Music and Labor Oct 4

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PART I:

HEROES

Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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ONE

“Richie” Allen, Whitey’s Ways, and Me: A Political Education

in the 1960s

Matthew Frye Jacobson

I wouldn’t say that I hate Whitey, but deep down in my heart, I just can’t stand Whitey’s ways, man.

—Dick Allen, Ebony, 1970

“Disrespect” would be a euphemism. Dick Allen was unanimously re- named “Richie” in 1960 by a white press wholly indifferent to the young ballplayer’s protestations that everyone from his mother on down had al- ways called him “Dick.” Later, when Allen finally did insist upon his right- ful name after several years of patiently accepting what he thought a vaguely racist diminutive, the press variously ignored his request, spitefully granted it (“Dick ‘Don’t Call Me Richie’ Allen”), or—worse—depicted the “name-change” as an emblem of Allen’s unstable character (as in: “in mid- career he became, adamantly, ‘Dick.’” Sports Illustrated referred to this as Allen’s “first name sensitivity.”)1 Fans in Philadelphia delighted in throw- ing objects at Allen—pennies, chicken bones, batteries, bolts, half pints— and when he took to wearing a batting helmet in the field, the press

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20 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

intimated that he needed the protection because he was bad with a glove. Allen twice appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated: once in 1970 under the heading “Baseball in Turmoil” (a reference to Curt Flood’s challenge to baseball’s reserve clause, but Allen was the sport’s better poster boy for “turmoil”), and once in 1972, smoking what remains the only cigarette in the history of SI covers.

Nor has Allen’s treatment mellowed over the years. The current entry for Allen on BaseballLibrary.com (“The Stories behind the Stats”) begins this way: “Talented, controversial, charming, and abusive, Allen put in 15 major league seasons, hitting prodigious homers and paying prodigious fines. He was praised as a money player and condemned as a loafer.” The site does duly note Allen’s Rookie of the Year season in 1964 and his MVP season in 1972; but its overall flavor tends fairly decisively toward “loafer” rather than “money player.” (The account of his stellar rookie season opens on the odd—but for Allen, familiar—note, “He made 41 errors at third base. . . .”)2 Total Baseball, the baseball encyclopedia, ranks Allen as the eighty-eighth best player of all time in an entry that begins, “Dick Allen feuded with writers, fans, managers, and teammates, earned many suspen- sions and behaved and fielded erratically.”3

In American political life, the phrase “Black Power” will always bring to mind Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party, and other black radicals who came to prominence in the latter half of the 1960s. In the too-clever parlance of ’60s- and ’70s- era baseball writing, however, its appropriation conjured figures like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Frank Robinson, and Richie Allen— the 1.5 generation of baseball’s integration after Jackie Robinson had bro- ken the color bar, black sluggers whose speed and playing style and might were transforming the national pastime. (Absent its black stars, Hank Aaron points out, the National League’s stand-out player of the 1960s would have been Ron Santo.)4

But the two meanings of “black power” were not unrelated, as Dick Allen’s career demonstrates perhaps better than most. The social drama of the Civil Rights movement constituted the inescapable context within which black ballplayers of this generation were understood and measured in the white media—most often, if tacitly, located along an imagined polit- ical spectrum of “good” and “bad” Negroes (Willie Mays at one end of the spectrum, Richie Allen, Bob Gibson, and Dock Ellis at the other). “If [Allen] had been white,” writes Gibson, “he would have been considered merely a free spirit. As a black man who did as he pleased and guarded his privacy, he was instead regarded as a trouble-maker.”5 It is only in the con- text of the wider political and social world of the 1960s, not of the club-

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21“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

house and diamond, that one can comprehend Allen’s becoming “a dart- board for the press,” in Pirate outfielder Willie Stargell’s phrase.6

Thus the sports page served as a site of oblique but significant social commentary on the racial questions of the day (indeed it was in relation to the sports page that whites seem to have first acknowledged and accepted that there might even be such a thing as a “white press”). It is not just that the world of Orval Faubus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Strom Thurmond, and Malcolm X supplied the cues for writing about a figure like Richie Allen, but also, contrariwise, that commentary on the likes of Allen—or Muhammad Ali or Cookie Gilchrist or Lew Alcindor—was by its very nature a genre of political writing whose significations reached beyond the diamond, the ring, or the gridiron, to the roiling racial world of a nation in unrest.

By the time Allen’s autobiography appeared in 1989, vernacular polit- ical discourse was better equipped to deal with the experience of someone “enormously talented and black in a game run by white owners, executives, and managers,” as one reviewer put it.7 Across the arc of his career in Philadelphia, however, from 1964 to 1969, the political truths of the sports world were grasped and analyzed chiefly by athletes and writers on the black side of the color line, and only very occasionally by a white com- mentator like Robert Lipsyte or Jack Olsen. Most often, black analyses of how race mattered—along with black protestations that race did matter— were simply folded into white power’s already-scripted tale of the “bad Negro,” as when Cookie Gilchrist mounted a boycott of the AFL’s 1964 All-Star Game in Jim Crow New Orleans, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists on the dais in Mexico City in 1968, or when Dick Allen or Frank Robinson raised the issue of Major League Baseball’s racist hiring practices. Bad boys all. By suggesting that race had anything to do with his image as “the bad boy of baseball,” in other words, a figure like Allen could only prove himself the “bad boy of baseball.”

This essay is not primarily about Dick Allen, but—quite deliberately— about Richie Allen, a creation of the white press, a negative icon of the Civil Rights era, “just about the premier bad boy in sports.”8 It is also about Richie Allen as a persona who—against the odds, one has to con- clude—became a positive icon to me, a white kid growing up in the subur- ban setting of Boulder, Colorado. The sports pages of this era constituted my political education. I was six years old and just beginning to pay atten- tion to baseball during Allen’s phenomenal rookie year. If “black power” signified anything to me at age nine, around the time when the term entered political parlance, it signified Allen’s towering home run to straightaway center in the All-Star Game in Anaheim. But by age ten, always hungry for another story, another AP wire photo, another stat on Allen, I could not help but notice that most of what I found was some brand of vilification.

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22 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

My fourth-grade teacher Miss Harms could lecture on Reverend King and the freedom struggle; but what I learned about the injustices and the slan- ders of racism, I learned mostly by following Richie Allen in the Denver Post, waiting in vain for someone to write something good. (“Richie played with fire in his eyes, always,” says Orlando Cepeda. “Never read that in no newspaper.”9)

Reflecting on the odd oasis of adulation that his own fame provided him amid a wider, uglier world of racism, harassment, and danger, Bob Gibson once told baseball writer Roger Angell, “It’s nice to get attention and favors . . . but I can never forget the fact that if I were an ordinary black person I’d be in the shithouse, like millions of others.”10 Allen never did quite get out, even despite his talent and his fame and the awed respect he earned inside the lines. Here, in what stands as both a historical and a personal reflection, I seek to discover what that might say about politics and sport in the 1960s, and also to recover what it did mean to one white fan, thousands of miles and many worlds away from the Philadelphia shit- house called Connie Mack Stadium.

1. Philadelphia

“No baseball season in my fifteen-year career had the highs and lows of ’64,” wrote Allen in his autobiography, Crash. “The Temps said it best baby, I was a ball of confusion.”11 Allen was the National League Rookie of the Year, hitting .318 with 201 hits, 29 home runs, and 91 RBIs. He also had 38 doubles and 13 triples, a single-season combination that the likes of Mays, Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Pete Rose never matched. Or Jackie Robinson, for that matter. (Joe DiMaggio bested it back in 1936, with 44 doubles and 15 triples). But Phillies fans found ways to sour on him nonetheless, many blaming him for the team’s spectacular September freefall that cost them what had seemed a sure pennant. Fans’ merciless booing became so common at Connie Mack Stadium in ensuing years that by the end of his tenure in Philadelphia, Allen had taken to scratching mes- sages during the game—such as the word “boo”—in the infield dirt with his spikes.12

Jackie Robinson and the magical date of 1947 seem to have long passed by the time Allen cracked the majors, but the key to his bitter expe- rience in the 1960s lies precisely in how little had happened in the inter- vening years. When one thinks of baseball’s falling racial barriers, the players who come to mind in addition to Robinson are people like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin, a generation born in the teens and twenties, who came of age in the forties and played in the Negro

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23“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

Leagues before entering the newly integrated majors directly on the heels of Branch Rickey’s “great experiment” in Brooklyn. The intervening glory years make it hard enough to recall that Willie Mays and Hank Aaron played their first pro ball in the Negro Leagues (Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons, Aaron with the Indianapolis Clowns); but even the players slightly younger than they—players with no Negro League experience at all—spent the early part of their careers in a baseball environment no less white and no less hostile than Jackie Robinson’s Ebbets Field.

Hank Aaron himself refers to them as “second generation black play- ers,” though 1.5 generation would be more accurate—Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Bill White, Orlando Cepeda, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Lou Brock. Though associated with the 1960s and a baseball era far removed from the Jackie Robinson moment, “most of them came through the minor leagues in the 1950s, and almost all of them had their own horror sto- ries.”13 In October 1964, David Halberstam writes of this generation,

If they were not the black players of the pioneer generation, they had come up right behind them: most had grown up in ghettos, and their way into the big leagues had been difficult, often through a still-segregated minor-league system. This obstacle course remained the foundation of big-league baseball, and it was rife with prejudice. Playing on minor-league teams in tiny South- ern towns meant the crowds—even the home crowds—were usually hostile. Worse, most of their fellow players were rural country white boys, who, more often than not, seemed to accept the local mores.14

“I didn’t know anything about racism or bigotry until I went into pro- fessional baseball in 1953,” writes Frank Robinson, who grew up in West Oakland and whose initiation in the taunts of “Nigger, go back to Africa” came in Sally League towns like Augusta, Macon, and Savannah.15 As Dock Ellis—ten years younger still than Robinson—put it, “You learn more than baseball in the minor leagues.” For his own part, Ellis recalls going into the stands in a game against the Geneva Senators, swinging a leaded bat at a fan who had called him Stepin Fetchit, or standing defiantly on the mound, middle finger extended to a hostile crowd, after striking out the last batter in a game in Wilson, North Carolina.16

Such incidents—Aaron’s racial “horror stories”—punctuate the biogra- phies of virtually every player of the 1.5 generation. Bill White spent 1953 as the only black player in the Class-B Carolina League, serving, in Hal- berstam’s words, as “a kind of beacon to local rednecks, who would come out to the ballpark and, for a tiny amount of money, yell at this one young black player, who symbolized to them a world beginning to change.” He sometimes carried a bat with him as he left the clubhouse, according to Bob

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24 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

Gibson, in order “to get through the hostile crowds that stood between him and the team bus.”17 Aaron and Wes Covington broke the color barrier up north in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (Aaron: “We didn’t exactly blend in”; Cov- ington: “I felt like a sideshow freak”) before Aaron was sent to the Jack- sonville Braves to break the color line in the Sally League.18 The president of the Sally League, Dick Butler, later claimed to have “followed Jack- sonville and sat in the stands to keep a lookout. You were never sure what was going to happen. Those people had awfully strong feelings about what was going on.”19 John Roseboro endured taunts of “chocolate drop” in Sheboygan; Felipe Alou was barred from the Evangeline League because of Louisiana segregation statutes (and shipped instead to the more hospitable Cocoa Indians of the Florida State League, “a class D menagerie”).20 In Fayette, North Carolina, Curt Flood “heard spluttering gasps, ‘There’s a goddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with those white boys! I’m leaving’”; and in Greensboro, Leon Wagner faced an armed fan by the out- field fence, issuing a warning, “Nigger, I’m going to fill you with shot if you catch one ball out there.” “What kind of country is this?” Vic Power wanted to know, upon confronting racial mores so different from those that obtained in his native Puerto Rico.21

Even after they had safely reached the majors, far from the redneck sneers of the Sally League circuit, most of the 1.5 generation had to ne- gotiate the southern racial climate and the segregated facilities of Florida sites like Bradenton, Vero Beach, Clearwater, or Tampa during the months of spring training. Most also had to deal with some element of segregation in their team’s travel, lodging, rooming, or eating arrange- ments in cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati during the regular season; many, like Reggie Smith, had epithets and more dangerous objects hurled at them at one time or another, even by the “fans” in their home ball- parks. Some joined major league teams that were themselves deeply di- vided by race. Gibson and White broke into the majors playing for an overtly racist manager named Solly Hemus: “either he disliked us deeply or he genuinely believed that the only way to motivate us was with in- sults,” remembers Gibson. During one clubhouse meeting, in the presence of the full team, Hemus referred to an opposing pitcher as a “nigger.” Or- lando Cepeda, for his part, attributes the perennial also-ran fortunes of the Giants during the early ’60s to the breakdown of team feeling along ethnoracial lines. (Among other things, though his lineup featured Cepeda, all three Alou brothers, Jose Pagan, and Juan Marichal, manager Alvin Dark tried to ban the Spanish language in the clubhouse. Dark— who, ironically, had grown up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the very town that barred Felipe Alou—also openly questioned the “mental alertness” of his “Negro and Spanish-speaking players.”)22

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25“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

Dick Allen drew a cruel hand, even by the standards of such a deck: after brief stints in Elmira (New York), Magic Valley (Utah), and Williamsport (Pennsylvania), in 1963 and at the age of only 20, Allen landed with the Arkansas Travelers, the Phillies’ AAA team whose home park was in Little Rock (of Central High fame) and whose lineup had, to that point, been white only. (As Lou Brock, who had been born there, liked to say, Arkansas was indeed “the land of opportunity”—at the very first opportunity he had gotten the hell out.23) “When I arrived at the park,” Allen recalls, “ . . . there were people marching around with signs. One said, DON’T NEGRO-IZE BASEBALL. Another, NIGGER GO HOME. . . . Here, in my mind, I thought Jackie Robinson had Negro-ized baseball sixteen years earlier.” As if to underscore the militant whiteness of this white world, the season’s festivities began with the ceremonial throw- ing out of the first pitch by Governor Orval Faubus. Afterward Allen found a note on the windshield of his car: “DON’T COME BACK AGAIN, NIG- GER.” “There might be something more terrifying than being black and holding a note that says ‘Nigger’ in an empty parking lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1963,” Allen comments, “but if there is, it hasn’t crossed my path yet.” That AAA season was filled with this sort of menace and dan- ger; and it was also exceptionally isolating, as off the field Allen was re- moved from the rest of the team by the maze of segregationist civic codes and social rituals of pre-Civil Rights Act Little Rock.24

This was perhaps the beginning of bad blood between Allen and both the Phillies’ white officialdom and Philadelphia’s white press. For one thing, Allen felt that he was ready for the majors already (his nine spring-training home runs in 1963 seemed to argue in his favor), and he saw himself as a sacrificial lamb to the organization’s imperative to desegregate its farm sys- tem. This might have been workable if, for another thing, the Phillies had handled Allen’s situation with some of the forethought and sensitivity that the Dodgers had shown Jackie Robinson. But the organization was quite calloused in its general disinterest in Allen’s Arkansas experience. As Ebony wryly noted in 1970, “During [the] 1963 season with Philadelphia’s minor league team in Little Rock, . . . he complained about racial injustice (Philly writers say they found no prejudice there).”25 Most telling, perhaps, was Arkansas manager Frank Lucchesi’s nonchalance toward the social burden that Allen was made to carry that season: “Richie was upset one night be- cause one person said, ‘Come on, Chocolate Drop, hit one out. . . . That’s not in taste but the fan didn’t realize it. They say worse things to white ballplayers. Richie is sensitive and he is self-centered.”26

And so, one might have thought, the trip north to Philadelphia the fol- lowing year would be an improvement. But Philadelphia baseball had a fairly spectacular history of racism of its own: though Connie Mack had

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26 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

tried to smuggle talented black players into Shibe Park as Italians or Indi- ans earlier in the century, the Philadelphia stadium—like the Phillies lineup—remained the most stubbornly anti-integrationist in the National League. The black press of the 1940s reported that Mack himself was among the owners “most bitterly” opposed to integration; and according to historian Bruce Kuklick, when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, “the cruelest taunts he received at Ebbets Field came from the visit- ing Phillies. . . .” As for Brooklyn’s visits to Shibe Park, Phillies GM Herb Pennock pleaded with Branch Rickey not to bring Robinson at all: “Branch, you can’t bring the nigger here. Philadelphia’s not ready for that yet.” When Robinson did turn up in Philadelphia, pitchers threw at him, infielders purposely spiked him, and Phillies players once lined up on the dugout steps, pointing their bats at him and making gunshot sounds. By the mid-1950s, the Phillies were the only remaining all-white team in the Na- tional League; and even after the team finally did integrate, it remained among the last major league teams to end segregated housing during spring training.27

Over and above the racialized traditions of Philadelphia baseball, the city itself was entering a heated and dangerous period in black-white rela- tions—it was a “racial tinderbox,” as the head of the city’s Urban League described it.28 In 1964 Allen arrived in a Philadelphia wracked by racial vi- olence over issues of job discrimination, housing, school segregation, and police brutality, and in which an aggressive (and aggressively white) former beat cop named Frank Rizzo was rising rapidly through the ranks toward the commissioner’s office, which he attained in 1967.29 (Faubus and Rizzo: two-thirds of some weird, depressing hat trick. Later Allen worked for Al Campanis.) There had been violent clashes over the integration of Philadel- phia construction in 1963; and in August 1964, during Allen’s rookie sea- son, three days of rioting engulfed a 125-block area of Lower North Philadelphia, one boundary of which was marked by Connie Mack Sta- dium. Players had to pass through a “police state” to get to the ballpark during those days. One black resident lamented, “The only thing I regret about the riot . . . was that we didn’t burn down that goddamn stadium. They had it surrounded by cops, and we couldn’t get to it. I just wish we could’ve burned it down and wiped away its history that tells me I’m noth- ing but a nigger.” Two died and 339 were injured in the rioting.30

Although Philadelphia fans might indeed “boo the losers in an Easter egg hunt,” as Bob Uecker once quipped, and even white outfielder Johnny Callison had objects thrown at him, still these fans found a very special—vitriolic—place in their hearts for the new arrival from the Arkansas Travelers. Even his Rookie of the Year stats (.318, 29 HR, 91 RBI) were not enough to shield Allen from the tense, racial hatreds of

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27“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

mid-’60s Philadelphia.31 Fan animosity toward Allen seems a compound of garden variety racism; scapegoating for the Phillies’ 1964 tailspin; venting on the larger race questions facing the city; and a misappre- hending response, as Sports Illustrated noted, to Allen’s expressionless playing style, which to many whites made him look “arrogant.” (Man- ager Gene Mauch’s more generous observation of Allen’s demeanor was that “He doesn’t get way up when things are going good, or way down when things are going bad. And that’s the best approach to any profes- sional sport.”) All of which was further fueled by “some of the harshest press in the city’s sports history.”32

Allen was in fact booed for the first time in the fifth inning of the Phils’ home opener in 1964, and he was booed plenty as the Phillies squandered their six and a half game lead in the final 12 games of that season. But the mutual bitterness began in earnest the next season, in July 1965, when a pregame fight between Allen and Philadelphia favorite Frank Thomas re- sulted in Thomas’ departure from the Phillies.33 The fight, by most ac- counts, was itself “racial.” Thomas was already well-known among his teammates for his derisive comments toward Allen, Johnny Briggs, and other black players. One thing that particularly enraged Allen was when Thomas would approach a black player, pretending “to offer his hand in a soul shake,” and then “grab the player’s thumb and bend it back hard.”34

On the day of the fight, Johnny Callison was razzing Thomas for a failed bunt attempt the night before, but Thomas chose to answer Allen instead of Callison. He taunted Allen as “Muhammad Clay,” by some accounts, and “Richie X” by others—taunts that in either case Allen answered with a pop to the jaw before Thomas broke a cardinal baseball rule by swinging his bat at Allen and catching him on the shoulder.35

Teammates pried the two apart, but an ineluctable sequence had al- ready been set in motion: Thomas was immediately sold off to Houston; Allen was forbidden from discussing the incident under penalty of a $2,000 fine; but Thomas, meanwhile, freely fed his (partisan, sanitized) version to the press. Manager Gene Mauch, too, made some rather coy remarks to the press that not only obscured the nature of the incident and Thomas’ part in it, but also left an impression that the Phillies had unfairly and quite know- ingly scapegoated the white veteran in deference to Allen’s talent and youth. It was here, most significantly, that the press began to tag Allen as a “troublemaker”—an appellation that would provide a convenient media peg for the rest of his career. “Baseball should never forget the Allen- Thomas fiasco,” says Bill White. “ . . . When Dick Allen came to the big leagues, he was a kid in love with the game. Baseball was all that mattered. After the Thomas incident, the love was taken right out of him. There’s his- torical significance in how that was handled.”36

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28 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

