1933 article about the “ever-grinning and sneering” Jack Johnson, it called the black man “a cross between a clown and a beast.” Boxing had even more reason to exclude blacks, it said; their physical advantages made every fight unfair. The black man “senses every danger with the primeval instinct of a wild animal,” the article stated. “In his movements he is lithe and sure, like a panther. He is wildly uncontrolled on the attack
and tremendously hard against blows to the skull, in fact, he is only really vulnerable in one place: on the shin bone (In America every boy knows that a nigger can only be felled by a sharp, downward kick against the shin bone).” Unsurprisingly, after January 1933 fewer black boxers found their way into German rings. The experience of a black wrestler named Jim Wango in Nuremberg in early 1935 may help explain why.*

  But Nazi ideology did not capture all the nuances in German racial thinking, nor did it stifle the more innocuous, almost affectionate feelings many Germans had for blacks. W. E. B. DuBois spent five months in Germany in 1936 and later wrote that he was treated with the kind of courtesy and consideration he had never received in America; his greatest indignity there was having people stare at him. Other American black visitors returned from Nazi Germany even more enthusiastic. One noted that blacks were still welcomed at German universities. “Other things being equal, I had rather live in the Rhineland than in Florida or Alabama,” one wrote. On the other hand, when Paul Robeson passed through Berlin in 1934, he felt menaced by uniformed men “with hatred in their eyes.” Marian Anderson was discouraged from performing there, while the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was banned outright.

  Before any racial matters had to be finally decided, Schmeling faced his encounter with Uzcudun on July 7. It would be Schmeling’s first fight in Berlin in seven years, and there were reports that Hitler would be there, the first time he would see Schmeling box. Schmeling had to dazzle to show he could still draw crowds in the States. “The Americans again have all the trump cards,” the Völkischer Beobachter lamented, pointing to a popular world champion and a challenger who, though he had black skin, packed a knockout punch in both hands.