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JOE LOUIS

This insightful study offers a fresh perspective on the life and career
of champion boxer Joe Louis. The remarkable success and global
popularity of the “Brown Bomber” made him a lightning rod for
debate over the role and rights of African Americans in the United
States. Historian Marcy S. Sacks traces both Louis’s career and the
criticism and commentary his fame elicited to reveal the power of
sports and popular culture in shaping American social attitudes.
Supported by key contemporary documents, Joe Louis: Sports and
Race in Twentieth-Century America is both a succinct introduction to
a larger-than-life figure and an essential case study of the
intersection of popular culture and race in the mid-century United
States.

Marcy S. Sacks is the John S. Ludington Endowed Professor of

History at Albion College in Albion, Michigan.
 ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL AMERICANS

SERIES EDITOR: PAUL FINKELMAN

Routledge Historical Americans is a series of short, vibrant

biographies that illuminate the lives of Americans who have had an
impact on the world. Each book includes a short overview of the
person’s life and puts that person into historical context through
essential primary documents, written both by the subjects and about
them. A series website supports the books, containing extra images
and documents, links to further research, and where possible, multi-
media sources on the subjects. Perfect for including in any course on
American History, the books in the Routledge Historical Americans
series show the impact everyday people can have on the course of
history.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Civil War Soldier, Supreme Court Justice
Susan-Mary Grant
Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer
Nancy C. Unger
Harriet Tubman: Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights in the
Nineteenth Century
Kristen T. Oertel
Muhammad Ali: A Man of Many Voices
Barbara L. Tischler
Sojourner Truth: Prophet of Social Justice
Isabelle Kinnard Richman
Andrew Jackson: Principle and Prejudice
John M. Belohlavek
Patrick Henry: Proclaiming a Revolution
John A. Ragosta
Ida B. Wells: Social Reformer and Activist
 Kristina DuRocher
Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet: Exploration, Encounter, and the
French New World
Laura Chmielewski
Harvey Milk: The Public Face of Gay Rights Politics
Eric Walther
Joe Louis: Sports and Race in Twentieth-Century America
Marcy S. Sacks
JOE LOUIS
SPORTS AND RACE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY
AMERICA