The result was that Allen came out looking unjustly favored and vaguely militant—a ready-made script for many whites, given the city’s racial climate—and he was directly blamed for the departure of a popu- lar (white) player. Banners announcing fans’ unambiguous preferences— such as “We Want Thomas”—bedecked Connie Mack Stadium; Daily News writer Larry Merchant embarked on an anti-Allen crusade in print; one fan “sucker punched” Allen; others at the park jeered him as “darkie” and “monkey” (when he wasn’t hitting game-winning home runs), and Allen recalls seeing one father pointing at him and teaching his little boy how to boo. It was soon after, too, that people started to throw things at Allen, to vandalize his home, and to harass his family. Across the balance of the 1960s, Allen was “booed mercilessly,” as Newsweek re- ported, and he received “hate mail . . . so brutal that he now refuses to open anything that looks like fan mail”; “people smeared paint on his car, threw rocks and shot BBs through his windows and booed his children on the street.”37 As the Daily News once reported in 1967, after Allen’s hero- ics had dispatched the Cubs, “He should have been grinning and content in the knowledge that his three-run homer in the twelfth inning won a game for the Phillies. But it is tough to grin when you come to the ball- park and there are letters calling you ‘Dirty, Black Nigger.’” It was after this particular game that Allen started speaking openly about wanting out of Philadelphia.38

The Thomas incident may have marked a turning point for Allen and the city, but it was scarcely the only factor in that souring relationship. As Don Malcolm suggests, the “Angry Negro Problem”—a thematic conven- tion for writing about a certain kind of athlete, from Dick Allen to Gary Sheffield—derives not only from the fact that “white Americans still are manifestly uncomfortable with demonstrative black males,” but also, sig- nificantly, that they are “probably most uncomfortable with the ones who are making piles of dough.”39 (As for a bit of context on “angry Negroes”: five weeks after the Thomas incident, the Phillies landed in Los Angeles just in time to witness the flames of the Watts riot.40)

Dick Allen, emphatically, was not utterly unappreciated by the baseball world, and this, paradoxically, may have fueled the animosity against him in some quarters. Philadelphia had signed him for a cool $70,000 bonus, the largest ever offered a black ballplayer. Later, Allen became the highest- paid player on the Phillies (and in 1973, upon signing with the White Sox for a quarter of a million dollars, he was to become the highest-paid player in Major League history to that point). “His salary has risen faster than anyone’s ever did before,” remarked Newsweek in 1968. “ . . . And his popularity has plummeted just as fast.”41 In the calculus of Philadelphia race relations—and of the nation’s—these two developments may have

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29“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

been intimately entwined. It is not just a case of a Negro’s earnings demol- ishing the white presumption of what would be fitting; it is also a matter of social demeanor—the white insistence upon “appropriate” black gratitude, which is to say a bit of the old-fashioned, hat-in-hand bowing and scrap- ing. But as Sports Illustrated commented, on the contrary, Allen was “the first black man . . . to assert himself in baseball with something like the un- accommodating force of Muhammad Ali in boxing, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in basketball, and Jim Brown in football.”42

As the economics of the game shifted in the late 1960s, too, there was the volatile matter of the sheer power attaching to a player’s contract: many among the white press and white fandom were troubled that the Phillies or- ganization found even Allen’s white managers (first Mauch, and then Bob Skinner) more readily expendable than this black star, impetuous though he was. As Jim Bouton had it in Ball Four, “There is a pecking order in the major leagues which goes like this: owner, general manager, superstar, man- ager, established player, coaches, traveling secretary, trainer, clubhouse man, marginal player.”43 Black superstar over white manager—this was a problem for many white fans in the 1960s. And while much discussion of race in baseball has focused on the suspicious paucity of black managers and team executives, the “problem” of the black super star—the tension between the racial hierarchy of the culture and the natural pecking order of the team—has been the cause of much devilment as well.

Within this alchemic mingling of circumstance, ideology, personality, and history, the media developed an iron framework for reporting on Allen’s career both on and off the field: Allen was militant, a malcontent, a troublemaker, a black radical. Allen was not entirely blameless for the vol- ume of available copy, it should be noted; but the “bad boy of baseball” label did create a media peg for stories that might have attracted no atten- tion at all in the case of other players, black or white. (Indeed, the shock and scandal of a book like Bouton’s Ball Four in 1970—what Bowie Kuhn called Bouton’s “grave disservice” to the game—was precisely its demon- stration that the game was made up pretty much exclusively of swearing, hard-drinking, tobacco-addicted, amphetamine-popping, bed-hopping, window-peeping bad boys.44) But for Allen and seemingly for Allen alone, a steady litany of well-publicized “transgressions” mounted throughout the ’60s: the Thomas incident in 1965; a freak, off-field hand injury in 1967, broadly but baselessly presumed to be the result of either a barroom knife- fight or perhaps a run-in with a lover’s husband; an actual barroom brawl in 1968 (which, like the Thomas incident, began with a racial slur); and also in 1968 a few missed days of spring training, an instance of reporting late to the ballpark, and his benching by Mauch for being “unfit to play” (Allen’s trouble, Mauch said, was not with “the high fastball,” but rather

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“the fast highball”); and in 1969, income tax problems, a missed plane to St. Louis, and a missed double-header at Shea.45

Where silence on such matters was the journalistic norm in this cook- ies-and-milk era of sports coverage (Mickey Mantle was not averse to showing up at the park “unfit to play,” either, for instance, as we later learned and as the press corps had surely known at the time), Allen’s every move seemed to generate acres of copy. “You fellas have created an atmos- phere where people who have never met me, hate me,” he told reporters. Later he commented, “Even if they gave me an opportunity to tell all of my side of the story, I wouldn’t take it because I just don’t trust the white press in general.”46 If Allen was a perpetual story, race and racism were never an acknowledged part of that story. But the “race neutral” language of the white press makes for some interesting reading: Allen “marches to a mournful tune that only he hears, moving with an insolent grace,” for ex- ample, according to the Philadelphia Daily News; though one might fairly ask whether it is even possible for a white man, in America’s media cosmos, to “move with insolent grace.” Further, Richie Allen is “a superstar with a built-in distaste for discipline” (New York Times); he is “a player of enor- mous talents and mercurial moods” who is “known less for his awesome batting power than for his drinking, horseplaying and habitual tardiness” (Newsweek); “a man who hits a baseball even harder than he hits the bot- tle,” a “wondrously gifted misanthrope,” the “chain-smoking, hard- drinking, horseplaying, perpetually late bad boy of the 1960s” (Sports Illustrated).47 So infamous did Allen’s movements become, that at the All- Star Game in 1969 President Nixon sent a personal message through Allen’s teammate Grant Jackson: “You tell Richie Allen to get back on the job.” By that same year—his last in Philadelphia, as it turned out—Allen had begun to “wish they’d shut the gates . . . and let us play ball with no press and no fans.”48

The contrast with the black press could not have been starker. In 1968, at the height of his most controversial season and amid a thorough raking in the white media, for instance, a photo gallery in the Afro-American lov- ingly depicted Allen as a devoted family man (“$85,000 dad plays mom at Phils’ ballpark. Richie Allen baby-sits with son between Sunday pitches”).49

After the St. Louis trade in 1970, Ebony directly took up the matter of the white press’s racism, as “the questions continue[d]” regarding Allen: peo- ple ought to “question the questioners,” the black journal protested. To question Allen “presupposes that Richie is guilty of all the bad things writ- ten about him. . . . Most of the people who hate or love Richie do so on the basis of what they’ve heard or what they’ve read in the white press.” The whiteness of the press, in this equation, was as inescapably significant as the blackness of the ballplayer: “Richie Allen is black and he’s proud and

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he has the gumption to be a proud, black man in one of America’s most conservative sports. He sprouts a lush Afro that’s anchored with long and wide sideburns”—“his natural and long wide sideburns were targets of white criticism in Philly for six years.” After pointing out that Allen was known to read the Bible with some regularity, and that one of his infamous missed games had to do with his son’s illness, Ebony argued that “Richie’s stands on baseball’s controversial issues and the fact he’s black” were what marked him as a “radical.” “Basically, he’s just a ‘regular brother,’ hipped with all the jive-time routines of coolness, arrogance and a happy-go-lucky attitude.”50

His were, indeed, the Afro and the pork chop sideburns with which Sports Illustrated would choose to illustrate its cover story on “Baseball in Turmoil” in the spring of the Allen-Flood-McCarver trade. Although Allen did hold out for more money from St. Louis, it is true, the “turmoil” had mostly to do, not with him—“I’ll play anywhere: third, short, anywhere but Philadelphia”—but with Curt Flood, who had refused to report at all. The word “turmoil” itself, in fact, came from an exasperated Gussie Busch, the Cardinals owner: “I can’t understand Curt Flood . . . or the Allen case . . . we are going through a hell of a turmoil right now.” Though Busch was having his problems with the Steve Carlton contract, too, the turmoil seemed to him largely racial, apparently, and also connected to the broader social currents of 1960s America: “I can’t understand what’s happening here or on our campuses or in our great country.”51

Flood’s protest was, in fact, “racial,” even if it was Allen who more looked the part in SI’s estimation. For one thing, Flood was not eager to go to Philadelphia, “the nation’s northernmost southern city,” as he put it, “ . . . to succeed Richie Allen in the affections of that organization, its press and its catcalling missile-hurling audience.”52 And for another, as many have remarked over the years, given the bondage and emancipation motifs of the legalities involved, it was perhaps inevitable that a black ballplayer would be the first to challenge Major League Baseball’s reserve clause and seek free agency. Flood himself begins his autobiography, The Way It Is (1970), with an epigraph from his brother Carl: “Pharaoh, you better let them chillun go, honey.” Later, noting that “the word slavery has arisen in connection with my lawsuit” (and conceding sardonically that “the condition of the major-league baseball player is closer to peonage than to slavery”), Flood appeals to the language of a 1949 court decision in the case of the Giants’ Danny Gardella: “Only the totalitarian-minded will believe that high pay excuses virtual slavery.”53 The reserve clause/slavery analogy was neither casual nor incidental, in Flood’s view: “Frederick Douglass was a Maryland slave who taught himself to read. ‘If there is no struggle,’ he once said, ‘there is no progress. Those who profess

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to love freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without a de- mand. It never did and never will.’”

To see the Curt Flood case in that light is to see its entire meaning.54

Elsewhere, Bob Gibson quoted Flood as likening a franchise owner’s powers “to a plantation owner, allowing his players to play for him in the same way that the plantation owner allowed the sharecropper to work his land while at the same time keeping him deep in debt and con- stantly beholden.” The slavery analogy was also clearly among the things that Gibson had in mind when, during the spring of the Flood-Allen trade, in dark jest he hung a sign above his locker, “Another happy fam- ily sold.”55

Sportswriter Sandy Grady was tacitly acknowledging the racialized di- mension of Allen’s experience—not with the reserve clause, necessarily, but with the hatreds and disparagements of “The City of Brotherly Love”— when he wrote of St. Louis GM Bing Devine’s having “emancipated” Allen. (In typical white press fashion, however, he also suggested that Devine had “emancipated” Philadelphia from Allen.)56 And Allen, for his part, drew from the same lexicon: “You don’t know how good it feels to get out of Philadelphia. They treat you like cattle. It was like a form of slavery. Once you step out of bounds they’ll do everything possible to de- stroy your soul.” “Skinner once said he could handle me,” Allen later re- marked, “ . . . Well you don’t handle human beings, you treat them. You handle horses.”57 Curt Flood might have said that; so might Frederick Douglass.

Allen headed into a slightly new era upon his departure from Philadel- phia; fans never again vented the kind of hatred that Allen had seen in Con- nie Mack Stadium in the 1960s. Lee Vilensky’s beautiful “Ode to Dick Allen” vividly captures the death grip that Allen and the white racists of Philadelphia had on one another during those years. Recalling his first ever visit to Connie Mack Stadium as an eight-year-old in 1965, Vilensky writes of the “batteries, bottles, paperweights” that were hurled in Allen’s direc- tion, and the “nigger, nigger, nigger” and “fuckin’ nigger, nigger” that swirled around the stands.

I guess it was about the seventh inning when Richie came up for his third at bat. I don’t recall what he had done in his two previous at bats, but the chanting started anew. “Nigger.” “Big mouth nigger.” “Fuckin’ nigger.” “Go back to Africa, Nigger.” Yes, someone actually yelled that. . . . [S]uddenly there was a crack of the bat as Richie Allen crushed a line drive over our heads. I turned around just in time to watch the ball bounce off a little eave above the top of the grandstand, then go completely out of the stadium. A shot of more than five hundred feet in distance. Not a high, arcing, majestic

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home run, but a cold, vicious, angry drubbing of the ball. A loud slap. The power of it scared me. It made people quiet. Took all their air like a punch to the gut. As Richie touched home plate, the man next to me said to no one in particular: “Fuckin’ nigger can hit.”58

2. Boulder

Dick Allen and biographer Tim Whitaker stand on the diamond where decades before the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro Leagues had played, directly across from the vacant lot where Allen’s boyhood home once stood. “Imaginary baseball,” says Allen. “It’s the purest version of the game.”

Allen tugs at his shirt sleeves and pushes his cowboy hat down on top of his head, mimicking the same routine he went through whenever he stepped to the plate against major league pitching. He takes a few practice swings with his imaginary bat.

Between his feet, Allen has formed a pile of stones with his boots. He picks up one of the stones, tosses it in the air, and takes a swing with

his imaginary bat. “As a kid, I used to stand right here,” he tells me, “with a broomstick

in my hands. When I played imaginary ball, I was always the Dodgers. I would bat stones and work my way through the Dodger lineup—Reese, Fu- rillo, Snider, Hodges—waiting, just waiting, for his turn to come around.”

Allen pauses dramatically, then cups his hands to his mouth. “Now battting,” he says, imitating the stadium echo of a public address announcer. “For the Brook-lyn Dod-gers . . . num-ber four-tee-two . . .”

Dick Allen reaches down and picks up another pebble. “The Jackie Robinson stone,” he says, tossing the pebble in the air and catching it, “was always the one that broke a window.”59

When I was growing up there must have been millions of us who were right with Allen on this: that real players played real games in real stadiums was just a necessary evil so that the much purer game of imaginary base- ball could take place, in lots and yards across North America, especially in the pregnant hours after dinner, as dusk edged into darkness. This scene de- scribes much of my own childhood, though for me the Richie Allen stone was the window-breaker. (Well, our developing suburban neighborhood was still rural enough, the distances still great enough, that no windows were ever really in danger. Besides, I couldn’t hit that well. But one time when I was about nine, pretending to be Juan Marichal, pitching off the side of our brick garage and mowing down the hitters 1–2–3 through the

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innings—a real gem—in the top of the eighth I couldn’t resist giving up a home run to Richie Allen. Num-ber fiff-teeen. In my effort to recreate one of those awesome shots that cause opposing fielders immediately to slack their bodies and look skyward in resignation, I threw the ball too high against the wall, breaking the narrow pane of glass that ran the length of the garage just beneath the awning. Later, when my dad asked me if I knew anything about the broken window, I came this close to telling him Richie Allen did it.)

Why Allen would have idolized Jackie Robinson is pretty obvious, but how did I come to idolize Allen?

I had the 1965 Topps trading card of Allen—the Phillies flag in one cor- ner, the little Rookie of the Year statuette in the other—but my real intro- duction to him was a hero-worshipping book for kids, Great Rookies of the Major Leagues by Jim Brosnan. The chapter on Allen was enough to make a huge impression on an eight-year-old, but it was not exactly calculated to do so: for example, it included Philadelphia owner Bob Carpenter’s judg- ment, “Allen was the worst-looking infielder I ever saw. I thought he’d be killed by a ground ball.” This piece of baseball hagiography also featured a four-panel sequence of photographs depicting Allen letting a grounder pass between his legs. (The caption reads, “Allen’s uncertain fielding some- times offsets his great hitting. Here he reaches for a sharp grounder, searches for the ball and then turns to watch it roll into the outfield. A Braves runner . . . passes Allen to score on the play.”)60

When I was given the book as a gift (in 1966, I believe—the year of its publication), I adopted Allen as my hero at once. It may have been because I was enthralled by his appearance: the chapter itself goes into great detail on his powerful physique, and there is nothing in the photos of Roy Siev- ers, Herb Score, Frank Robinson, Tom Tresh, or Pete Rose that begins to compare with the pure poetry of form in some of the Allen photos—I see it this way even still. Or, it may have been because I identified with his much- discussed weakness as a fielder, and took special heart in the story of a player who was able to overcome his own limitations. If I were going to be- come a major leaguer (and who could doubt it?), my own path to glory would surely be strewn with similar obstacles, not to mention the qualms and denunciations of people like Bob Carpenter. Or it may have been that, as the fat kid with thick glasses whom everyone made fun of, I gravitated naturally toward the one figure in the book who was clearly being picked on. (“He . . . turns to watch it roll into the outfield.” It might have been a few more years before I could articulate this, but even at age eight I felt some version of hey, what the fuck, man?) Within two years—1968—when I was three seasons into my Richie Allen worship and Allen himself was get- ting more and more press for his off-field behavior, I understood exactly

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what it was that I was seeing. This was my education in U.S. race relations. In a 1970s routine about visiting Africa, Richard Pryor talks about

meeting people who are “so black” that it makes you want to say—and here he drops his voice to an awed whisper—“BLACK.” My neighborhood growing up was a lot like that, except in white. It was not the militant whiteness of South Boston (or Connie Mack Stadium); it was not even the least bit self-conscious. On the contrary, the neighborhood was so white as to suggest and naturalize the idea that people of color did not exist at all. Which is just to say, whatever I learned about racialized relations before going away to college in 1977, I certainly did not learn by firsthand en- counters. (Nearby Denver, ironically, was the AAA locale where the Min- nesota Twins banished black players as punishment for dating white women.61)

There is a longer-term history that is relevant here, because I did grow up in a liberal household in which civil rights sympathies were never in question. Since my father is a New York Jew, naturally we used to listen to Mahalia Jackson every year when we decorated the Christmas tree. He had grown up in the Bronx in the 1930s, and at age thirteen, the year he was not bar mitzvahed, he somehow discovered Harlem and jazz. Though his was probably not the kind of childhood that encouraged much fellow feeling with “the shvartzes” (to judge from my grandmother’s social out- look), from those early jam sessions onward, his glimpses of Harlem and his captivation by the black aesthetic of the jazz scene translated into a very particular social sensibility—a whole way of perceiving and under- standing the human virtues and various political categories like “decency.” This he tried to pass on to us, along with an appreciation for Louis Arm- strong. My mother, on the other hand, is a white Ohio Methodist, and her Tipp City upbringing could not have been much less white—or “WHITE”—than my own. But as theirs was what was called a “mixed marriage,” both of my parents had some experience with prejudice—their parents’, for example.

And so, with the Civil Rights movement rumbling in the distance throughout my childhood, and my parents’ attention to questions of “dif- ference” and justice remaining fairly salient, racial matters were not as far removed from my immediate experience as the demographics of my town would imply. I remember my father trying to explain the logic of King’s “passive resistance” to me at a time when, as a political philosopher, I was probably too young for anything beyond “impulsive vengeance.” My sis- ters and I got the liberal lecture on the stupidities of prejudice on the ride to Denver to see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. A bit later, it became a point of bedrock principle in our household that of course one would sup- port the Broncos’ Marlin Briscoe in his bid to become the NFL’s first black

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quarterback. (“He’s not all that good,” my best friend’s father said, “he’s just all that black.” The opinion was offered up too gruffly not to be sus- pect, even to a ten-year-old.)

But what strikes me in retrospect is how indirect my political education was, for the most part. Straight talk like the Guess Who’s Coming to Din- ner lecture was the exception, not the norm, as was my fourth-grade teacher Miss Harms’ very interesting prediction of racial retribution in the wake of the King assassination. When I think closely, I recognize that at the time I did not actually see much—or any—of the Civil Rights imagery that now occupies my “memory” of the era—Bull Connor’s German Shepherds and fire hoses, the flames at Ole Miss, even the “I Have a Dream” speech. The balcony of that Memphis hotel I think I did see for myself on TV in 1968; but most of the rest of it is later documentary footage, not actual memory.

My teaching has been animated by Stuart Hall’s dictum that social sub- jects “are unable to speak, to act in one way or another, until they have been positioned by the work that culture does.” It is culture above all that outfits us to behave politically in certain ways and not in others—culture is politics by other means.62 But rarely have I asked the question: If I was just coming to consciousness during the Civil Rights years, what was I learning and how was I taking it in? America’s liberal culture was undoubtedly teaching a lot, though it may not always have been teaching liberality. The most potent message of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for instance, does not involve our common humanity across the color line, but rather a nat- ural submission to the authority of the Great White Father (in this case Spencer Tracy): ultimately nobody can make a move without his approval. Shows like Love American Style and Barefoot in the Park taught that black is indeed beautiful—as long as it’s almost white. The affable Johnny Car- son taught that candor is hip and that racist stereotypes can be funny—as when he joked that there could never be a black quarterback because there were not seven white guys who would turn their backs on him at the line of scrimmage, “especially during a night game.”

On the other hand, anti-authoritarianism was occupying an increas- ingly significant place in the dominant culture—I think of Cat Ballou, Bon- nie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, and a host of other films from my childhood in which bad guys were the good guys and good guys were the bad guys. Perhaps this strain in the culture outfit- ted me with a useful skepticism toward the media’s own claims regarding the badness of the black radical; perhaps it was this strain that equipped me to sympathize with a bad boy like Richie Allen, doing battle with “the man” in the white front office and the white press. How far is it from the unorthodox authoritarianism of The Mod Squad to the unorthodox anti-

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authoritarianism—consciously “raced” or not—of Richie Allen, Cookie Gilchrist, the Smothers Brothers, Jim Bouton?

During these years—confusing enough even for many adults, I am sure— baseball addressed my childhood confusions in a pre-verbal but nonetheless poetic and incandescent language. (By “baseball,” I mean the whole cos- mos—the games themselves, the lineups, the sports page, the fan reactions, the hypnotizing photographs, the piles of adoring books, the Topps cards, the on- and off-field lore in Sport, Sporting News, Sports Illustrated.) “I can’t say it was because of the bombs and the Bull Connors that black players tore up the National League in 1963,” writes Hank Aaron, “but I can’t say it wasn’t either.”63 On a particularly fierce streak in the summer of 1968, Bob Gibson, too, writes: “I really can’t say, in retrospect, whether Robert Kennedy’s as- sassination is what got me going or not. Without a doubt, it was an angry point in American history for black people—Dr. King’s killing had jolted me; Kennedy’s infuriated me—and without a doubt, I pitched better angry. I sus- pect that the control of my slider had more to do with it than anything, but I can’t completely dismiss the fact that nobody gave me any shit whatsoever for about two months after Bobby Kennedy died.”64

Aaron and Gibson might rightly have claimed the whole decade for black dominance, not just the isolated moments of 1963 and 1968. (Take the offensive statistic for total bases, the most dramatic instance: from 1960 to 1969 white players made it into the National League’s top three exactly once—Pete Rose was third in 1968. Aaron, Banks, Mays, Cepeda, Robin- son, Pinson, Allen, Williams, Alou, Clemente, Brock, McCovey, and Perez account for the other twenty-nine top-three finishes.65) But in any case, from the suburban picture window of Boulder, Colorado, the ball field and The Movement read as being intimately connected. “Baseball was socially relevant,” wrote Curt Flood, “and so was my rebellion against it.”66 This is a lesson I imbibed fundamentally but wordlessly between 1966 and 1969. The hateful, swirling “nigger, nigger, nigger” that Lee Vilensky heard in Connie Mack Stadium, and Richie Allen’s cold, angry drubbing of the ball in response, was a social drama that was integral, if only implicitly so, to the game-within-the-game of 1960s baseball as I watched it on Game of the Week every Saturday.

For one thing, while Gibson, Aaron, Allen, and others may have been playing “angry,” they looked to me, above all else, to be simply serious; and the regular access that baseball afforded to African American seriousness was no small thing. The seriousness of King and the historic moment came across in the chatter and hum of the adult world around me and in head- lines to stories that I knew vaguely about but did not exactly read. People like Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll also made an impression. But base- ball occupied my mind 162 days of the year; and unique among the major

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sports, baseball games unfolded at a contemplative pace that was well-suited to conveying the force of an athlete’s character—neither concealing it behind the armor of the NFL nor blurring it in the flying speed of the NBA.

“Quiet dignity” is almost certainly a racist construction—or at least a racialized one—as the phrase never appears in connection with white people, I notice; and it probably dates from a period when “quiet,” from Negroes, was especially prized in U.S. culture. But nonetheless, something like “quiet dignity” is a part of what the 1.5 generation of black stars communicated to me, at once a contrast and an antidote to the vapid dronings-on of play-by-play announcers like Curt Gowdy and Joe Gara- giola; and the “dignity” in the equation tended to keep their “quiet” from coming across as anything like accommodation. The intensity of concen- tration—the intensity of mind—evident in the expressions and small ritu- als of Gibson on the mound, Flood or Robinson at the plate, silently but decisively dismantled any facile cracker assertions about the brutish ca- pacities of “the Negro.” That Solly Hemus or the white fans in various Sally League locations had either failed to acknowledge this, or, perhaps, had not allowed themselves to see it in the first place, just goes to show how desperate they were.

But if baseball held the power to dislodge the slanders of racism, so did it have a tendency to generate some slanders of its own—the denigrating trope of the black athlete’s “natural gift” is only one among many. “Hang- ing around baseball, as I have been doing,” wrote Donald Hall in the 1970s, “I don’t see racism in management, in coaching, or in the front of- fice. Reading the newspapers of Detroit and Chicago and Boston and New York, I see it every day.” The list of the “Most Unpopular Sports Figures, in the last decade or two,” he points out, “is largely black”—a younger Muhammad Ali, Duane Thomas, Dick Allen, Alex Johnson.67

This is where Allen was so significant to me, not just as a personal idol but as a social emblem: the dissonance between what I felt about Allen and what the press reported about him became so taut as to snap my youthful ingenuousness, because to me Allen was clearly a figure of dignity, too, no less than Gibson or Aaron or Brock or Clemente. I was too young by about one season to catch and appreciate the Frank Thomas incident and Allen’s initial falling-out with the press; but it was a stunning and deflating lesson to me when, in 1967, the media so openly questioned Allen’s “claim” to have injured his hand while pushing his car, and when in 1968 and 1969, they so openly denounced him—not just as an outlier (on the order, say, of Jay Johnstone)—but as someone uncontrolled and uncontrollable, a kind of pre-criminal, when he missed a plane to St. Louis or showed up late to Shea. In his paean to Allen, “Letters in the Dirt,” folksinger Chuck Brodsky—another white kid of almost exactly

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my vintage—reflects upon the racial dimension, as he saw it, in Allen’s treatment by the fans and by the press: “He stood a bit outside the lines which / made him fair game for those times / Richie Allen never kissed / a white man’s ass.”68 This is precisely the conclusion I came to myself, sometime around the age of ten.

Hindsight, of course, clarifies some things but hopelessly clouds others. Knowing what I now do about the 1960s, about racism, about the Move- ment, and about Allen himself, can I recover with any certainty the Richie Allen who occupied my imagination in 1970, when the Cardinals’ road schedule and my family’s summer vacation intersected for a moment at a day game in San Diego? Can I see my young self any more clearly than I see Allen? Allen would not answer, or even look up, when I called out to him from behind the Cardinal dugout after infield practice, but I had not expected it to go any differently. I bore him no grudge for ignoring me, nor did it di- minish in the least the magic of seeing him in person. Did I see the situation as “racial?” Did I see myself white standing there—another white fan, per- haps, from Allen’s point of view, who might meet his glance with an insult or an AA battery—another white boy who had been taught by some jeering peckerwood how to boo? I believe I did, because for one thing, this was one of the very first times I had ever addressed an African American directly; it is doubtful that I was unaware of my whiteness and his blackness, notwith- standing the era’s liberal bromides on the virtue of being colorblind. And for another thing, even if I did not know his precise thinking on “Whitey’s ways,” I had figured out some things by watching Allen and his career from afar. I understood at least dimly the burden in our exchange; and, rightly or not, in an inarticulate way I felt his rebuff to concern not me, exactly, but the larger web of relationships ensnaring us both. I had entered history, in other words, and this was perhaps the first time in my eleven years that I was aware of it. At least it seems so to me now. (See figures 1.1 and 1.2.)

After the ’60s crested and began to recede, the culture was hungry for emblems of reconciliation; the Richie Allen narrative was conveniently pressed into service. Following his bitter years in Philadelphia, and two years of marked underappreciation in St. Louis and Los Angeles, Allen landed in a brief dream sequence with the Chicago White Sox. Not only did he put up the kind of numbers in 1972 that the best of his early years had promised (.308, 37 HR, 113 RBI), but in Comiskey Park he found a wel- coming and comfortable home. The difference, according to Allen, was White Sox manager Chuck Tanner: “He’s from home and he’s like a brother.” (The two knew each other from the old days in Pennsylvania— Tanner’s hometown of New Castle is about seven miles from Allen’s Wampum—and they often called each other “Homey,” which perhaps hints at Allen’s intended meaning in the phrase “like a brother.”) Tanner thought

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1.1 Allen heads for the dugout after infield practice, ignoring my calls from the stands. Old habits die hard: note that Allen wears a batting helmet in the field, even far removed from the projectiles of Connie Mack Stadium. Photo: Jerry Jacobson

1.2 “Dick Allen and me in San Diego, summer 1970. Allen is the distant figure directly above my left hand. The glasses make me look like Pirate pitcher Bob Veale, don’t you think?” Photo: Jerry Jacobson

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41“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME

Allen “not only the best player in the American League, but the best in the majors . . . When he’s through with the White Sox, he’s going to walk right into the Hall of Fame.”69 Tanner thought that Chicagoans ought to build a monument to Dick Allen.

The manager’s appreciation for Allen transcended baseball by a long way. “He has a magnetism,” said Tanner, “—like Clark Gable, say, or Marilyn Monroe.”70 This is an astonishing thing to say: daring to compare the appeal of a black man to the enchantment of these white icons—and one of them a beauty queen at that—strikes me as more radical in its way than anything Allen ever thought up in defiance of Whitey. This is a world, after all, where black and white ballplayers are rarely compared: even in the cosmos of sports talk today, Griffey might remind people of Mays, for in- stance, but certainly not of Mantle; and McGwire is said to have hit “with Frank Howard-type power.” Orval Faubus could do no better in segregat- ing our common conceptions of who is “like” whom; and yet Tanner spot- ted Dick Allen’s similarities to Marilyn Monroe. We probably ought to build a monument to him.

From Allen’s White Sox years onward, the baseball establishment fell in love with the story of its own acceptance of Allen, even if it did not quite learn to love the ballplayer himself as Chuck Tanner did. (He never did come near the Hall of Fame, for instance.) But Allen “is a man who marches to his own wry drummer,” reported Sports Illustrated in 1972. “On the day his teammates were going out on strike, Allen signed his 1972 contract.”71 “His own wry drummer” is a far cry from the portrait of the trouble-making militant that had predominated in the coverage of Allen as a Philly. After Chicago, the press began to find something lov- ably quirky in Allen’s history of unorthodoxies; but more important, the press seemed to find something laudable in its own warming up to Allen: it was as if, in embracing Allen, the white sports establishment could at once prove and celebrate just how far it had come. “He wrote dismissive notes to his general manager in the base-path dirt with his foot!” com- mented Sports Illustrated in tones of mock scandal in 1973. “What kind of man would do a thing like that? And why didn’t anybody think of it before?”72 Now Allen was “a team player who has bounced around . . . a mentor to the young, a seasoned veteran whom managements have seen as a discipline problem. The more you learn about Allen from out- side sources,” remarked Sports Illustrated, “the more he swims before you.” Even the press’s conventional disregard for Allen’s point of view began to shift: as SI now described it, when Allen entered pro ball, “First thing, his name got changed . . . he did not care to be issued a new name by an organization.”73 Dick “Don’t Call Me Richie” Allen suddenly seemed fairly reasonable.

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America’s favorite Dick Allen story is the one about how he got a standing ovation when he returned to the Phillies in 1975. Although he found himself “wondering where all the brothers had gone” as he looked around the Phillies’ new, suburban ballpark, evidently Allen is fond of this one, too. “Things had changed,” he wrote, “ . . . blacks were beginning to run the city. In the old days, I represented a threat to white people in Philadelphia. I wore my hair in an Afro. I said what was on my mind. I did- n’t take shit. But now, like the rest of the country, Philadelphia had come around to accepting that things had changed and were going to keep chang- ing, like it or not.”74 The movement, had, after all, accomplished some things; the logic and the accepted idioms of American race consciousness had shifted significantly; the terms of sports celebrity, too, had changed, un- orthodoxy taking its place among the new orthodoxies—Jim Bouton, Joe Namath, Rosey Grier, Steve Carlton, Bill Lee. Perhaps Dick Allen had merely been a few years ahead of the curve, and there was no depth to the tragedy of his Philadelphia story after all. Many found it comforting to think so.

And yet the reconciliation narrative—the Allen/Philadelphia story, and the national healing for which it is an implied allegory—cannot plow under all the chicken bones, the bolts, and the batteries that rained onto the field in those earlier years in Philadelphia, nor can it wipe from memory Allen’s whimsical sorrow songs, the letters in the dirt. Perhaps this is why the player who had integrated professional baseball in Orval Faubus’ Arkansas and who had later distinguished himself as one of the most powerful hitters in the Major Leagues, expressed elation in 1987—as if finally receiving af- firmation—when aging Negro star Cool Papa Bell pronounced that he in- deed would have had what it takes to make it in the Negro Leagues. Inverting the conventional storyline of baseball aspiration and fulfillment, a buoyant Allen exclaimed, “He said I could have been one of them. . . . He said I had power and I could run, the two most important requirements in Negro League baseball.” Even he recognized the irony in his being “a big leaguer who felt like he lost out because he never got a chance to play in the Negro Leagues.”75 This is not to paint Allen as a victim of desegrega- tion. But his implied daydream about being “one of them,” a Negro League star, does say a bit about the operations of race in the game, even two decades after Jackie Robinson had broken down the color barrier. “People said there was one set of rules for me and another for the rest of the team,” Allen once said, reflecting on his image as the Phillies’ troublemaker. “When I was coming up, black players couldn’t stay in the same hotel or eat in the same places as whites. Two sets of rules? Baseball set the tone.”76

This is the political lesson that Allen’s career had been teaching all along: desegregation did not come off as advertised.

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Notes

1. Dick Allen and Tim Whitaker, Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), xvii; “Dick Allen,” in BaseballLibrary.Com/ baseballlibrary/ballplayers/A/Allen_Dick.stm; Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 105; William Kashatus, September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 191.

2. “Dick Allen,” in BasballLibrary.Com; Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970; June 12, 1972.

3. John Thorn, Pete Palmer, Michael Gershman, Total Baseball: The Official En- cyclopedia of Major League Baseball [Seventh Edition] (Kingston, NY: Total Sports, 2001), 158.

4. Hank Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler, I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 334–335.

5. Bob Gibson with Lonnie Wheeler, Stranger to the Game: The Autobiography of Bob Gibson (New York: Viking, 1994), 224.

6. Willie Stargell and Tom Bird, Willie Stargell, an Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 168.

7. New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1989, Sec. 7, 36–37. 8. Ebony, Oct. 1972, 192. 9. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 186.

10. Roger Angell, “Distance” [1980], in Game Time (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 208.

11. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 53. 12. David Wolf, “Let’s Everybody Boo Rich Allen,” Life, Aug. 22, 1969, 50.

Folksinger Chuck Brodsky’s “Letters in the Dirt” is a paean to Allen and his infield writing. Baseball Ballads, chuckbrodsky.com, 2002.

13. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 209. See also Jules Tygiel, “Black Ball: The Integrated Game,” in Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska/Bison, 2002), 104–117. Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy [1983] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) remains the standard in the field on the early period of integrated ball.

14. David Halberstam, October ’64 (New York: Fawcett, 1994), 113. 15. Frank Robinson and Barry Stanback, Extra Innings (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1988), 23, 26. 16. Donald Hall with Dock Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 123, 128. 17. Halberstam, October ’64, 203; Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 58. 18. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 55, 56. 19. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 79. 20. John Roseboro with Bill Libby, Glory Days with the Dodgers and Other

Days with Others (New York: Atheneum, 1978), 54–55; Felipe Alou with Herm Weiskopf, My Life and Baseball (Waco, TX: Word, 1967), 29. (Even

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44 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

so, writing in 1967 the highly conservative Alou averred that the urban up- risings were inspired by communist agitators, 103.)

21. Curt Flood with Richard Carter, The Way It Is (New York: Trident, 1971), 38; Samuel Regalado, Viva Baseball! Latin Major Leaguers and Their Special Hunger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 66, 67.

22. Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 52–53; Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92; Hall and Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, 134; Orlando Cepeda with Herb Fagen, Baby Bull: From Hardball to Hard Time and Back (Dallas: Tay- lor Publishing, 1998), 74–75; Kashatus, September Swoon, 113; Regalado, Viva Baseball!, 84–87.

23. Halberstam, October ’64, 151. 24. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 11–14; Kashatus, September Swoon, 45. 25. Ebony, July, 1970, 90. 26. Quoted in Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 111. 27. Bruce Kuklick, To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia,

1909–1976 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 145–148; Kashatus, September Swoon, 9–37; Bryant, Shut Out, 5; David Faulkner, Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson from Baseball to Birming- ham (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 163–164; Tom McGrath, “Color Me Badd,” The Fan, September, 1996, 39.

28. Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska/Bison, 2003), 67.

29. Kuklick, To Everything a Season, 155–156, 158; Early, This Is Where I Came In, 70–71.

30. Kuklick, To Everything a Season, 155–156; Early, This Is Where I Came In, 75–89; Kashatus, September Swoon, 76–80, 111–113.

31. Sports Illustrated, June 1, 1970, 40; Kashatus, September Swoon, 54. 32. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 111; Kashatus, September Swoon, 82. See

also William Kashatus, “Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism,” Nine, Fall 2000, 151. On Allen’s general mistreatment by the press, see Craig Wright, “Dick Allen: Another View” (originally published in SABR magazine), posted at www.expressfan.com/dickallenhof/docs/defense.pdf.

33. Kashatus, September Swoon, 80. 34. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 4. 35. See “The Thomas Incident, July 1965” in Kashatus, “Dick Allen, the Phillies,

and Racism,” and Kashatus, September Swoon, 149–157; Sports Illustrated, Sept 10, 1973, 111; Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 1–10.

36. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 58–59, 10; Leonard Schechter, “Richie Allen and the Use of Power,” Sport, July, 1967, 66.

37. Newsweek, July 8, 1968, 52; Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 111; Kashatus, September Swoon, 155–156.

38. Kashatus, September Swoon, 172. 39. Don Malcolm, “The Angry Negro Problem,” Baseball Primer: Baseball for the

Thinking Fan, www.baseballprimer.com/articles/malcolm_2001–03–05_0.shtml. 40. Kashatus, September Swoon, 160.

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41. Newsweek, July 8, 1968, 52. 42. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 107. 43. Jim Bouton, Ball Four [1970] (New York: Wiley, 1990), 393; Kashatus, Sep-

tember Swoon, 189. 44. Bouton, Ball Four, ix. 45. This is the Richie Allen canon. See Allen and Whitaker, Crash, and Kashatus,

September Swoon (Mauch quoted 166). New York Times, Aug. 23, 1968, 79; July 3, 1969, 35.

46. “Richie Allen is Not All Bad Boy,” New York Times, May 18, 1969; Ebony, July 1970, 92.

47. Kashatus, September Swoon, 171; New York Times, “Sports of the Times,” June 25, 1968; Newsweek, May 19, 1975, 58; Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1972, 83; Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970, 18; April 29, 1974, 19; July 19, 1999, 19.

48. Bill Conlin, “Richie Is Beautiful. He Don’t Give a Damn for Nobody,” Jock, January 1970, 88; Sports Illustrated, May 19, 1975, 59.

49. Afro-American, July 13, 1968, 13. 50. Ebony, July, 1970, 89, 90, 92, 93. 51. Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970, 21. 52. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 188. 53. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 139. 54. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 206; Halberstam, October ’64, 364. 55. Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 219; Sports Illustrated, March 23,

1970, 22. 56. Kuklick, To Everything a Season, 163. 57. See “Oppositional Identity” in Kashatus, “Dick Allen, the Phillies, and

Racism”; Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1972, 84. 58. Lee Vilensky, “Ode to Dick Allen,” Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Re-

view, Vol. 20, number 3, www.efqreview.com/NewFiles/v20n3/dustofthefields- two.html.

59. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 40. 60. Jim Brosnan, Great Rookies of the Major Leagues (New York: Random

House, 1966), 165–167. 61. Roseboro and Libby, Glory Days with the Dodgers, 232. 62. Stuart Hall, “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities,” in Wahneema

Lubiano, ed., The House that Race Built (New York: Vintage, 1998), 291. 63. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 231. 64. Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 188. 65. Thorn, Palmer, and Gershman, Total Baseball, 2204–2222. 66. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 16. 67. Hall and Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, 177. 68. Brodsky “Letters in the Dirt,” The Baseball Ballads (Weaverville, NC: chuck-

brodsky.com, 2002), track 5. 69. Sports Illustrated, June 5, 1972, 64. 70. Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1974, 20. 71. Sports Illustrated, June 5, 1972, 64. 72. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 107.

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73. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 108, 110. 74. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 159–160. 75. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 85. 76. Sports Illustrated, July 19, 1993, 84.

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TWO

In Sports the Best Man Wins

How Joe Louis Whupped Jim Crow

Theresa E. Runstedtler

A single column cannot begin to describe the feeling of the man of color who watches a brown-skinned boy like Joe Louis, from Alabama, the most backward State in the Union, fight his way up from the coal mine and the cotton field through strength of his body and mind.

—Ted Benson, Sunday Worker, reprinted in Pittsburgh Courier, February 29, 1936

American Hero or Race Man?

On June 22, 1938, when Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, won a decisive, first-round knockout in his revenge match against Nazi-promoted Max Schmeling, white America embraced the black heavyweight champion as a national hero. Amid increasing reports of Hitler’s imperialistic aggres- sion and persecution of the Jews, the mainstream white press highlighted the bout’s worldwide implications, claiming Louis’s triumph as an Amer- ican victory in the larger fight against fascism. As Heywood Broun of the New York World-Telegram mused, “One hundred years from now some historian may theorize, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi

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prestige began with the left hook of a former unskilled autoworker.”1 In- spiring more than just a mere footnote, Louis’s 1938 win expanded into a celebrated epic of American patriotism and democracy. Brimming with postwar confidence in 1947, Louis’s close friend, Frank Sinatra, de- clared: “If I were the government official responsible for the job of mak- ing the rest of the world understand our national character and the ideals that motivate us, I would certainly make use of the case history of Joe Louis.”2

However well-known the narrative of Louis as the quintessential U.S. citizen became, another story, one that white America and history have overlooked, meant more to African Americans in the 1930s: Joe Louis as Race Man. That Louis earned the customary title of “Race Man” was a mark of high distinction, since this phrase had long been reserved for men who best exemplified racial progress and leadership in areas like business, academics, and politics.3 Writing for the New Masses in 1938, a skeptical Richard Wright derided the Louis-Schmeling fight as “a colorful puppet show, one of the greatest dramas of make-believe ever witnessed in Amer- ica.”4 For Wright, the real significance of Louis lay not in his dubious sta- tus as a national hero, but in his ability to inspire the black masses. Three years earlier, in September 1935, when Louis garnered a swift victory over Jewish American Max Baer in front of 90,000 fans at Yankee Stadium, Wright described the “religious feeling in the air” on Chicago’s South Side, where over twenty thousand “Negroes poured out of beer taverns, pool rooms, barber shops, rooming houses and dingy flats and flooded the streets.” With Louis’s win over Baer “something had ripped loose, ex- ploded,” claimed Wright, allowing “four centuries of oppression, of frus- trated hopes, of black bitterness” to rise to the surface. Louis was “a consciously-felt symbol . . . the concentrated essence of black triumph over white.”5

Wright was certainly not alone in recognizing Louis’s influence as the period’s iconic New Negro. African Americans’ limited access to legal and political channels of protest meant that sports, and in particular boxing, became one of the preeminent mass media through which they articulated their conflict with the racial status quo. Until 1947, when Jackie Robin- son joined baseball’s Major League, boxing was the only professional sport that allowed whites and blacks to compete in the same arena. More- over, in this individual sport of hand-to-hand combat, fighters emerged as contested symbols of race, manhood, and nation among the American masses. By 1933 Louis was already a fixture in the black press, supplying African Americans with the cultural ammunition to critique their persis- tent lack of democratic rights and dignity. Louis graced the front page of the Chicago Defender more times than any other black figure during the

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Depression, including Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie.6 Not only did his life story become the focal point of sports and human-interest sections in various weekly newspapers, but his pugilistic exploits sparked larger de- bates about black representation as editorialists evaluated his role in racial advancement.

As the dawn of the New Negro era symbolized the race’s passage into “the sunlight of real manhood,” Louis’s well-documented whupping of Jim Crow provided a public outlet for diverse expressions of black struggle across the socioeconomic and political spectrum.7 The term “New Negro,” meaning a progressive, politically savvy African American, initially emerged from the turn-of-the-century writings of Booker T. Washington.8

However, black participation in World War I in tandem with the Great Mi- gration of African Americans to northern cities like New York and Chicago had a radicalizing effect, infusing the New Negro movement with a height- ened sense of militancy, urgency, and racial pride. In revisiting the Harlem Renaissance, historians have begun to expand on its traditional interpreta- tion as a middle-class, bourgeois literary movement to uncover the various facets of New Negro activism from black theater companies to leftist inter- nationalism.9 The sport of boxing offered yet another arena in which New Negroes could express their racial militancy, albeit vicariously, through the hard punches and prosperous lifestyle of men like Joe Louis. Indeed, the ris- ing figure of Joe Louis gave the masculine New Negro ideal unprecedented, mass appeal.

A detailed analysis of Louis’s coming of age in his first major profes- sional fight against Mussolini’s darling, Primo Carnera, on the eve of the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian conflict, capped off with a suggestive re-reading of his well-known loss to Max Schmeling in 1936, not only uncovers how dis- cussions of black manhood dominated both domestic and diasporic resis- tance strategies, but also helps to explain the historical emergence of the male sports celebrity as an integral symbol of black success in the twenti- eth century.10 The Louis-Carnera match takes center stage, since most ac- counts have tended to downplay its significance as a matter of coincidental timing in which foreign affairs overlapped with box-office promotion. However, a close examination of the riotous celebrations Louis inspired, along with his mass representation in the black and leftist presses, pho- tographs, fight films, and blues songs, reveals that African Americans ac- tively fashioned him as a Race Man, using him to fight racism and fascism on two fronts—at home and abroad.11 Taken from this vantage point, the Louis story obliges historians to expand their understandings of the New Negro’s popular dimensions as a cultural conduit through which African Americans of the 1930s continued to address the interlocking questions of race, gender, nation, and class.

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Biography of a Race

Triumphant tales of the young boxer’s rise to fistic fame filled the pages of black and young communist publications, along with mass-circulated bi- ographies. Even though each had a differing agenda, they all spun his life story into a kind of utopian biography of the race. While the sympathetic white writer Edward Van Every engaged in hyperbole when he claimed the boxer’s life made “story book tales of fight heroes seem tame,” the popu- lar depictions of Louis’s struggles from southern sharecropper to northern migrant to industrial worker to successful boxer must have resonated with the experiences of many of his African American fans.12 Providing a myth- ical link that connected an oppressive black rural “past” with the promise of a prosperous urban future, the young boxer’s personal story defied re- gional, class, and even generational boundaries to offer an accessible, yet decidedly masculine vision of collective progress.

According to the composite story that emerged in the black press, Joe Louis Barrow was born on May 13, 1914, in Lafayette, Alabama, the sev- enth of eight children in a sharecropping family. In 1926, Louis and his kin joined the Great Migration to the North, settling in one of Detroit’s black ghettos. Soon after their arrival, twelve-year-old Louis developed his young muscles in a part-time job delivering ice to the city’s wealthier citizens. Trained in cabinetry at the Bronson Vocational School, Louis later worked at the Ford plant right up until he joined the ranks of professional boxing.13

As the papers revealed, Louis had honed his fighting skills at Detroit’s Brewster Recreation Center during his teenage years. By the time he won the national Amateur Athletic Union light heavyweight championship in April 1934, the youthful pugilist had participated in fifty-four bouts, win- ning forty-three of them by knockout, thereby garnering the support of the African American management team of John Roxborough, Julian Black, and Jack Blackburn. Writers bragged that at twenty-one, Louis was already two hundred pounds, standing six feet, one and a half inches tall, with fif- teen-inch biceps.14 Showcasing his muscular physique, groomed hair, and boyish smile, the black press helped mold him into a statue of strength and charm that appealed to men, women, and children.

Even the Young Worker, an interracial communist organ, included fre- quent reports on Louis that tended to cast him as an exemplary African American worker. As one journalist related, “He was born in the slums of Birmingham, Ala. When only a mere lad, he carried cakes of ice to eke out a living. He worked in King Henry Ford’s plant in Detroit. Always on the fringe of starvation, he learned how to struggle for self-preservation.” Im- buing Louis with a black labor consciousness, the writer continued, “He can see that as a worker, he will end up just where he started from, in the

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51IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS

slums, because of the widespread discrimination that is practiced against his race.”15 Portraying him as an everyday man with “a chance to cash in on his skillful dukes,” the Young Worker used Louis to not only advance a positive image of African Americans to white youth, but also to show black workers that they did not have to give up their race heroes to join the com- munist ranks. White and black laborers both could rally around this male protagonist.

By the time Louis entered the ring against Primo Carnera in June 1935, his humble beginnings and subsequent climb to international success had taken on an epic quality, as sympathetic journalists fashioned his biography into the ultimate story of racial and economic uplift. In an era when images of bumbling Sambos, feminized male minstrels, and confused primitives still held currency, Louis’s public personification of forcefulness and fair- ness, virility and respectability, stylishness and responsibility, resonated with popular understandings of manhood, civilization, and modernity. Thus, from the footnotes of the well-known narrative of Louis as American hero emerges not only the buried history of a black diasporic icon, but also a larger story about the intersection of gender and resistance in America’s race wars.

From Uncle Tom to New Negro

Writing in the New York Amsterdam News, editorialist Theophilus Lewis dubbed Joe Louis a “Boxing Business Man.” Lewis praised him as a model of mature focus, telling readers, “Joe Louis prefers to be Joe Louis and not what white people think Joe Louis should be. Professional boxing is his chosen road to success.” As Lewis continued, “A man’s success is not a playful matter—it is a serious business. He refuses to pretend it is a pas- time, a sort of youthful prelude to mature living.”16 Despite the obvious passion and respect with which Louis’s African American contemporaries followed his career, sports historiography, much like popular memory, has tended to overlook black representations of Louis. For the most part, scholars’ focus on mainstream daily newspaper accounts has skewed their assessments of him as a moderate and even ineffectual figure of white cooptation.17 While several historians challenge this “Uncle Tom” cri- tique, most still emphasize Louis’s contributions as a crossover American hero, without deconstructing whites’ and blacks’ differing perceptions of his cultural and political importance.18 Overall, these approaches obscure the reality that various segments of black America acknowledged and even lauded Louis’s accomplishments, fashioning him as a gendered expression of public resistance.

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Louis’s folk hero status relied, in large part, on his masculine embodi- ment of the period’s shifting constructions of black identity and advance- ment. Just ten years earlier, in the opening essay of The New Negro, scholar Alain Locke had declared that “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on,” and now the “American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro.” According to Locke, despite African Americans’ continued exclu- sion from the rights of full citizenship, they could still “celebrate the at- tainment of a significant . . . phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.”19 As Louis rose in the ranks of professional box- ing alongside this collective rite of passage, racial progress became increas- ingly conflated with the redemption of black manhood.

African Americans had long deployed masculine constructions of pow- erful blackness to confront what historian Gail Bederman describes as the Progressives’ tradition of weaving race and gender into a web of white male supremacy. According to popular, early-twentieth-century thought, one could determine a group’s civilization based on their extent of sexual dif- ferentiation. In keeping with this pseudoscientific doctrine, black men and women were supposedly identical, while the patriarchal organization of the “civilized” white race signified that they were not only the furthest along in the Darwinist chain of evolution, but also uniquely capable of wielding po- litical authority and exercising the rights of citizenship.20 According to his- torian Barbara Melosh, the economic difficulties of the Depression helped to reify this overall paradigm of white male supremacy. Concerns over fam- ily stability and conflicts over female labor led to the retrenchment of white patriarchy after the gender subversions of the 1920s such as the passing of the 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage, the rise of the assertive New Woman, and the racy culture of the flapper.21 Not surprisingly, as whites continued to articulate their racial supremacy through an assertion of male control, many African Americans attempted to prove their equality using resistance strategies that embraced male dominance.

Even though the African American political and intellectual movements of the 1930s shared a common focus on promoting the legitimacy of black manhood, New Negro activists, by no means, agreed on a standardized de- finition of its cultural, political, and economic terms. Instead, they har- nessed and shaped gendered discourses to suit not only their differing philosophical and tactical aims, but also their varied constituents. While es- tablished organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had long appropriated the white Victorian principles of patriarchy, propriety, industry, and thrift as the foundation for black advancement, Harlem’s up-and-coming cadre of New Negro writers and poets began to challenge these rigid ideals by exploring

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homosocial bonds and masculine pursuits beyond the realm of bourgeois domesticity.22 In turn, the public assertion of militant black manhood be- came a rallying cry for the emerging politics of collective race and class protest led by groups like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and the Communist Party.23 Whether they worked within the framework of American democratic ideals, or rejected their hypocrisy, African American activists of the 1930s used manhood as a mobilizing force.

As different sectors of black society claimed Louis as one of their own, his public representation came to embody the class and generational ten- sions surrounding Depression-era articulations of black manhood. On the one hand, the period’s constructions of black manliness incorporated the contradictory ideals of savagery and civilization, as metaphors of battle and physical prowess existed alongside discussions of intelligence, artistry, and respectability. On the other hand, the New Negro movement also signaled a nascent shift toward a more modern sense of masculinity grounded less in middle-class notions of gentility, and expressed through recreational pur- suits, the conspicuous consumption of mass-marketed commodities, and the open display of bodily might and sexual virility.24 The popular celebra- tion of Louis as Race Man connected these gendered imaginings of black- ness with the spirit of the masses. This was not a solo performance on the part of Louis, but rather a collective spectacle involving a complex process of negotiation among his body of black supporters.

However, even as one uncovers Louis’s significance as the quintessen- tial New Negro of the 1930s, the inherent dangers of a masculinist critique of racism inevitably rise to the surface. Trapped in a paradox, Louis, his black fans, and members of the black press challenged white superiority by engaging the same constructions of patriarchal authority that were simul- taneously confirming their racial inferiority. Not only did they ultimately legitimize existing power relations, but their male-centered modes of resis- tance also pushed black women to the periphery of the struggle.

Boxing’s New Negro Comes of Age

When Louis celebrated his twenty-first birthday on May 13, 1935, the black press urged his African American fans to pay tribute to his work as “a ster- ling young fighter, a gentleman and sportsman.” In calling Louis “the finest type of American manhood,” they granted him two labels that blackness did not usually allow.25 On the front-page of the Pittsburgh Courier sports sec- tion, one writer declared, “Joe Louis, you are a man now. . . . [O]nly a step across the threshold of boyhood, the hopes of a race and the best wishes of a nation are with you.” Recognizing Louis’s importance as an emblematic

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figure through which gender and race coalesced in a narrative of black progress, the writer warned the young fighter to “live a clean, honest life . . . and always remember that your very qualities of modesty and manliness are the things which bring thousands of people to see you fight.”26 In empha- sizing Louis’s own coming of age as a man, black journalists exposed the collective focus on questions of black manhood.

In the buildup to his bout against Primo Carnera, the black press pro- moted Louis’s redemptive and unifying mission in what some were dubbing the “battle of the century.” With bold optimism, one writer in the Pitts- burgh Courier maintained that Louis would defend successfully “the ardent hopes of more than twelve million Americans” when he stepped into the ring at Yankee Stadium. Another pre-fight feature in the Chicago Defender named Louis the most “outstanding Race athlete of the past 30 years,” cit- ing his unprecedented ability to draw black fans to the box office. In the month preceding the fight, Harlem buzzed with expectant energy as African Americans of all ages kept Louis as their favorite topic. The New York Age even noted that “women from all walks of life, some who had never taken any interest in fights,” prayed for a race victory in the ring.27

As widespread interest in the Louis-Carnera match cut across racial lines, many African Americans relished the fact that the black fighter’s rise was revitalizing the entire boxing industry after years of sparse ticket sales.28 In a bid to bring Louis closer to a title bout, his African American managers, Roxborough and Black, had formed a pragmatic alliance with Mike Jacobs, an influential Jewish American promoter. Jacobs held a vir- tual monopoly of the industry, organizing major heavyweight events in con- junction with the Hearst Milk Fund for Babies, a New York charity run by the wife of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.29

Even though Louis was already a superstar in the black press, Jacobs “introduced” the young fighter to white America. A public relations mas- termind, he hired press agents like black journalist Russell Cowans to crank out daily media releases for white and black newspapers all over the coun- try. These reports carefully constructed Louis as the epitome of white mid- dle-class respectability.30 While this centralized communications scheme ensured that overlapping portrayals of the “official” Louis appeared in both presses, a comparison of white and black sources reveals that writers reinterpreted and reshaped the Louis image along racial lines, often using manhood as a metalanguage for race.

While most journalists in the mainstream press certainly favored Louis to win, they were not ready to count out Carnera, even though a streak of fixed fights and messy dealings with the mob underworld soiled the veteran boxer’s seven-year record.31 Despite their high praise of Louis’s technical abilities and well-mannered conduct, many white writers held reservations

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about his physical and mental toughness. Invoking the emasculating stereo- types of black cowardice, infantilism, and emotionality, they charged that Louis’s encounter with Carnera would determine if this “beardless” boy could hold his own against boxing’s big men. After all, in addition to being eight years Louis’s senior, Carnera stood nearly half a foot taller and out- weighed Louis by almost 70 pounds. As one writer in the Macon Telegraph observed, the question of “Can he take it?” was the “one predominant note of skepticism” among the white, fight-going public.32 Nationally syndi- cated sports columnist Grantland Rice agreed that if Louis failed to score an early knockout, the “rugged” Carnera would “outmaul” the boy to win by decision. Moreover, Rice and many of his colleagues questioned whether the young fighter would remain poised in the midst of the “terrific bally- hoo” of what promised to be one of the biggest fight crowds in many years.33 Casting Louis as the “dusky David” to Carnera’s “Goliath,” white journalists wondered whether the youthful, black technician possessed the gritty manhood to defeat the roughhousing Italian Giant.34

As Louis’s rite of passage to boxing manhood, the fight also became a litmus test for the strength and maturity of the race. However unconvinced the white press was, black writers supported Louis with great resolve, pre- dicting an easy knockout in two to five rounds.35 The question of whether or not Louis could “take it” reportedly drew a loud chuckle from Manager Roxborough, who bragged that the young fighter had already prevailed in the face of knockdowns, a fractured knuckle, and even punches to the jaw.36 Louis’s manly battle against Carnera not only had “colored America looking to redeem its honors in the fistic world,” but it took on greater im- plications as a proxy for larger racial conflicts at home and abroad.37

Enlisted for Ethiopia

While Louis prepared for his conquest of Carnera, another race war threat- ened to erupt across the Atlantic. Benito Mussolini’s imperialistic designs on Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia weighed on the minds of many African Amer- icans. From the Courier to the Crisis, articles in the black press kept read- ers apprised of the latest news on the impending Italo-Ethiopian conflict during the spring and summer of 1935. While mainstream publications tended to bury the reports of Abyssinia, the black press featured them prominently, often as front-page news. They carried not only current, but historical accounts of Ethiopia, along with human-interest stories on Se- lassie, his family, and the plight of the Abyssinian soldiers.

Ethiopia was the last independent nation on the African continent and its potential takeover had grave implications for struggles of black autonomy

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and equality throughout the world. In particular, the perception of a parallel between Italian fascism and United States racism served to provoke strong, public African American reactions to the looming invasion.38 Moreover, when the League of Nations failed to come to the aid of the African country, it further emphasized the racial dimensions of the conflict, as self-interested, white governments turned a deaf ear to the pleas of their colored counter- part.39 Given the depressed economic conditions in northern black commu- nities like Harlem and the continued terror of Jim Crow in the South, African Americans recognized the close connections between their plight and that of their Ethiopian brothers. As poet Langston Hughes declared:

Ethiopia, Lift your night-dark face, Abyssinian Son of Sheba’s Race! . . . May all Africa arise With blazing eyes and night-dark face In answer to the call of Sheba’s race: Ethiopia’s free! Be like me, All of Africa, Arise and be free!40

Out of the crucible of modern colonialism and fascism emerged a growing sense of black diasporic consciousness.

Many black fans saw the upcoming Louis-Carnera fight as an apt mi- crocosm of the pending match up between Il Duce and Selassie. In the major black weeklies, stories and photos of Louis’s training regimen, his victory, and the subsequent celebrations ran side-by-side with reports of the Abyssinian crisis and pictures of the Ethiopian emperor. Arguably, even African Americans who did not read the papers must have picked up on the obvious analogy. Enthusiastic discussions of the Louis-Carnera bout, from street corners and front porches to local barbershops and beauty salons, surely touched on the boxer’s symbolic role as he went fist-to-fist with Mussolini’s Darling. Not only had Louis become a ubiquitous folk hero by 1935, but as historian William R. Scott argues, Italy’s imminent invasion stimulated an unprecedented period of black American militancy and group protest. From Los Angeles to New York, the black masses organized Abyssinian-defense loans, acts of civil disobedience, huge rallies that at- tracted thousands of participants, economic boycotts, and even the recruit- ment of volunteer combat troops.41

Complementing the efforts of grassroots activists, Louis became a pop- ular outlet for articulations of nascent black nationalism, along with radi-

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cal, international critiques of racism. He offered a public embodiment of the intellectual discussions of the conflict that graced the pages of periodi- cals like the Crisis, Opportunity, and Marcus Garvey’s Black Man. Various black groups even met with Louis during his training camp to underscore the importance of his upcoming fight for black people on the world stage. Louis recalled, “Now, not only did I have to beat the man, but I had to beat him for a cause.”42 Enlisted as a fistic soldier in the fight against fascism, he promised to enact Abyssinia’s struggle for black autonomy in a way that his legions of African American fans could grasp with a sense of visceral im- mediacy. In the spectacle of the ring, Louis’s body would perform a utopian vision of not only the black American body politic, but also that of the Ethiopian homeland.

Beyond just the basic fact that Louis, a black man, would wage hand- to-hand combat against an Italian fighter, there were a number of physical and metaphorical parallels between the real and ring conflicts enabling African Americans to engage in a gendered critique of domestic racism and foreign fascism.43 In particular, contemporary black American discourses of African redemption were suffused with the language of manly battle, inde- pendence, and honor. To black writers and political figures of the New Negro era, the colonized continent represented black womanhood, while the autonomous Abyssinian nation was a decidedly male construct. Writ- ing to the Negro World, a Garveyite publication, in the lead-up to the an- nual UNIA convention in 1924, Irene Gaskin exhorted, “Our flag boys [the African tricolor of red, black, and green] . . . means loyalty to our country and the protection of our women in our motherland Africa.”44 Labeling colonized Africa the “motherland,” she placed men at the head of both na- tion-building and the defense of black womanhood. Since white imperial justifications often connected a society’s ability to self-govern with its de- gree of patriarchal order, it is not surprising that African American com- mentators infused both these battles for racial nationalism with an overwhelmingly masculine bent.

The conflict between Italy and Ethiopia became anthropomorphized into a duel between Mussolini and Selassie, as the black press portrayed Abyssinia’s struggle to remain autonomous as a test of the tiny country’s racial manhood. At a time when a boxer’s moniker usually had ethnic over- tones, Louis, dubbed the Brown Bomber, the Ethiopian Exploder, and the African Avenger, became a natural stand-in for the Abyssinian emperor, and by extension, black nationhood.45 African American cartoonist Jay Jackson encapsulated this connection in a clever drawing that showed a much smaller Louis boxing against a bestial caricature of Carnera in front of Ethiopian and Italian fans, while a seat reserved for the League of Nations remained empty in the foreground.46 (See Figure 2.1)

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As the celebrated “Crown Prince of Fistiania,” Louis was, in many ways, the ultimate “Abyssinian Son of Sheba’s Race.”47 While some white journalists and intellectuals questioned the racial heritage of the light- skinned Louis and Selassie, writers in the black press embraced both men

2.1 “Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth,” May 25, 1935. During the lead-up to his match with the Italian, Primo Carnera, Joe Louis became a natural stand-in for the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and by extension, black nationhood. Used with permission. Source: Chicago Defender.

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as strong Race heroes. White biographer Edward Van Every’s attempts to connect Louis’s athletic prowess with his tri-racial “blood strain” resonated with numerous reports in the mainstream dailies that sought to deempha- size the boxer’s African roots. Although the biographer acknowledged that Louis “insists . . . the Negro predominates in his blood,” Van Every stressed the possibility that Louis was “a good part white and more Indian than African.”48

Flying in the face of such efforts to undermine Louis’s role as Race Man, African American writers positioned him as the “Black Hope,” argu- ing that Louis was a “badge of racial prestige . . . in man’s most honored sphere of endeavor—the noble art of self-defense.”49 Similarly, the black press showed impressive pictures of the emperor Selassie in his full regalia, underscoring his links to the ancient kingdom of Cush and claiming him as the “King of all Negroes everywhere.” One editorial in the Baltimore Afro- American even maintained that “one glance at . . . [Selassie’s] hair” surely proved that Ethiopia was a black nation.50 Louis and Selassie’s shared African roots became a reservoir of strength, and thus, their victories in manly battle would be victories for the race on both a national and inter- national scale.

Just as reports conflated Louis with Ethiopia’s emperor, Carnera be- came the Italian dictator’s sporting deputy. With ethnic epithets like Mus- solini’s Darling, the Ambling Alp, and the Vast Venetian, Carnera served as a popular platform for the fascist leader’s chest-beating propaganda. Just five years earlier in July 1930, when Carnera’s criminal associations had caught up with him, Il Duce had personally intervened to prevent the fighter’s deportation from the United States. Moreover, when Carnera won the world heavyweight title against Jack Sharkey in 1933, Mussolini or- dered a uniform of the black shirt fascisti for his boxing champion and posed with Carnera in photos that he sent to newspapers throughout the world. The fighter even addressed his leader with the fascist salute.51

Paralleling the Louis-Carnera pre-fight publicity, white Americans wondered whether the tiny Ethiopian nation would survive the onslaught of Il Duce’s larger, more modernized forces. Despite Italy’s clear military ad- vantages, an editorial in the Crisis challenged Mussolini’s bravado, claim- ing that the “last gobble of Africa” would prove to be a “bloody swallow.” It charged that Il Duce and his army would have to navigate the country’s treacherous terrain while facing the unpredictable guerrilla strikes of Se- lassie’s courageous and cunning men.52

In the ring, Louis would have to practice and then engage a similar guerrilla strategy in order to compensate for the gigantic proportions and long reach of Mussolini’s Darling. Mapped out by trainer Blackburn and perfected by Louis, the ingenious battle plan involved breaking down the

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Italian’s defensive stance with punishing body shots, and then moving in to attack Carnera’s head. While Marcus Garvey urged his pan-Africanist brothers to “act manly, courageously, [and] thoughtfully” in mobilizing for the crisis that would come with Mussolini’s invasion, the black press high- lighted Louis’s strict training regimen as another confirmation that he would prevail. Although Garvey lamented that Abyssinia’s lack of prepara- tion would only permit a “passionate, enthusiastic, and emotional” re- sponse to Italy’s attack, the calm and conscientious Louis appeared well-equipped to conquer Carnera as he slashed his way through a host of gargantuan sparring mates.53 Intelligence and rational discipline became in- tegral to Louis’s performance of black nationhood.

Many African American journalists and politicos connected the Louis- Carnera fight to the gendered debates of savagery versus civilization in the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. Although Mussolini declared that he sought to bring progress to the supposedly backward nation of Abyssinia, black in- tellectuals like James Weldon Johnson questioned the dictator’s rhetoric, ar- guing that Italy was simply after African loot. Critiquing Mussolini’s violent designs, Johnson questioned the conventional, Western definition of civilization, arguing that even though Ethiopians lacked a modern infra- structure, they were at least civilized in character, with “courage, honesty, and consideration for the needs of others.”54 Drawing on similar tropes, Pittsburgh Courier commentator J. A. Rogers compared “Selassie, The Gentleman, And Mussolini, The Braggart.” Not surprisingly, Rogers used heavyweight boxing as a metaphor for this larger battle of savagery against nobility, emphasizing Mussolini’s baseness by equating his “gesturing” and “clowning” to that of the irreverent black fighter Jack Johnson.55 In this racial and gendered reversal, Mussolini became the minstrel, as Rogers not only claimed Ethiopia as a civilized nation, but also referenced Louis’s con- current role in bringing racial progress to the boxing ring.

Playing on the brutish appearance of Mussolini’s Darling, along with his reputation for illegal wrestling and holding, the black newspapers’ drawings and photos of the Italian Giant made Carnera appear more beast than man, while their renderings of Louis retained a lifelike appearance. Al- though white journalists and cartoonists certainly portrayed Louis in more humane ways than his predecessor, Jack Johnson, some still tended to de- pict him using Sambo stereotypes. Paul Gallico’s fight-day column in the New York Daily News included a thick-lipped, hairy depiction of Louis chasing after Carnera. Even though Gallico predicted that Carnera would face a “shy, easily upset man mellow,” the writer also suggested that the an- imalistic Louis could “go berserk” at any time.56

In contrast, the black press steered away from caricatures of Louis and quoted him using full sentences. Moreover, while boasting of his strength,

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black journalists also emphasized his kindness and generosity to his mother and family. In mid-April 1935, many black writers celebrated Louis’s dis- play of patriarchal responsibility when the fighter used one of his purses to purchase a fully furnished home for his mother.57 Whereas the Italian Giant embodied everything that was barbaric and violent about white racism and fascism, Louis came to exemplify an exalted form of civilized black man- hood, grounded in a mix of physical prowess and force of character.58 By more than just a case of coincidental timing, Louis became a gendered metaphor of black militancy and nationalism that drew on the rhetorical power of prevailing discourses of manliness and civilization. Even if Se- lassie had little chance of preventing an Italian takeover, Louis would de- fend black honor.

The Manly Art of Self-Defense

As Louis fought for Ethiopian independence, he also fought for the dignity and citizenship rights of African Americans at home. In addition to his sym- bolic connections to more radical, transnational black activism, he became the focus of an interrelated debate over questions of black American man- hood and the state of the race. This discursive battle in the popular media was an equally significant race war being waged on the African American home front. While he prepared for his match, black journalists shaped many of the same gendered critiques associated with the international di- mensions of his fight into a domestic narrative of black progress.

Black Americans’ disproportionate suffering during the Great Depres- sion only served to highlight their continued alienation and second-class citizenship. In the South, Jim Crow segregationists still ruled by legal and extralegal means, as struggling black sharecroppers and laborers sought to combat economic exploitation, widespread disfranchisement, and the ter- ror of lynching.59 Many African Americans left the South in search of safety and opportunity in the North, but even the Black Mecca of Harlem expe- rienced police brutality and high unemployment. On March 22, 1935, the famed New York neighborhood erupted into violence after rumors circu- lated that the white manager of a local store had beaten and killed a Puerto Rican boy. Even though several hours later the rumors were discounted, Harlem’s first-ever race riot continued into the night, as African Americans expressed their frustrations through mass destruction.60

Against this oppressive backdrop, Louis’s success became the most con- spicuous argument against the continued exclusion of African Americans from the benefits of full national citizenship. Black journalists inscribed his body with the ideals of black manliness and masculinity, and they sculpted

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his persona into a cultural vessel in which they poured their hopes and dreams. As an editorial in Opportunity described, “[t]he picture of a young Negro boy working in the Ford plant at $5.00 per day . . . who literally forces his way to a place where he can command a half million dollars within a single year” appealed to African Americans from “every walk of life.”61 While establishment uplifters could still embrace Louis for his re- spectability and productivity, a younger generation of New Negroes lion- ized him for his style and virility. To them, Louis was not exceptional; rather, he represented what black America could do with the chance to compete on level ground. As he climbed his way from the dirt of the cotton fields to the bright lights of the boxing ring, he linked African Americans from different classes and vocations in a story of collective progress.

As musicologist Paul Oliver argues, Louis’s heroic climb from the cot- ton fields of Alabama to boxing fame encapsulated the appealing drama and seeming invincibility of traditional African American ballad heroes like John Henry. Indeed, Louis was the only Depression-era athlete that popular blues artists commemorated in recorded songs.62 As a man who faced the prospect of punishment alone in the ring, he enacted through sport the same kinds of struggles confronting many of his fans. Houston singer Joe Pullman’s recording, entitled “Joe Louis is the Man,” was the first song to honor Louis’s toppling of Carnera. Although Oliver describes Pullman’s creation as a “naïve piece of folk poetry,” it captured the essence of Louis as the arche- typal New Negro. While revering the Bomber as “a battlin’ man,” it also noted that he was “not a bad dressed guy,” and that even though he was “makin’ real good money,” it failed to “swell his head.” Just as Pullman cel- ebrated “powerful Joe” in his performance, the husky-voiced Memphis Minnie McCoy of Chicago recorded “He’s in the Ring (Doin’ the Same Old Thing)” as a tribute to Louis’s two-fisted “dynamite.” The mix of Memphis Minnie’s throaty lyrics, her guitar, and Black Bob’s pounding piano empha- sized the indestructibility of Louis, who knocked out his opponents with re- markable consistency to the delight of his poor and working-class fans:

When your people’s goin’ out tonight, Jes’ goin’ to see Joe Louis fight, An’ if you ain’t got no money gotta go tomorrow night, ’Cause he’s in the ring doin’ the same ol’ thing.63

As a rallying point for black communities across the nation, the figure of Louis served to unite the ethereal realm of diasporic politics with the every- day troubles of African Americans.

Louis received a hero’s welcome from the black community at Grand Central Station in New York City in the middle of May 1935. As the black

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press included photos of Louis in chic suits enjoying the finer things in life like driving brand-new cars, he moved beyond his station as prizefighter to become both celebrity and socialite.64 His bodily display of impeccable fashion was one of the most integral aspects of his gendered performance of black pride, since it allowed him to transgress racial norms, moving be- yond the ubiquitous black identity of poor worker to showcase his wealth and individuality. One black correspondent praised Louis for looking the part of fistic champion in “his street togs,” while another carefully itemized the boxer’s wardrobe of a “dozen suits, nine pairs of shoes, two dozen shirts, 100 neckties, ten hats, six coats and countless sweaters, zippercoats, [and] suits of underwear and pyjamas.”65 Likewise, newspaper ads for Murray’s Pomade, a popular hair straightener, reinforced Louis’s reputa- tion for being not only a great fighter, but also “one of the best dressed men in America.” As the text of the advertisement claimed, Louis strived to be “well-groomed” both in and out of the ring. The company encouraged the reader to support Louis and to buy their product, since doing both would enable a man to take on the young boxer’s power and panache in his every- day life.66 As the consummate New Negro, Louis reinforced his manhood through his prodigious consumption and street-hip style, offering an opti- mistic vision of the possibilities of black urban America.

Part politician, part pop idol, and part philanthropist, Louis spent a busy week in the Big Apple meeting with civic leaders like Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia, shaking hands with boxing legends like Jack Dempsey, and at- tending a series of charity benefits. Trading in his trousers for workout gear four times a day, Louis also starred in a promotional, vaudeville show at the Harlem Opera House, scoring one of the biggest draws in the his- tory of the theater. With a kick-line of pretty dancing girls in the back- ground, he sparred, skipped, and punched the heavy bag to the delight of packed houses. However, the respite was short-lived. With only a month left before the Carnera fight, Louis left for his training camp in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.67

Black correspondents painted an idyllic picture of the countryside estate where Louis prepared for battle, emphasizing its connections to old Ameri- can gentility, while also touting its modern conveniences. Celebrating Louis’s role as the temporary master of the “Big House,” they cloaked him in a mantle of both bourgeois respectability and technological efficiency.68 Ac- cording to local lore, George Washington had slept there, and black writers claimed that Louis now occupied the same room where the first president had stayed. Reputedly “one of the most famous fistic training grounds in the world,” the camp was “[n]estled in a nature-scooped nook of the Ramapo Mountains,” yet close enough to the city of Patterson to offer all of the amenities of rural and urban life combined. Although Louis spent most of

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his days working out, in his few moments of leisure time he supposedly en- joyed freshwater fishing, boating, golfing, and even horseback riding.69 The training camp itself became an expression of not only Louis’s nobility and modernity, but also the dignity and advancement of his people.

As the first fighter to ever rent the entire grounds for the exclusive use of his training camp, Louis ruled as lord of the estate. He retained a six- teen-man, African American entourage that included an eighteen-year-old, personal valet and the “expert dietician” Frank Sutton, a former restaura- teur. In particular, Sutton, who had once served Booker T. Washington, be- came a popular figure in the black press reports from Pompton Lakes. Referencing the “nutritionist,” black writers presented detailed accounts of Louis’s disciplined, “two-meal-a-day diet,” countering white reports of the fighter’s supposed penchant for ice cream and tendency to overeat.70

Editorials in the black press insisted that African American fighters no longer needed to seek out white assistance to get ahead. Louis reputedly re- jected the possibility of white patronage, saying that he would “hang up the gloves for good” if Roxborough and Black sold any part of his earnings. By this time Jacobs certainly provided much of Louis’s financial backing, but black reports tended to downplay the white promoter’s role, while empha- sizing the influence of his black managers. Roxborough, Black, and Black- burn’s tactical abilities at the negotiating table and at ringside formed an important plotline in the story of Louis’s success. In true New Negro form, Louis and his black “Board of Strategy” were beating white men at their own enterprise.71

A steady stream of cars and pedestrians traveled to the estate to see Louis in action. In this seemingly apolitical space, showing support for Louis enabled his black supporters to publicly express their own status and worth and to gain vicariously the strength of his fists. By the middle of June, his sparring workouts had already attracted around 3,200 visitors, and as the fight drew nearer, writers predicted crowds of 1,000 per work- out of mostly African American fans from all along the East Coast.72

Alongside regular folk, professionals and celebrities made appearances. Black newspapers like the New York Age and the Baltimore Afro-American provided weekly lists of the VIP spectators—judges, sportsmen, entertain- ers, entrepreneurs, orchestra leaders, morticians, and politicians—who ranged from local to national elites. Many of those who saw Louis in the flesh achieved their own form of celebrity as they returned home to trum- pet his prowess on the street corners and in the bars of their urban com- munities.73 Attending the Louis camp became, for spectators, an expression of pride and promise.

As Louis toppled his sparring mates, his African American fans cele- brated him as a polished, physical specimen of black virility. Louis embod-

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ied an undeniable, yet understated sexuality that appealed to the younger generation of New Negroes without upsetting the traditional conventions of respectability. Even though the Louis team’s “official” position was that the fighter did not associate with women, black fans still celebrated his bodily perfection. As public school teacher Helen Harden recounted in a letter to the New York Age, many spectators visited the camp “with one purpose,” and that was “to gaze on the Detroit Bomber.” Harden gushed that he was simply “lovely to look at. Not a blemish on his saffron hued skin.” Another black female fan refused to believe the official reports that claimed Louis would keep women out of his life until he won the world title, arguing that “Joe is a real man, after all.”74

Although the young boxer obviously appealed to women, many articles in the white press twisted the Louis party line to unsex and infantilize the black fighter, claiming that “iceberg” Louis had “no time for women” and that his only “sweetheart” was his mother.75 Challenging these images, the black press fashioned him as an idol of masculinity, showing suggestive photos of Louis washing himself in the shower and gazing at the camera partially disrobed. While black writers did acknowledge that Louis had no serious plans for marriage, they also reported that camp intimates swore he was a “lady-killer.”76 However, concerned with dissociating their fighter from the negative legacy of Jack Johnson, Louis’s handlers kept the young man’s sexual escapades with white women, along with his love of speeding cars and frivolous spending, out of the press.77 In an era when black male sexuality connoted rape and recklessness, Louis’s carefully constructed bal- ance of physicality and decency offered a positive model of virile black manhood.

Despite the more daringly masculine aspects of his persona, Louis still stood as a paragon of manly productivity in the face of racist, white reports of his laziness. Even a sympathetic white writer like Van Every betrayed his prejudice when he claimed that Louis’s trainer had to “force Joe . . . to cut out his dissipation . . . even if it infringed on his sleep.”78 In refuting these types of disparaging comments, one journalist in the New York Amsterdam News declared that “[n]o fighter during the past twenty years has trained with more earnestness than this Detroit boy.”79

Following the conventions of contemporary boxing manuals, the black press provided detailed descriptions of Louis’s routine, arguing that his abilities were not just “natural,” but cultivated.80 With scientific precision and utmost discipline, Louis arose at six in the morning to run in the moun- tains, followed by a demanding afternoon of sparring matches, bag punch- ing, rope skipping, and bending exercises. So important was it to counter notions of black indolence that one sportswriter even maintained that Louis was a model of efficiency when he slept, taking “it as seriously as he

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does his fighting. No faking, no lost motion.”81 In this way, Louis’s persona combined the traditional watermarks of gentlemanly respectability with the rising tide of New Negro masculinity. He became not only the Race Man, but also an Everyman for the race.

The New Negro and his New Crowd

Just days before the fight-date, the impending Italian invasion of Ethiopia permeated local politics as the Hearst Milk Fund contemplated canceling the Louis-Carnera bout for fear that it would inspire race riots. The Hearst an- nouncement marked the high point in a month-long racial debate over the potential for black-Italian violence at the match. Pointing to the rioting of Harlem’s black population in March 1935 and the ongoing furor over the Abyssinian crisis, white sportswriters Westbrook Pegler and Arthur Brisbane warned that a boxing match pitting a black American against an Italian fighter would furnish the fuel for racial unrest in both the stands and streets. Pegler deemed the bout a “new high in stupid judgment,” while Brisbane worried that it might inspire “a fight bigger than the scheduled fight.”82

Given Pegler and Brisbane’s predictions, it became clear that not just Louis’s manhood was on the line in the upcoming match, but also the col- lective manhood of his African American spectators. The black press re- sponded with vehemence. Al Monroe of the Chicago Defender recognized white America’s unease with the sudden rise of the Race Man Louis, whose burgeoning popularity was “moving ‘out of control.’” He dismissed the warnings of violence, claiming that his Nordic counterparts had no inten- tion of writing “the real facts.”83 In turn, while the New York Amsterdam News claimed that “Negroes today are unlikely to riot over anything less than deep-seated social injustice and economic exclusion,” they also warned that “Negroes ARE likely to be forced to defend themselves against attack by whites who have been stirred by repeated comment on the possi- bilities of rioting.”84

In late June, when a front-page editorial in the white Newark Ledger called for a boycott of the fight, the black press upped its ante. The Balti- more Afro-American claimed that this was a deliberate move to prevent Louis from advancing to the heavyweight championship, reporting that blacks and Italians in Newark’s “hill” sections had responded with their own boycott of the Ledger. Linking it to larger political questions, the Chicago Defender placed the ultimate blame in Mussolini’s lap, declaring that the dictator’s shameless use of the Louis-Carnera fight as fodder for race hatred in the Italian American press had provoked the Ledger boy- cott.85 Just as Louis’s individual victory would prove his boxing manhood,

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so too would his black fans have a communal chance to prove their matu- rity and respectability as spectators. Characteristic of the period’s wider questioning of the merits of bourgeois respectability alongside the rise of popular strains of more aggressive, mass politics, class tensions surfaced in this aspect of the pre-fight publicity. Recalling the controversy over Harlem’s first-ever race riot in March, black journalists understood that much was at stake. Their arguments were not just defensive, but prescrip- tive. While Louis’s win would certainly be cause for celebration, it had to remain civilized. Otherwise, his ultimate strength would remain locked in his fists, unable to transfer its impact to the larger struggle against racism and fascism at home and abroad.86

On the morning of June 25, 1935, the Brown Bomber and Mussolini’s Darling readied themselves “to clash for the synthetic championship of two continents.”87 Despite the reassurances of the black press, the Hearst Milk Fund was taking no chances with the possibility of violence, and for the first time in New York City’s boxing history, a troop of armed police would surround the ringside at Yankee Stadium as Louis and Carnera fought. Over 1,000 patrolmen and detectives would also be stationed at strategic points throughout the arena.88

Since the major radio networks of NBC and CBS refused to air the match for fear of potential bloodshed across the country, the 100 ticket sell- ers in the stadium box office had their hands full with a last-minute rush of spectators.89 For weeks before the fight, several black newspapers had ad- vertised organized bus trips to the event, along with special railroad rates and flights that welcomed both men and women.90

Under a sunny, steamy New York sky, most of the nearly 15,000 African Americans on hand to see Louis arrived long before the white spec- tators with ringside seats. They congregated in the right- and left-field bleachers as soon as the Yankee Stadium gates opened at five o’clock, singing, cheering, and performing ad hoc speeches during their two-hour wait for the preliminary fights. A journalist for the New York Age spoke with one man who had traveled with his wife all the way from Leland, Mis- sissippi. The writer could only interpret this cotton buyer and Fisk Univer- sity graduate’s dedication as an example of “the spirit of enthusiasm and race pride that urged him and thousands of others from Chillicothe, Kinder Lots and many other hidden hamlets” across the country to attend the fight.91 In addition to the lively crowds in the bleachers, black America’s royalty, from politicians to professionals, and from sportsmen to entertain- ers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lena Horne sat closer to the ring.92

By the time of the main event, over 60,000 spectators of all races packed the stadium, with gate receipts totaling nearly $350,000, a new high for a nontitular match.93

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As ring announcer Hugh Balogh urged, “in the name of American sportsmanship. . . . [R]egardless of race, creed, or color, let us all say, may the better man emerge victorious.”94 As the fighters approached each other, Carnera looked like a massive beast alongside the young David. Yet, it was Louis, expressionless and calm, who commanded the center of the ring, while Mussolini’s Darling danced around him. By the end of the first round, Louis had already drawn blood, cutting the Italian Giant’s lip with a smashing right to the mouth. Louis continued to explode with hard body shots, followed by rights and lefts that bruised Carnera’s face. Toward the end of the fifth, Mussolini’s Darling looked ready to collapse, with blood streaming down his face, but Louis, still fresh-legged, blasted him with more head and body combinations. Louis rocked Carnera with a series of hard rights in the sixth round, sending Mussolini’s Darling to the canvas three times. As Carnera staggered to his feet Referee Arthur Donovan called off the fight as Louis hit his target with a cannonade of punches. The crowd burst into cheers as Louis won by technical knockout, with not a mark on his face.

Even without the benefit of a radio broadcast, news of Louis’s win trav- eled quickly. Not too far from the stadium, a phone call conveyed the re- sult to the estimated 20,000 fans who gathered at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. As the Pittsburgh Courier reported, floods of African Americans poured into the streets from Seventh to Lenox and 125th to 145th with a carnival spirit “reminiscent of Marcus Garvey’s best days.” The ravages of the Depression seemed momentarily suspended as celebrants in the taverns offered up toasts to Louis, while cars with plates from as far away as the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, and Canada crawled and honked their way down Seventh Avenue.95

As the black press pointed to the relative order of the post-fight festiv- ities as confirmation that African Americans were not as uncivilized as Pe- gler and Brisbane had thought, the behavior of Louis’s fans became another mark of resistance. As a correspondent for the Journal and Guide asserted, “Contrary to unfounded anxiety expressed in some quarters, there was no sign of disorder before, during or after the fight.”96 Yet, the glowing de- scriptions in the black press appear to have obscured the multiple ways in which African Americans from different walks of life expressed their sup- port of Louis.

Articles in the white dailies presented a much more raucous picture of the post-fight revelry. By reading their accounts intertextually with the black press reports, one can draw a more nuanced portrait of the vigorous celebration without much regard to hallowed respectability. One elderly, black orator named Gill Holton reputedly declared, “It [wa]s the greatest night Harlem . . . had since the riot.” Officers on foot and horseback, along

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with those driving motorcycles and radio cars, monitored the thousands of fans that surrounded the packed Savoy Ballroom. Mounted police had to intervene when members of the crowd stormed the entrance, breaking down one of the doors and injuring a half-dozen people. When the com- munity’s honorary mayor, entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, arrived in a limousine, he made a cursory speech cautioning the throngs of fans to re- main calm, but minutes later he, too, joined in the shouting as he moved down the street. Belligerent youths postured on the hoods of moving cars, yelling at the tops of their lungs, while children who should have been in bed pounded ashcans on the streets and compared their flexed biceps.97

Even if Louis’s managers advised him against expressing his jubilation in the ring, the Brown Bomber’s victory gave his fans an opportunity to ag- gressively assert their racial pride en masse, in a way that defied conven- tional racial norms.

The events surrounding the Jersey City Riots of August 1935 paint an even clearer picture of this sense of militancy. According to a report in the New York Age, around 100 black and Italian men armed with knives, base- balls, stones, and other blunt objects engaged in a “free for all” of street fighting on August 11. A verbal dispute over the impending Italo-Ethiopian conflict and the related Louis-Carnera bout had apparently sparked a fist- fight that exploded into a massive brawl, leaving four wounded and lead- ing to eleven arrests. An emergency squad consisting of radio cars, along with police on foot with tear gas bombs, managed to quell the unrest. African Americans claimed that Louis’s recent victories had heightened white aggression in the district. Yet, according to the whites involved, black youths had been taunting passers-by, demanding that everyone acknowl- edge Louis’s superiority. After the initial clash, the hostilities almost resur- faced the next day, as two bands of white males totaling around ninety exchanged verbal challenges with a group of African American men.98

More than just an inspiration for the writings of New Negro elites, Louis’s decisive win sparked an already smoldering sense of militant consciousness among the African American masses, bringing strong expressions of black pride to the surface that defied the combined strictures of white racism and elite decency.

Brown Moses?

In addition to energizing the masses, Louis’s conquering of Carnera ignited a passionate debate in the black press regarding the proper representation of the race and what constituted legitimate forms of black progress. His vic- tory gave writers and intellectuals a symbolic slate on which they attempted

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to negotiate and navigate their struggle for manhood rights. For the most part, black writers never questioned whether Louis had “sold out” to the white establishment or had shirked his duties to black America.99 Rather, they argued over whether Louis, as boxer, was a suitable male figurehead for the future of the race, both nationally and internationally. After all, with his success in the corporal realm of pugilism, Louis presented somewhat of a dilemma to the traditional politics of bourgeois uplift. Many black elites struggled to come to terms with the fact that this popular hero was gaining unprecedented notoriety and wealth through muscular achievement, rather than education and erudition. As African Americans endeavored to escape the reductionist stereotypes of black physicality that consigned most to me- nial labor, Louis emerged as a gendered wild card with multiple possibili- ties in the changing game of racial construction.

Some commentators expressed their utter joy over Louis’s manly victory as a source of racial pride and progress. Dan Burley of the Baltimore Afro- American dubbed Louis the “Brown Moses of the Prize Ring,” claiming that through his win over Carnera, Louis had become a national leader in the way that Moses brought the Israelites out of bondage. Citing the fact that Texas was now competing for a chance to host a Louis fight, along with Missouri’s decision to lift its ban of interracial matches, Burley maintained that Louis was literally knocking out Jim Crow, with his wins being every bit “as good as electing a Congressman to represent us in Washington.”100

In some respects, Louis could exert physical force and command white attention in a way that escaped his black political and intellectual counter- parts. Only in the ring could a black man actually harm a white man with- out being arrested or lynched. Because of the ostensibly apolitical nature of Louis’s triumph, many black writers, conscious of its larger symbolic im- plications, could celebrate it in detail without fear of reprisal. Extensive photo layouts of the Italian Giant’s boxing demise splashed across the pages of many black newspapers, presenting multiple pictures of Louis standing over his conquered foe.101

Even though some African American journalists highlighted Louis’s mix of muscular prowess and mental acuity, contending that “his cunning brain work[ed] in accordance with fast and deadly fists,” others cautioned black Americans not to place their hopes in the individual, physical tri- umph of Louis.102 While the Crisis understood his importance to the “rank- and-file,” they advised black America not “to hitch its wagon to a boxer, or base its judgments of achievement on the size of a black man’s biceps or the speed and power of his left hook.”103 Moreover, another editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American claimed that the contributions of intellectual Race Men like Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, along with the legal advances in the anti-lynching campaign, were “worth a dozen suc-

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cesses in the prize ring.”104 Regardless of its cathartic value, Louis’s win had not altered the structures of oppression in America, nor had it blazed any new paths for racial progress. Placing more weight in the potential of academic and political tactics for achieving manhood rights, they ques- tioned the significance of sporting victories.

Falling between these two extremes, some editorialists believed that even if Louis did not bring institutional changes, he was still an appropri- ate role model of racial uplift, especially for young boys. While not inclined to view Louis as “a Moses of the race or as an Economic Hope,” one writer for the Journal and Guide maintained that the Bomber’s “moderation, tem- perance, [and] modesty” offered the “real moral in his victory, the most im- portant thing to be proud of.”105 A few weeks after the Louis-Carnera bout, the New York Amsterdam News attempted to put these ideals into action, founding and sponsoring a “Joe Louis Boys Club” that encouraged youngsters to follow in the footsteps of “America’s model young man.” Ac- cording to its advertisement, the club’s main purpose was to instil the young men of the community with Louis’s discipline and competitive spirit.106 Yet, however much adults wished that young boys would emulate Louis’s respectability, the teen generation had different reasons for idoliz- ing the boxer. According to the fieldwork of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, black youths from all classes in the 1930s admired Louis for his conspicu- ous wealth and hip style and drew vicarious satisfaction from his brutaliz- ing of white opponents.107 To them, Louis was less about uplift and more about black pride and militancy.

Ultimately, even if the heavyweight emerged as a contested symbol with little concrete effect on the realities of long breadlines and Mussolini’s im- perial designs, his win over Carnera still served to shine a critical spotlight on the struggles and ironies of black life. Both journalists and cartoonists in the African American press used the gendered images of boxing to for- mulate political critiques that drew explicit connections between foreign fascism and domestic racism. The focal point of the Chicago Defender’s picture page showed a battered Carnera on the mat with a caption that read, “I’d rather be in Ethiopia.”108 In another particularly poignant, post- fight drawing, a boxer resembling Louis became a proxy for the Brother- hood of Sleeping Car Porters, standing victorious over a dazed Carnera look-alike that had “Pullman Company, Unionism” written across his chest.109 As a figure that embodied the deep connections between diasporic and domestic politics, Louis’s victory in the ring had underlined the hypocrisy and unfairness of not only Mussolini and the League of Nations, but also white America.

Pointing to the sheer absurdity of it all, another Afro-American edito- rialist wondered what “secret of mass psychology” turned white humanity

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in one part of the nation into a murderous mob, while in another “they cheer to the echo a little brown boy who pummels the gore out of a big white man mountain?”110 Louis’s victory over Carnera had exposed the many-headed beast of white supremacy, while also subjecting it to a cul- tural barrage of strong black manhood.

Schmeling takes Sampson

Following the Carnera fight, many journalists in the white dailies suddenly became repositories of advice for Louis, offering cautionary tales of what could happen if the young fighter let amusement and overconfidence get in the way of his boxing. Bill Corum of the New York Evening-Journal warned Louis to stick to his “Ma” and to steer clear of the jazzy night life in Harlem. In a patronizing, almost race-baiting fashion, the writer coun- seled: “Don’t get big headed. . . . Behave yourself.” Above all, Corum re- minded Louis that he was not only a fighter, but a symbol to his race.111

On May 16, 1936, in Lakewood, New Jersey, Louis celebrated his twenty-second birthday, along with the official opening of his training camp for the first of his two bouts against Germany’s Max Schmeling. Box- ing’s dignitaries, from Nat Fleischer of Ring Magazine to World Heavy- weight Champion Jim J. Braddock, honored the young fighter for his spectacular achievements over the last year.112 However, with his next match only a month away, one of the most popular questions in the white mainstream press was whether or not Louis “could take” the pressures of his newfound fame. As yet another test of his mettle as Race Man, Louis’s skirmish with Schmeling would once again become a stand-in for larger racial conflicts at home and abroad.

As Louis began his preparations, Corum’s foreshadowing of the young boxer’s potential downfall seemed to be coming true. Over ten pounds heavier and reputedly more interested in improving his golf game than his fighting skills, Louis appeared disinterested and sluggish during his initial practices. Even though Louis was the younger and more talented boxer, journalists from both presses wondered if his apparent smugness would cause him to falter. As Lloyd Lewis of the Chicago Daily News contended, “Joe Louis is the only man who can whip Joe Louis.”113

While some writers in the white dailies continued to infer that Louis’s listlessness confirmed that blacks could not handle positions above their usual station, the African American press responded with continued faith in the abilities and ambition of their New Negro of the manly art. Although one journalist in the New York American argued that “success and plenty” were spoiling the former “canebrake baby” turned “million-dollar corpo-

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ration,” most reports in the black press tended to take on a more positive view of Louis’s training efforts by the beginning of June.114

Outside the ring, African American writers celebrated Louis’s new role as husband and provider for his sophisticated, beautiful bride, Marva Trotter, thereby appropriating the gender roles of white bourgeois society. After their wedding in September 1935, the black press seized on the op- portunity to refute the popular racist image of Louis as a “Mammy’s boy,” promoting the young couple as black America’s first family. Freed from the responsibilities of her secretarial job, Mrs. Louis pursued char- ity work, practiced the piano, visited the beauty salon, and attended par- ties of New York’s black society. While Marva soon gained her own form of celebrity, admired by black women for her poise, charm, and fashion sense, she assured her fans that “Joe’s the boss of our family and he’s al- ways going to be so.” 115 Even though economic imperatives prevented most African Americans from fulfilling these patriarchal ideals, journal- ists shaped Louis and his wife into a public display of healthy black American family life.

Yet, an underlying critique of Louis’s decision to marry before obtain- ing the heavyweight title would later come back to haunt Marva after her husband’s loss to Schmeling. Even before their nuptials, many of Louis’s black fans made it clear that they thought his managers needed to shield him from the corrupting influences of women to protect his strength. As one editorialist in the Baltimore Afro-American argued, “An athlete who marries is usually no good for a year, trainers say. And this is the reason managers of Joe Louis will be shooing sweet girls away from their charge until he is champion.” The temptations of female sexuality were apparently a dangerous distraction in the field of manly battle, and the editorialist went on to warn Louis’ handlers not to take any chances “with some Delilah who might snear [sic] their Sampson.”116

In addition to this sexualized, domestic plotline, the Louis-Schmeling match up became a metaphorical battle in which African Americans could combat the theory of Aryan supremacy that stripped the Jews of their rights in Nazi Germany and kept blacks from achieving equality in the United States. The African American press had already been reporting the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews and its links to American racism as early as 1933.117 Arguably, the Jewish question did not acquire the same kind of popular resonance in the black press in comparison to the Abyssinian cri- sis, which still continued as a featured news item even in the summer of 1936. However, it was clear that, for some sectors of the black population, the Louis-Schmeling match had both international and national implica- tions for the race. Although the suave Schmeling did not have the same sav- age appeal as Carnera, the black press still invited their readers to make

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ethnic comparisons, offering side-by-side photos of the fighters’ physical weapons, along with listings of their measurements.118

In contrast, white sportswriters generally ignored the international im- plications of the fight, since Hitler’s persecution of the Jews had not yet be- come an issue in the mainstream daily press. Even the Nazis had little interest in promoting their ties to the match, since they assumed that Schmeling would lose.119 In the weeks before the bout, many white Amer- ican dailies appeared to put aside their national allegiances to promote the German in articles and pictures. While the text of the Atlanta Constitution grudgingly argued for Louis’s inevitable victory over Schmeling, the south- ern paper’s absence of Louis pictures versus its numerous, handsome pho- tos of the German heavyweight spoke volumes about who they wanted to win.120 Other white sportswriters were more transparent with their alle- giances to Schmeling, like Pat Rosa of the New York Post who claimed that the prideful and industrious German would certainly give Louis the “Drifter” a run for his money. For Rosa, this test of “mind . . . over mat- ter” would favor the talents of Schmeling.121 Louis was not the American hero that he would later become in his rematch against the German in 1938. For many white fans, the upcoming bout was decidedly racial rather than nationalistic.

Already delayed one day because of rain, the fight took place at Yan- kee Stadium on the overcast evening of June 19, 1936. The poor weather coupled with a Jewish boycott of the fight made for a relatively small crowd of 45,000 spectators. Unlike the cool, lean panther of just a year ago, Louis looked thicker around the waist, while Schmeling possessed the best physique of his career. In pre-fight interviews, Schmeling revealed that he had discovered a weakness in Louis’s supposedly impenetrable defense, and he intended to exploit it. Throughout the bout as Louis consistently dropped his left guard when throwing his right, Schmeling hit him with stiff counterpunches to the jaw. In the fourth round, the German fighter rocked Louis with a hard right, sending him reeling. Although Louis managed to stand his ground in the face of many punishing blows, in round twelve Schmeling smashed him with a right, sending him to his knees against the ropes. As Louis rose to his feet on the count of four, Schmeling finished him off with another stiff right. Louis dropped to the canvas and lay prostrate as if sleeping.122

A shell-shocked black America went into mourning. African American fans all across the country hung their heads in gloom. Their Race Man had fallen to the representative of Aryan supremacy. As one report from Louis’s home base of Detroit described, “It was like a sudden death in the fam- ily.”123 With black America grieving, the white press quickly threw their support behind Schmeling, arguing that the so-called Nazi boxer had proved

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“[h]e was too smart for the Negro.” While Grantland Rice exaggerated when he deemed the fight the “most severe beating in ring history,” the New York Post presented a pitiful picture of the fallen Louis on his backside, ac- companied by a headline that reduced him to “Just a Scared and Beaten Boy.”124 Louis’s loss seemed to confirm black America’s inferiority.

African American fans did not know what to make of their “Super- man’s” fall from grace. Rumors of doping quickly hit the black press. An- other particularly vicious example of the post-fight gossip pointed the finger of blame at Marva, charging that she had distracted Louis before the match by showing him a recent love letter from her former boyfriend. In the Black Man, Marcus Garvey maintained that Louis had simply married too early, reasoning that the young boxer would have won against Schmel- ing if he were still a single man. For Garvey and many of Louis’s black fans, the tragic defeat appeared to prove the liability of women in the war of the races. Their male-centered conceptions of the fight for racial equality seemed to leave little room for the meaningful participation of women. Ul- timately, Garvey hoped that Louis had “learned a lesson from the fight, that when a white man enters the ring in a premier bout with a black man, he realizes that he has in his hands the destiny of the white race.” Apparently Louis had not taken his role as Race Man seriously enough.125

On the other hand, many black fans remained supportive of Louis, pointing to his integrity and respectability even in the face of defeat. In a letter to the New York Amsterdam News, Sam J. Jones of Brooklyn ar- gued that Louis had proved his manhood by showing that he could with- stand prolonged physical punishment. Moreover, Jones suggested that black America take its lead from Louis in the midst of this crisis because the young fighter’s denial of the rumors, along with his willingness to take responsibility for his mistakes, illustrated his true sportsmanship and dignity.126

While their pillars of racial manhood toppled one by one, with the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and the continuing problems of the Great Depression, some journalists in the black press worried about the future progress of the race. As one post-fight headline in the Chicago Defender asked, “Haile Selassie First, Now Louis; Who Next?” Louis’s loss against the German fighter had managed to bring things full circle, intensifying black Americans’ fears about the implications of the Abyssinian defeat at the hands of Mussolini. Depicting the instability of racial uplift in the form of a “Stool of Achievement” lying on its side with two broken legs labeled “Louis” and “Selassie,” one cartoonist argued, “It can still be re- paired.”127 In the wake of the Brown Bomber’s defeat, Race Men across the nation called upon each other to stand up and take charge. (See image 2.2.)

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By the time white America embraced Louis as a national hero with his famous knockout win in his 1938 rematch against Max Schmeling, black fans, even outside the United States, had long lauded the boxer as the epit- ome of black pride and success. In the heart of the Nazi nation, a young Afro-German man could barely contain his excitement over Louis’s pum- meling of Schmeling, as he sat surrounded by white patrons in a public bar. When asked what he thought of the fight, the Louis fan responded, “In sports, the best man wins.” 128 This subtle, but smug reply incensed some- one to throw an iron chair at his head. Louis’s victory was more than just the symbolic overthrow of Nazi fascism; it challenged the masculine foun- dations of white supremacy. For the young Afro-German, it was not just an American triumph, but the triumph of a fellow black man connected to him through a cultural and political identity forged in the transnational crucible of racist and fascist oppression.

2.2 “It Can Be Repaired, “ June 27, 1936. Joe Louis’s loss to Germany’s Max Schmeling seemed to underline the uncer- tainty of racial uplift in the 1930s. With Louis and Haile Se- lassie defeated, African Americans would have to search elsewhere for viable Race Men. Used with permission. Source: Chicago Defender.

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Undoubtedly, Louis was neither an uncomplicated hero of American democracy nor a simple figure of racial cooptation, for the real moral of his success stands as one of the most important cultural legacies of the New Negro era. His rise as the preeminent 1930s Race Man points to the pe- riod’s larger trend toward the engendering of blackness as a male construct. Despite various class and generational tensions, conceptions of black dig- nity, black strength, black resistance, and even the imagined black nation remained intimately connected to the imagined status of black manhood. From popular culture to academics to political organizations, the “crisis of black masculinity” moved to the forefront of discussions on racial progress, with increasingly visible and vocal calls for the “proper affirmation of black male authority.”129 While political, economic, and social equality re- mained elusive, the fantastic successes of African American athletes with the racial integration of U.S. professional leagues in the following decades meant that sports emerged as the ultimate, public stage for this collective project in the assertion of black manhood. Moreover, calls for black male athletes to conform to the bourgeois, patriarchal standards of respectabil- ity and productivity as “role models” for young African American men, continues to pervade current discourse on the social significance and re- sponsibility of black athletes.

Even though the U.S. Army would soon use the figure of Joe Louis to inspire tolerance among white G.I.’s, African Americans had already laid claim to him as Race Man and budding patriarch. His model of black mas- culinity—one that vanquished white men, while leading black women— stayed with African Americans as they left home to fight Hitler and later returned to take on Jim Crow again.

Notes

Parts of this article were presented at the 2003 Harvard University Graduate Conference on “Performing Ethnicity” and at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The author would like to thank all of those who graciously helped this piece to evolve over multiple drafts, including Glenda Gilmore, Seth Fein, Paul Gilroy, Matthew Ja- cobson, Amy Bass, Jeffrey Sammons, Pamela Grundy, and the members of the Spring 2002 Yale Research Seminar in American History.

1. Heywood Broun, New York World-Telegram, 1938, qtd. in Chris Mead, Joe Louis: Black Hero in White America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 159.

2. Frank Sinatra, “Foreword,” in Neil Scott, Joe Louis: A Picture Story of his Life (New York: Greenberg, 1947).

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3. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton offer a sociological account of the “Race Man” concept in Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1945). They argue that this social type developed as a means for black Americans to resist their second-class status by pointing to black superiority in particular areas of expertise. In other words, the success of the Race Man became a metaphor for the success of all African Americans (390–392). In examining the various facets of Louis’s popular construction as a 1930s Race Man, this article builds on the gendered critique of twentieth- century black politics in Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1998). Black feminist scholars like Carby argue against the popular practice of equating the redemption of black patriarchal manhood with racial progress, since using the Race Man as the dominant metaphor for black suc- cess tends to render black women’s roles and struggles, along with the rela- tionship between racism and sexism, largely invisible. Moreover, this association of patriarchy with progress has often foreclosed a united front against the related oppressions of white supremacy and gender inequality. Please note that I use the terms African American and black or black Ameri- can interchangeably throughout this article.

4. Richard Wright, “High Tide in Harlem,” New Masses, July 1938. 5. Richard Wright, “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite,” New Masses, Oct. 8, 1935,

18–19. 6. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, qtd. in Mead, Joe Louis: Black Hero in

White America, 92. 7. Chicago Whip qtd. in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue

(New York: Penguin, 1979, reprinted 1997), 24. 8. See Booker T. Washington, A New Negro for a New Century: An Up-to-Date

Record of the Upward Struggles of the Negro Race (Chicago: American Pub- lishing House, 1900).

9. On the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement see Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue; and Cary Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988). For research that expands the scope of the New Negro movement see David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant : African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Mark Schneider, We Re- turn Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (Boston: Northeast- ern University Press, 2002); and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

10. I ground my definition of resistance in the theory of political scientist Jim C. Scott. See Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 8–9, 41. Louis’s victories offered mo- ments when African Americans’ “hidden transcripts” of grievances could be brought into public view. Moreover, my discursive deconstruction of the vari- ety of covert ways that African Americans articulated their notions of black representation and resistance through Louis’s persona and accomplishments employs Scott’s overall conception of “infrapolitics” (19).

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11. My analysis draws on historian Penny Von Eschen’s discussion of black dias- poric activism in the 1930s. See Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1997). Louis’s matches against Carnera and Schmeling further demonstrate the extent to which antifascism and anticolonialism informed public debates over black identity and politics during the Depression.

12. Edward Van Every, Joe Louis, Man and Super-fighter (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1936): book cover. Van Every was the white sports journalist who gave Louis his first feature break in the daily press. Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender carried advertisements for Every’s biography (see June 13, 1936, 13).

13. Fans could read about Louis in the 1935 Pittsburgh Courier series, “The Life Story of Joe Louis, as told to Chester Washington and William G. Nunn.” Other major black press organs also included regular updates about the boxer’s life outside of the ring. Also see Van Every, 34, 36, 46.

14. “Here are Details on Weight and Size of Joe Louis,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 8, 1935, section 2, 4.

15. B. Weinstein, “Joe Louis Comes to Town,” Young Worker, June 25, 1935. Also see “The Real Joe Louis, by his sister Eunice Barrow,” Young Worker, Decem- ber 24, 1935, 1.

16. Theophilus Lewis, “Boxing Business Man,” New York Amsterdam News, July 6, 1935.

17. Much of the literature depicts Louis as a docile “Uncle Tom” who functioned as a “race ambassador” to white America. In these treatments, the quiet, gen- tlemanly Louis pales in comparison to supposedly less conventional boxers like the flamboyant Jack Johnson and draft resistor Muhammad Ali. See Othello Harris, “Muhammad Ali and the Revolt of the Black Athlete,” in Muhammad Ali: The People’s Champ, ed. Elliot Gorn (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995): 56. Also see Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: Free Press, 1969); Bill Hawkins, “The White Supremacy Continuum of Images on Black Men,” Journal of African American Men 3, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 7–18; Othello Harris, “The Role of Sports in the Black Community,” in African Americans in Sport, ed. Gary A. Sailes (New Brunswick, NJ: Trans- action Publishers, 1998), 3–14; David K. Wiggins, “The Notion of Double Consciousness and the Involvement of Black Athletes in American Sport,” in Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture, eds. George Eisen and David K. Wiggins (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) 133–156; and Gorn, ed. Muhammad Ali. See Ken Burns, “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.” USA: PBS, 2005; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 8–10; and Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: The Free Press, 1983). In particular, Ken Burns’ documentary for PBS has brought the Jack Johnson story to a mass audience on PBS. This biographical film traces Johnson’s public exploits and the heated controversies they created within the context of Jim Crow America. In particular, it details Johnson’s

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well-publicized marriages to white women, his unapologetic enjoyment of ma- terial riches from clothes to cars, and his notorious taunting of white oppo- nents while beating them in the ring.

18. Mead, 156–157. While Mead champions Louis’s contributions to the strug- gle for racial integration, his project investigates Louis through the eyes of white sources. For a discussion of state-sanctioned constructions of Joe Louis in wartime propaganda, see Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the ‘Negro Problem’ during World War II,” Journal of American History 89, no.3 (December 2002): 958–983. Also see Jeffrey Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 97–129; Gerald Astor, “And a Credit to His Race”: The Hard Life and Times of Joseph Louis Barrow, a.k.a. Joe Louis (New York: E. Dutton, 1974); Jill M. Dupont, “‘The Self in the Ring, the Self in Society’: Boxing and American Culture from Jack John- son to Joe Louis,” Ph.D. diss. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000); Art Evans, “Joe Louis as Key Functionary: White Reaction Toward a Black Champion,” Journal of Black Studies 16, no. 1 (September 1985): 95–111; William H. Wiggins, “Boxing’s Sambo Twins: Racial Stereotypes in Jack Johnson and Joe Louis Newspaper Cartoons, 1908–1938,” Journal of Sport History 15, no. 3 (Winter 1988): 242–254; and Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Martha Wilkerson, “Multifarious Hero: Joe Louis, American Society, and Race Relations During World Crisis, 1935–1945,” Journal of Sport History 10, no. 3 (Winter 1983): 5–25. Even though several valuable works examine Louis’s black folk hero status, they still tend to overlook key questions of gender. See A. O. Edmonds, Joe Louis (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982); Richard Bak, Joe Louis: The Great Black Hope (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1996); Donald McRae, In Black & White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (London: Scribner, 2002); and Thomas Hietala, Fight of the Century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).

19. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: MacMillan, 1925, reprinted 1992): 5, 8, 16.

20. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 5, 25. 21. In analyzing New Deal public art and theater, Melosh illustrates the period’s

preference for constructions of rugged, white manhood in opposition to the de- tested, feminine images of weakness and over-refinement. See Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1991): 43.

22. See Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 12–13; and Martin A. Summers, Manliness and its Discontents: The

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Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8–9.

23. See Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 7–12; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994) 112–114. Bates’s analysis of A. Philip Randolph’s BSCP places the trade union’s increasingly stri- dent demands for the “manhood rights” of full citizenship within context of the larger shift from a “politics of civility” and white patronage to the aggres- sive, “new-crowd” demonstrations of the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, as Kel- ley contends, the Communist International’s 1928 Black Belt thesis of self-determination offered black radicals a racial platform from which to par- ticipate in the Party’s masculine vision of militant, international revolution.

24. Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 151–153. 25. Emphasis added, “Joe Louis Needs Boosters, Not Knockers,” Pittsburgh

Courier, May 11, 1935. 26. “Joe Louis is ‘Three Times Seven,’” Pittsburgh Courier, May 18, 1935, section

2, 4. 27. “Joe Louis–Primo Carnera Fight Holds Spotlight,” Pittsburgh Courier, June

22, 1935, section 2, 4; “Rise of Joe Louis is Biggest Sensation in Sports His- tory,” Chicago Defender, May 4, 1935; and Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,” New York Age, July 6, 1935, 8.

28. In the early 1930s, the sport of boxing was on shaky ground, experiencing its own kind of depression. With the title changing hands almost yearly in the first part of the decade, public interest waned. Quickly becoming the sport’s biggest drawing card, Louis ushered in what some contemporary authors termed the pugilistic New Deal. See Alexander Johnson, Ten—And Out! The Complete Story of the Prize Ring in America (New York: Ives Washburn, 1936): 245.

29. For a discussion of Jacobs’ monopoly of fight promotion in the 1930s, see Richard Bak, Joe Louis: The Great Black Hope, 82–87. Also see Daniel M. Daniel, The Mike Jacobs Story (New York: Ring Book Shop, Inc., 1949). Al- though historian Jeffrey Sammons casts Louis’s affiliation with Jacobs as an un- fortunate loss for Louis and black America, it was necessary for them to align themselves with Jacobs because the promoter’s influence insured that Louis would have a chance to challenge for the world title (Beyond the Ring, 98).

30. Mead, 53. 31. Although Carnera was a former world heavyweight champion, by 1935 his

shady associations with gangsters like Al Capone, along with his participation in what many believed were fixed fights, was common knowledge in the box- ing world. Moreover, his early days as a carnival sideshow act, in addition to his freakish size and frequent clumsiness in the ring, made him a kind of laugh- ing-stock of the profession. For more biographical information on Carnera see Astor, chapter 7. Also see Clifford Lewis, The Life and Times of Primo Carn- era (London: Athletic Publications, 1932). Lewis, in conjunction with Carn- era’s French manager Leon Sée, wrote this biography in defense of Carnera’s already tarnished image.

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32. “Joe Louis, Training for Carnera Match, Decides to Become First Beardless Heavyweight Champion,” Macon Telegraph, June 17, 1935; Van Every, 119, 123. For a contemporary discussion of the common stereotypes of black fight- ers as “cowardly and unwilling to face punishment,” see Robert Scott McFee, “The Rise of the Dark Stars,” Vanity Fair, July 1935, 57.

33. “Rice Says ‘Terrific Ballyhoo’ Puts Big Burden on Joe Louis,” Baltimore Sun, June 25, 1935. Also see Joe Williams, “Negro Star on the Spot, Louis by Early Kayo, Or—Carnera will Outmaul Him,” New York-World Telegram, June 25, 1935; and Hugh Bradley, “Louis Picked to Win But He Must Start First to Stop Primo,” June 25, 1935.

34. Sid Mercer, “50,000 to See Fight Tonight,” New York American, June 25, 1935. 35. See Al Monroe, “Fight May Even End in Two if Detroiter Starts Early,”

Chicago Defender, June 22, 1935; Bill Gibson, “Brown Bomber Should Win before 6th Round,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 15, 1935, 21; Russell J. Cowans, “Louis in Great Shape, Battle Predicted,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 22, 1935, section 2, 4; and “Louis’s Spar Mate, Six and One-Half Feet Tall, Gives Carnera 5 Rounds,” California Eagle, June 21, 1935.

36. “Joe Louis Can Take It; His Manager Tells Why,” Chicago Defender, June 22, 1935.

37. “New York Likes Joe Louis,” Claude Barnett Papers, Part I, Series A, Reel 10, May 20, 1935, 16.

38. William R. Scott, Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo- Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993): 9. Also see Brenda Gail Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. For- eign Policy, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Von Eschen, Race Against Empire; Joseph E. Harris, African American Reactions to War in Ethiopia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); J. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); William R. Scott, “Black Nationalism and the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict, 1934–1936,” Journal of Negro History 63, no. 2 (April 1978): 118–134. For contemporary explanations of the conflict and its implications for African Americans see J. A. Rogers, “Italy over Abyssinia,” Crisis, February 1935, 38–39, 50; Makonnen Haile, “Last Gobble of Africa,” Crisis, March 1935, 70–71, 90; and George Padmore, “Ethiopia and World Politics,” Crisis, May 1935, 138–139, 156–157; and Charles H. Wesley, “The Significance of the Italo-Abyssinian Question,” Opportunity, May 1935, 148; Marcus Garvey, “Barbarism in America,” Black Man, Octo- ber 1935, 8. The Abyssinian crisis was arguably the most talked-about story of foreign fascism for African Americans, as reports on the conflict continued to appear on the front pages of black newspapers well into 1936.

39. See cartoon entitled “Maybe He Bribed the Guard,” Chicago Defender, March 9, 1935. This cartoon shows an Italian burglar robbing an Ethiopian store- house of natural resources as a League of Nations security guard looks the other way. Also see “The League of Nations,” Chicago Defender, March 2, 1935, editorial page; “See Mussolini Forcing a War with Ethiopia: France, England Join Plot Against Africa,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935, 2.

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40. Langston Hughes, “Call of Ethiopia,” Opportunity, September 1935, 276. 41. Scott, Sons of Sheba’s Race, 9, 59. For more detailed descriptions of popular

black activism during the Abyssinian crisis, see Scott’s chapters entitled “Grass-Roots Activism” and “Harlem Mobilization.” For a southern perspec- tive, see Kelley, “Afric’s Sons with Banner Red” and “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do” in Race Rebels.

42. Joe Louis, with Edna and Art Rust, Jr., Joe Louis: My Life (New York: Har- court Brace Jovanovich, 1978): 58.

43. Although journalists in the white, mainstream press also played on the inter- national implications of the Louis-Carnera fight, they characterized the im- pending invasion as a wholly foreign affair with no real links to contemporary, domestic forms of racist fascism in the United States. In their reports, Louis did not function as a representative of American democracy, but rather, he took on the role of an Ethiopian auxiliary defending Abyssinia from the ravages of Ital- ian fascism. See Westbrook Pegler, “Emperor Goes in Training for His ‘Big Boy Peterson’: Mussolini Takes Leaf Out of Carnera’s Science of Warfare By Se- lecting Setup For His First Battle,” Birmingham Post, February 16, 1935; “Po- lice Squads to Guard Louis,” Baltimore Sun, June 25, 1935; and John Lardner, “Can’t Help Being King, Says Louis: Wins First Real Skirmish Between Men of Italy and Ethiopia,” Evening Bulletin Philadelphia, June 26, 1935.

44. Irene Gaskin, “Boys Salute the Flag, the Red, Black, Green,” Negro World, July 5, 1924, 10, qtd. in Summers, 100. On the male-inflected language and performance of African redemption in Garvey’s UNIA, see Summers, “A Spirit of Manliness,” in Manliness and its Discontents, 66–110. In Garveyite rhetoric, the physical space of Africa and the process of redemption both pre- sented ideal sites for the assertion of black manhood as men took on a mili- taristic function while women played supporting roles. For the African Americans’ gendered imaginings of Haiti, see Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 261–288. New Negro artists’ rehabilitation of Haiti as “America’s Africa” involved a re-reading of the Hait- ian Revolution as a triumphant narrative of black manhood and black pride through figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture.

45. For a list of Louis’s popular nicknames see Lenwood G. Davis, Joe Louis: A Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983) 202–203. Also see Mead, 50–51.

46. Jay Jackson, “Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth—(Modern Version: His Fist),” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935, editorial page.

47. Chester Washington, “Sez Ches,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 1, 1935, section 2, 4; Hughes, “Call of Ethiopia.”

48. Van Every, 24, 26, 27. One pre-fight cartoon even played up the Asian char- acteristics of Louis’s face, touting him as “more Mongolian than Senegam- bian.” See Burris Jenkins, Jr., “Brown Study,” New York Evening Journal, June 6, 1935.

49. Dan Burley, “Louis Ready for Baer,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 20, 1935, 21.

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50. “Just let Italy Try it!” Chicago Defender, June 15, 1935; “One Look at His Hair,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 6, 1935, 4.

51. New York Times, November 28, 1930, 31; Astor, 95; and The Kings of the Rings, produced by Jean Labib and T. Celal for HBO Home Video, 1995.

52. “No Snap,” Crisis, March 1935, 81. Also see “Ethiopia Defiant as Italy Plans to Grab Africa,” Chicago Defender, February 16, 1935; “Ethiopia Has 500,000 Men for Conflict,” Chicago Defender, June 22, 1935, 1–2; “Ethiopia in Stern Reply to Mussolini,” Chicago Defender, May 11, 1935, 1; and “Look Out, Italy,” Chicago Defender, June 15, 1935, 1.

53. Compare Marcus Garvey’s treatise on the value of preparedness with respect to the Abyssinian crisis in “Lest We Forget,” Black Man, Oct. 1935, 4, with Louis’s various training updates in the black press such as “Couldn’t Take it, Ace Clark Deserts,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1935; Russell Cowans, “Louis in Great Shape, Battle is Predicted,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 22, 1935, section 2, 4; and Dan Burley, “Louis In Tip-Top Form on Eve of Carnera Bout,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 22, 1935, 20.

54. Thomas O’Halloran, “Forced Civilization Hit By Educator in Talk on Ethiopia,” New Jersey Post, October 30, 1935, James Weldon Johnson Scrap- books, Box 7, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. For other ex- amples of the savage versus civilized debate, see Rev. E. A. Abbott, Letter to the Editor, “Mussolini and Ethiopia,” New York Age, July 20, 1935; and “‘Civilizing,’ Ethiopia,” New York Age, August 3, 1935, 6.

55. J. A. Rogers, “Selassie, the Gentleman, and Mussolini, the Braggart, Com- pared: J. A. Rogers Gives Graphic Comparison of Italian and Ethiopian Tac- tics,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 3, 1935, section 2, 2. Garvey also concurred with Johnson’s assessment of the Italian aggression, critiquing Mussolini’s plans to bomb and gas innocent women and children and labeling the dictator, “the arch-barbarian of our present age.” See Marcus Garvey, “The War,” Black Man, October 1935, 1. Also see Garvey’s poems, “The Beast of Rome,” Black Man, October 1935, 4, and “Il Duce—The Brute,” Black Man, July- August 1936, 6.

56. Paul Gallico, “At it Again,” New York Daily News, June 25, 1935. The white dailies’ infantilized, Sambo portrayals of Louis continued even after his defeat of Carnera. See Hoff, “Ink Pot-Pourri,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 21, 1935; Ed Hughes, “Another Case of ‘Bad Hands,’” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 17, 1935. For a more thorough discussion of Sambo depictions of black box- ers, see Wiggins, “Boxing’s Sambo Twins.”

57. See “Joe Louis Purchases Home for his Mother in Detroit,” Chicago Defender, April 13, 1935, 7; and Julia B. Jones, “How does it feel to be the Mother of the Next Heavyweight Champ?” Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1935, section 1, 11.

58. See “The Stage is Set,” New York Amsterdam News, June 22, 1935, 14. In a stark inversion of the traditional savage-civilized dichotomy, a picture of the clean-cut Louis in his defensive crouch stands alongside an enlarged photo of Carnera’s scowling, teeth-baring mug. For examples of cartoons that follow these conventions see George Lee, “Sporting Around,” Chicago Defender, May 18, 1935, 15; and Chicago Defender, June 1, 1935, 13.

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59. For comprehensive treatments of black activism for economic and citizenship rights in the South see Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

60. Jervis Anderson, This was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982): 242–244. For contemporary descriptions of the Harlem Riot, see “Machine Guns Set Up,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 23, 1935, 1–2; “Harlem Race Riot,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 23, 1935, 1–2; “Blame Radicals for Spreading False Rumors,” Chicago Defender, March 23, 1935, 1–2.

61. “Joseph Louis Barrow,” Opportunity, October 1935, 295. 62. Paul Oliver, Aspects of the Blues Tradition (New York: Oak Publications,

1970): 149–50. 63. Lyrics qtd. in Oliver, 152 –53. 64. See “New Buick Brings Smile to Joe Louis,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 11,

1935. For the most part, the white dailies only included pictures of a shirtless Louis in his fighting gear. In comparison to the black press, mainstream white papers did not print as many photographs of Louis. Even though writers often made him the centerpiece of their articles, pictures of Louis often failed to ac- company their words. Instead, the white press tended to showcase more pic- tures of Louis’s white opponents, even if they were foreigners and underdogs like Carnera.

65. Al White, “New York Likes Joe Louis,” Claude Barnett Papers, Part I, Series A, Reel 10, May 20, 1935, 16; and “Louis Called Best-Dressed Heavyweight,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 15, 1935, 1.

66. Chicago Defender, June 22, 1935, 16. This same ad also appeared in several other black newspapers. Although some may argue that Louis’s endorsement of Murrays Pomade is representative of his willingness to ape white culture, his- torians like Robin Kelley view “the conk as part of a larger process by which blacks appropriated, transformed, and reinscribed coded oppositional means onto styles derived from the dominant culture” (Kelley, Race Rebels, 168).

67. Al White, “New York Likes Joe Louis,” Claude Barnett Papers, Part I, Series A, Reel 10, May 20, 1935, 16; “Defender Cameraman Follows Joe Louis Around in N.Y.,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935, 17; “Joe Louis Captures New York,” New York Age, May 25, 1935, 15. For a description of the vaude- ville show, see Louis, Joe Louis: My Life, 54.

68. William G. Nunn, “Courier Writer Paints Word-Picture of Trip to Pompton Lakes Camp,” June 8, 1935.

69. Bill Gibson, “Hear me talkin’ to ya,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 15, 1935, 20. Also see Russell Cowans, “Room Said to Have Been Used by Geo. Washington Now Used by Joe Louis,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 8, 1935, 21; Jersey Jones, “Joe Louis’s Training Camp is One of Most Modern and Ideal Spots in the Metropolitan District,” New York Age, June 8, 1935, 8; Baltimore Afro-American, June 8, 1935, picture page; Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,” New York Age, June 22, 1935.

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70. See Jones, “Joe Louis’s Training Camp,”8; “Sutton, Who Helped Johnson Be- fore Title Fight, To Be Dietician In Joe Louis Camp,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 6, 1935, section 2, 5; Chester Washington, “Visiting the Joe Louis Training Camp,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 8, 1935; “Joe Louis Going Great on 2-Meal Diet—Sutton,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1935; and William G. Nunn, “Courier Writer Paints Word-Picture of Trip to Pompton Lakes Camp,” Pitts- burgh Courier, June 8, 1935. For descriptions of Louis’s poor eating habits in contemporary white sources, see Charles Heckelmann, “Eat and Sleep Pas- times for Bomber Louis,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 17, 1935; and Van Every, 56–57.

71. For articles on Jack Blackburn’s skills as a “mastermind” trainer see “Joe Louis Going Great as He Trains for Big Bout with ‘Da Preem’,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 8, 1935; and “Joe and Jack—The Perfect Combination,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 20, 1935, section 2, 4. For discussions of Roxborough and Black’s business smarts see “Joe Louis and His Board of Strategy,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 23, 1935, section 2, 5; “No White Managers,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 22, 1935, editorial page; and “Joe Louis Wins,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, editorial page. According to Summers, young, black radicals of the 1930s spoke out against the traditional avenues of white pa- tronage, even as they accepted white funds, in order to dissociate themselves from the prevailing feminized image of the dependent black man (Manliness and its Discontents, 234–240).

72. Van Every, 127–129. 73. Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,” New York Age, June 8, 1935, 8; “Many Visi-

tors at Joe Louis’s Camp,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 8, 1935, 16; and “Johnny Dundee, Claude Hopkins Visit Louis Camp,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 15, 1935, 20; Joseph Mitchell, “Harlem Argues Itself to Sleep About Joe Louis and How He’ll Tear the Stadium to Pieces Tonight,” New York World- Telegram, June 25, 1935.

74. Harden letter qtd. in Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,” New York Age, June 22, 1935; Julia B. Jones, “How Does it Feel to Be the Mother of the Next Heavyweight Champ?” Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1935, section 1, 11.

75. Wilbur Wood, “Louis Iceberg in Ring or Out: Bomber Abhors Flattery and Flatterers and Girls Don’t Interest Him,” New York Sun, August 12, 1935; “Mother is Louis’s Only Sweetheart,” Buffalo Evening News, July 16, 1935; Jack Miley, “Naw, I ain’t got no girl ‘cause I ain’t got no time for women,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 1935.

76. “Famed Bomber Ready,” New York Amsterdam News, June 22, 1935, 14; “Hear me talkin’ to ya,” Bill Gibson, Baltimore Afro-American, June 15, 1935, 20; Doc Morris, “Following Joe Louis,” Chicago Defender, June 15, 35; and “Live Clean Life, Louis Advises Ring Hopefuls,” Baltimore Afro- American, June 15, 1935.

77. Most biographers have pointed to an apocryphal list of Roxborough’s rules of etiquette for the young fighter printed in many white and black papers to demonstrate Louis’s dissociation from Johnson. According to the list, the Bomber was never to have his picture taken with white women; he was never

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to go to a nightclub alone; he would not participate in soft or fixed fights; he was never to gloat over his opponents; he was to keep “deadpan” in front of the cameras; and he was to live and fight clean (Mead, 52; Sammons, 98). Yet, as Louis himself admitted in his various autobiographies, he often did things that were in direct violation of Roxborough’s “list.” However, the Jacobs pub- licity machine kept these aspects of his character out of the public eye.

78. Van Every, 56–57. After the fight, many articles continued to describe Louis as lazy and sleepy. See John Lardner, “Joe Louis Sleeps and Sleeps But He’s Happy, Family Says So,” New York Post, June 27, 1935; Margaret Garrahan, “Fame Doesn’t Bother Giant Killer Louis: Joe Just Sleeps and Eats as Rest of World is Agog Over Win,” Birmingham News, June 28, 1935; Henry McLemore, “Joe Louis May be a Whirlwind Killer Inside Ring Ropes, but Out of Them He is World’s Laziest Man,” Wilkesbarre Times-Leader, July 2, 1935; and Charles Heckelmann, “Eat and Sleep Pastimes for Bomber Louis,” Brook- lyn Daily Eagle, July 17, 1935.

79. “Famed Brown Bomber Ready,” New York Amsterdam News, June 22, 1935, 14.

80. For examples of contemporary boxing manuals see Nat Fleischer, Scientific Blocking and Hitting and Other Methods of Defense (New York: C. J. O’Brien, 1935); Boxing: A Guide to the Manly Art of Self Defense (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1929); and Tommy Burns, Scientific Boxing and Self Defence (London: Athletic Publications, 1927). These books teach the reader how to be a skilful boxer rather than a brutish brawler.

81. Russell Cowans, “News from the Joe Louis Camp,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 1, 1935, section 2, 4; Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,” New York Age, June 8, 1935, 8; Gibson, “Hear me talkin’ to ya,”20; and “Live Clean Life.” In ad- dition to these articles, many photos showed Louis in various stages of his training day. See “Joe Louis at Work,” Chicago Defender, June 1, 1935, 15; and “Defender Scribe Does Road Work with Louis,” Chicago Defender, June 15, 1935.

82. Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough: Plan to Stage Italian-Negro Prizefight at Very Door of Embittered Harlem is Called New High in Stupid Judgment,” New York Sun, 1935. Brisbane article qtd. in Mead 58.

83. Al Monroe, “Speaking of Sports,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935, 15. Also see “Pegler Inspires Race Riot,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935; “Do They Want Trouble?” New York Amsterdam News, June 15, 1935; and “Columnist Spoofs Rumor of Trouble at Louis-Carnera Go,” Journal and Guide, June 1, 1935, 14.

84. “Do They Want Trouble?” New York Amsterdam News, June 15, 1935. 85. “Louis-Carnera Fight Boycott is Sought by Daily,” Baltimore Afro-American,

June 22, 1935, 1; and “Uses Papers to Separate Groups Here,” Chicago De- fender, June 22, 1935, 1.

86. The Harlem Riot had exposed an existing class divide in terms of appropriate race representation and activism. In the aftermath, establishment uplifters ex- pressed their disapproval of the riot and attempted to distance themselves from “the mob.” The editors of Opportunity claimed that “the mob does not and

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cannot reason,” and that it drew its sanction from the underworld of the “ir- responsible soap box orator and the street corner agitator.” Thus, more civi- lized black leadership needed to “direct the aspirations of the Negro into peaceful channels” of protest. See “The Harlem Riot,” Opportunity, April 1935, 102. For a general discussion of these political tensions, see Gaines, Up- lifting the Race, 246–251.

87. Chester Washington, “Louis Favored to Win by Knockout,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 22, 1935.

88. Jack Miley, “Riot Guns Ready at Primo-Louis Fight,” New York Daily News, June 26, 1935.

89. The box-office stat is from Miley, “Riot Guns Ready at Primo-Louis Fight.” Also see “Prejudice Kept Joe Louis-Carnera Fight Off the Air,” Indianapolis Crusader, July 6, 1935. This was the first major fight in years that had failed to get national airplay, and the Indianapolis Crusader argued that networks’ actions exposed their racial prejudice. Bowing to popular demand, the Michi- gan Network comprised of several stations managed to put the fight on air, aided by the sponsorship of Detroit’s Stroh Brewery. A couple other Detroit stations also aired telegraphic reports of the fight.

90. For advertisements for organized trips see the Chicago Defender, June 8 and June 22, 1935; and the Baltimore Afro-American, June 8, 1935.

91. “Distinguished Gathering Throngs Stadium for Heavyweight Battle,” New York Times, June 26, 1935, 24; Dan Parker, “Fans on Hand Early,” New York Daily Mirror, June 26, 1935; “Singing, Happy Negroes Jam Bleachers To See Ring Idol Continue Win String,” Boston Herald, June 26, 1935; and “Louis- Carnera fight drew sport fans from all over country; Gross receipts were $328,655.44,” New York Age, July 6, 1935.

92. “Stars of Stage, Screen, Mingle with the Masses,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935, section 1, 4; and “List of Those at Big Bout Amazes,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935, section 1, 4.

93. “Louis-Carnera fight drew sport fans from all over country.” The fight also broke the record for newspaper coverage, with hundreds of journalists from both presses on hand.

94. Mead, 59. The following description of the fight is based on my viewing of the fight film acquired from private collector Ken Noltheimer of Ringwise, Inc., along with contemporary white and black press reports, and secondary sources. See New York Daily Mirror, June 26, 1935; “Al Monroe in Vivid Story of Big Fight,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, 14; and “‘Ches’ Gives The Courier Readers Ringside Story,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935, sec- tion 1, 4.; and Mead, 59–61.

95. Floyd J. Calvin, “Harlem Goes ‘Mad With Joy’ as Joe Louis Chops Down Giant Opponent,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935, 1; and Astor, 102. Sim- ilar scenes played out across the country. In Macon, Georgia, a throng of 6,000, with an estimated 3,500 blacks, congregated in front of the press offices of the Telegraph to hear regular updates of the fight. In Detroit, thousands of supporters reportedly converged on the Joe Louis headquarters at St. Antoine and Beacon Streets, and in Chicago, around 10,000 fans blocked traffic out-

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side the offices of the Chicago Defender until the wee hours of the morning. See Bobby Norris, “White or Black—He’s Dynamite,” Macon Telegraph, June 27, 1935; “Detroit Fans Believe Baer Gave up Title to Evade Joe Louis,” Jour- nal and Guide, June 29, 1935, 14; and “10,000 Hear Defender Broadcast of Fight,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, 1.

96. Bernard Young, Jr., “Conquest of Italian Foe is Complete,” Journal and Guide, June 29, 1935, 2. Also see “Brisbane and Pegler,” Chicago Defender, July 6, 1935.

97. Joseph Mitchell, “Harlem is Wild About Joe Louis, Don’t Folks Here Sleep? He Asks,” New York World-Telegram, June 27, 1935; Archer Winsten, “There’s only Joy in Harlem as Joe Louis is Acclaimed”; Joseph Harrington, “Many Injured Celebrating Victory”; and “Harlem Celebrates,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 27, 1935. This scene is also supported by pictures and de- scriptions contained in the documentary I Remember Harlem, Schomburg Center for Black Culture, New York Public Library, Audiovisual Division, New York, NY.

98. “Race Riot Quelled in Jersey City,” New York Age, August 17, 1935, 1, 11. 99. There is one article that warned Louis “not to get too broad in [his] sympa-

thies” and therefore, neglect the special needs of his people and his special obligation to black America. However, this piece was the exception, rather than the rule. See Gordon B. Hancock, “A Letter to Joe Louis,” Journal and Guide, July 13, 1935, 6.

100. Dan Burley, “Calls Joe Louis Worth Vice President or Congressman,” Balti- more Afro-American, July 6, 1935, 16.

101. See “How Louis Smashed Primo’s Defense,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 6, 1935; “The Scene as Joe Louis Smashed his Way to Victory Over Giant Carnera,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935, picture page; “Through the Magic of the Speed Camera the Guide Gives you a Louis-Carnera Ringside Seat,” Journal and Guide, July 4, 1935, 14; and “‘David Anoints Goliath’ with Barrage of Bruising Leather,” Chicago Defender, July 6, 1935, 14.

102. Bill Nunn, “Perfect Fighting Machine,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935. Also see “Celebrities Praise Louis for Victory,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, 7.

103. “Joe Louis and Jesse Owens,” Crisis, August 1935, 241. 104. “How Proud Should We Be of Joe Louis’s Victory?” Baltimore Afro-American,

July 6, 1935, 4. Also see “Three of a Kind,” New York Amsterdam News, July 6, 1935, editorial page.

105. “The Moral in Joe Louis’ Victory,” Journal and Guide, July 13, 1935, 6. 106. “Joe Louis Boys Club,” New York Amsterdam News, July 14, 1935, 4. 107. E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways (New York: Schocken

Books, 1940, 1967), 174–185. 108. “Graphic Story of Louis-Carnera Fight Told in Pictures,” Chicago Defender,

June 29, 1935, 13. 109. Chase, “Another Joe Louis,” New York Amsterdam News, July 13, 1935, 12.

Also see “Front Page,” Chicago Defender, July 6, 1935. In this cartoon, the artist has a black man with the words “you and me” on his back reading a

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number of front page headlines like “Joe Louis Wins,” “Jesse Owens Sets New Records,” “Haile Selassie Defies Italy,” while gruesome caricatures of the Brain Trusters, Huey Long, Mussolini, and Hitler complain that the black men have stolen their space. Once again, race progress, and even the racial subject is male.

110. William N. Jones, “Day by Day,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 6, 1935, 4; and Ralph Matthews, “Watching the Big Parade,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 6, 1935, 4.

111. Bill Corum, “Stick to your ‘Ma,’ Joe,” New York Evening-Journal, June 27, 1935. Also see “Risko Warns Louis Against Overconfidence with Max,” New York American, June 16, 1936.

112. Fred Van Ness, “Louis Celebrates 22nd Birthday; Cuts Cake and Gets Gold Belt,” New York Times, May 14, 1936.

113. Lloyd Lewis, Chicago Daily News, June 17, 1936. For other examples from the white press that discuss Louis’s poor showing at Lakewood, see “Louis Listless in Sparring with Mates,” New York American, May 27, 1936; and Hype Igoe, “Bomber Can’t Resist Lure of Golf Course,” New York Evening Journal, June 4, 1936. For examples in the black press, see Al Monroe, “Bomber Fails to Slay ’Em in Workouts, Chicago Defender, May 30, 1936; and Ralph Matthews, “Joe’s Camp Upset,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 6, 1936.

114. James Cannon, “Fame and Riches May Bring About Louis’ Downfall,” New York American, June 2, 1936. For examples of positive reports in the black press, see “Brown Bomber Back in his Stride,” Chicago Defender, June 6, 1936; “Joe Louis Impressive in Camp Workout Sunday,” Baltimore Afro- American, June 13, 1936.

115. Thelma Berlack-Boozer, “Joe’s Always To Be the Boss of the Family,” New York Amsterdam News, June 20, 1936. For examples of Marva’s exposure in the black press, see “Sunday Workout Shows Look Like Social Affair,” Pitts- burgh Courier, June 6, 1936, section 1, 9; “Harlem Elite Deluge Marva Louis with Favor!” Pittsburgh Courier, June 20, 1936, section 1, 9; “The Bomber’s Bride,” New York Times, June 19, 1936. For examples of white press reports that depicted Louis as a young boy under the disciplinary control of his “Mammy,” see the series of articles that ran in the New York Daily Mirror in the early part of July 1935: “Joe’s Mammy Sees Lesson in Poverty,” July 6, 1935; “Joe’s Behavior Mother’s Care,” July 7, 1935; “Joe in Church Sunday Under Mother’s Care,” July 8, 1935; “Mother Warns Joe of Sugar-Mouths,” July 8, 1935; “Joe’s Mother O.K.’s Fights,” July 12, 1935; and “Mother Con- fident Joe Will Be Champ,” July 13, 1935.

116. “Keeping the Girls Away from Joe,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 13, 1935. For descriptions of Louis’s appeal with the ladies see the series of articles in the Baltimore Afro-American from July 13 to August 24, 1935, that described his fan mail and the various incidents in which mobs of women rushed him for his autograph.

117. Several secondary sources offer general analyses of the connections between Jim Crow in the South and Nazi Germany. See Glenda Gilmore, “An Ethiop

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Among the Aryans: African Americans and Fascism, 1930 to 1939,” unpub- lished manuscript; Stefan Kouhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York, New York University Press, 1998). For some contemporary dis- cussions of the connections see Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, “Parallel Between Hit- lerism and the Persecution of the Negroes in America,” Crisis, May 1934, 127–129; Jacob J. Weinstein, “The Jew and the Negro,” Crisis, June 1934, 178–179 (part 2 in July 1934 issue); “Stop Lynching Negroes is Nazi Retort to American Critics,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 10, 1935, section 1, 3; and “American Nazis Quite as Bestial as Their German Brothers,” Baltimore Afro- American, August 24, 1935, 6.

118. See “Powerhouses of Heavyweights Compared,” and “Fighting Eyes Show De- termination of Heavyweight Fighters,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 20, 1936.

119. Mead, 92. See “Schmeling’s Departure for the U.S. Practically Ignored in Ger- many,” New York Times, April 16, 1936; and “Hitler Still Frowns on Max Fighting Joe Louis in U.S.,” New York American, May 19, 1936.

120. See “It’s All Part of Day’s Work—In Busy Schmeling’s Camp,” Atlanta Consti- tution, June 14, 1936; “Can He Stop the Bomber?” Atlanta Constitution, June 18, 1936; “Mapping Out Maxie’s Battle Plans,” Atlanta Constitution, June 19, 1936. This same trend was characteristic of other papers like the St. Louis Daily Globe Democrat and the New York Daily News.

121. Pat Rosa, “Stolid Uhlan’s Pride and Ideals May Halt Joe Louis the ‘Drifter’,” New York Post, June 13, 1936. Several reports also praised Schmeling for his hard work at training camp. See Bill Farnsworth, “Industrious Max Changes Style for Louis Bout,” New York Evening Journal, May 13, 1936; Mary Knight, “Girl Reporter Discovers Civilized Fight Camp,” Dayton Herald, June 13, 1936.

122. I base the above description of the fight on my viewing of the fight film ac- quired from private collector Ken Noltheimer of Ringwise, Inc., along with contemporary white and black press reports.

123. “Detroit, Harlem in Gloom as Idol Collapses,” Detroit Evening Times, June 20, 1936.

124. Fred Digby, “Max in Sensational Win!” New Orleans Morning Tribute, June 20, 1936; “Just a Scared and Beaten Boy,” New York Post, June 20, 1936; “Schmeling Knocks Out Louis in Twelfth Round; Most Severe Beating in Ring History, Says Rice,” Atlanta Constitution, June 20, 1936, 1.

125. See “Continued Probe of Rumors That Bomber was Doped,” Chicago De- fender, June 20, 1936, 1; “Louis Not Doped; Love Rift Spiked,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 27, 1936; and Marcus Garvey, “The World As It Is,” Black Man, July/August 1936, 19–20.

126. Sam J. Jones, “He Can Take It,” New York Amsterdam News, June 27, 1936, 12.

127. Chicago Defender, June 27, 1936, 19. 128. Interview with Gupha Voss recalling her father’s story of the second Louis-

Schmeling fight qtd. in Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Bass, Amy. In the Game : Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=307887. Created from umboston on 2018-08-20 14:29:19.

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Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Amer- icans in the Nazi Era (New York: Routledge, 2002), 215. There are other ex- amples of international attention from people of color. See “What the People Think,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 28, 1935, section 2, 4, for a congratu- latory letter from “the colored young people of Costa Rica.” For a reference to purported fan mail from India, see “Fans Advise Joe Louis on Marriage,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 20, 1935, 2. Also see “Joe Louis Beats Brad- dock and Is World Champion,” The Bantu World, South Africa, June 26, 1937, 1.

129. Philip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), x.

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