MARCY S. SACKS
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor and Francis
The right of Marcy S. Sacks to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-415-89564-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-89565-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-08165-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion Pro
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Visit the companion website: www.routledge.com/cw/sacks
For Rodolfo, the only champion I need
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Son of an Alabama Sharecropper
Chapter 2 “Born with Two Strikes”
Chapter 3 “The Man in the Mask”
Chapter 4 “Heroes Aren’t Supposed to Lose”
Chapter 5 “A Credit to His Race”
Chapter 6 “It Makes Us a Pack of Liars”
Documents
Bibliography
Index
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took far longer to finish than I ever imagined it would,
though that makes its completion perhaps even sweeter than it
would have been. For a time, I thought I would abandon the project
altogether. My deepest thanks therefore go to those who gave me
the space I needed to step away and who then welcomed me back
when I was ready to return. First and foremost, that includes the
staff at Routledge who consistently encouraged me without carping
over the long delays and eventual hiatus. As I finally prepared to
complete the manuscript, my editorial assistant at the press,
Theodore Meyer, answered innumerable questions and held my hand
through parts of the process that felt entirely mysterious. His
patience and enthusiasm did wonders for my motivation to keep
plugging away until it was finally done.
Paul Finkelman, the editor of the Historical Americans series at
Routledge, is a marvel of knowledge and efficiency. He responded to
the manuscript with incredible alacrity, and his mastery of subject
matters well beyond his own area of professional focus helped me
avoid mistakes. Paul’s insights and suggestions most assuredly
improved the final product. I am indebted to him for all he did to
sharpen my argument.
Along the way, librarians, archivists, and other staff from the New-
York Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the Connecticut
State Library, Albion College (especially Allie Moore, Becky
Markovich, and Michael VanHouten), the Schomburg Library, the
New York Public Library, and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People all assisted in securing material. In a
tremendous act of generosity, a former Albion College student, Jayne
Ptolemy, hunted down a specific resource for me at Yale University’s
Beineke Library while she was earning her doctorate there. Joan
Eagen and Linda Wooden from Albion College did the careful, time-
consuming work of transcribing documents and creating the
bibliography.
I have been incredibly fortunate to receive funding from numerous
sources. The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the
University of Michigan provided me with a research affiliation,
financial resources, and critical feedback at an early stage of the
project. My special thanks go to Jay Cook for his careful reading of
first drafts. And the National Endowment for the Humanities
awarded me a “We the People” grant to support a sabbatical during
which I conducted much of the research. I have endeavored to
remain faithful to the spirit of that fellowship by illuminating an
aspect of American life and culture through this biography. Albion
College underwrote many research trips through the generosity of
the Faculty Development Committee, and with the backing of the
Faculty Personnel Committee and Albion’s Board of Trustees, I was
named the John S. Ludington Endowed Professor of History with
additional funds to support my work. None of this would have been
possible without those resources.
Many people offered indirect help to this project. The group of men
training at the boxing gym in Brooklyn, Michigan (stereotypically
located in the basement of a Catholic church), welcomed me as a
serious student of the sport when I became an amateur boxer early
on. They not only allowed me to train with them, but they also
shared their stories and dreams. Through their camaraderie, I
gained a small taste of Joe Louis’ world. I also learned how difficult
of a sport boxing is; the insistence by many of Louis’ contemporaries
that he boxed “mindlessly” is simply untenable.
Scores of students who enrolled in my history courses over the
years both inspired this project and helped me gain clarity about my
argument. Discussions with them about the convergence of sports
and race motivated my desire to write about Louis as a popular
figure in twentieth-century America. Clare Corbould has been a dear
friend and role model of productivity for years. I no longer
remember how I was so lucky to meet her, but my life has been
enriched by her long-distance presence in my life. My across-the-hall
colleague, Deborah Kanter, gently encouraged me to rethink my
decision to abandon the project. Her encouragement during a
difficult time meant more than she realizes. Eddie Visco always had
chocolate at the ready, and my sister, Lynne Sacks, was an
exceptional resource for all of my procrastination needs. Michael
Sherman provided the space in which I wrote the two hundred most
important words of the entire manuscript. Ann Sullivan and Nick
Salvatore sustained me with wonderful meals and camaraderie as I
finished the writing.
My intellectual debt belongs to Nick Salvatore and Leon Litwack,
both of whom taught me how to be a historian and a storyteller.
They are giants of the profession, and I have been fortunate beyond
measure to have studied with them both. Anything I have done well
is the result of their training; the weaknesses are my failure to live
up to their tutelage.
My children, Alejandro and Daniela, surely gave up on me ever
completing this book. I thank them for being too decent (or
disinterested?) to say so. Rodolfo, on the other hand, has never
given up on me. His support is unwavering and his wellspring of
patience apparently bottomless. Por todo el apoyo que me has dado
sin falta, te doy mi corazon para siempre.
 INTRODUCTION

In the late stages of completing this manuscript, the city of Detroit

made plans to raze the now-vacant Joe Louis Arena, affectionately
known as “The Joe” and long the home of the National Hockey
League’s Detroit Red Wings. Since its opening in 1979, two years
before the death of its namesake, the Joe was the only professional
sports arena in the United States named for a person.1 Beginning
with the 2017–2018 season, the team now plays at the $600-million
Little Caesar’s Arena (as does the National Basketball Association’s
Detroit Pistons, finally returning them to the city proper after years
of playing at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Oakland County). But the
loss of Detroit’s most recognizable tribute to the hometown hero
provoked discussions—albeit as an afterthought to the decision to
construct a new venue—about how to effectively commemorate him.
Spearheaded by Rochelle Riley, a columnist for the Detroit Free
Press, the campaign to preserve Louis’s “revered name” in the public
spotlight helped the city reconnect with the history and significance
of the long-gone hero.
“Children deserve to know his story,” Riley insisted in her column
on February 18, 2017, and the city of Detroit “must continue to
honor” him even after “the Joe is torn down and hockey glory moves
over” to the new arena. From this opening salvo came a months-
long push to find a suitable alternative, and she encouraged city
residents to make suggestions, thereby promoting a widespread
conversation about Louis’s legacy. Again and again in the ensuing
months, Riley wrote about Louis’s boxing feats, especially his
seminal victory over the German boxer Max Schmeling in a rematch
in 1938, on the cusp of World War II. She reminded her readers of
his many acts of decency and patriotism and his presumed ability to
“unite people of all colors at a time when the country needed it.”
Many people offered ideas that ranged from rededicating city parks
to constructing a new soccer arena that would bear his name, but
Riley herself finally threw her support behind a call to rechristen
Cobo Hall, the city’s convention center, with the name of the famed
boxer. Doing so would accomplish two parallel goals—to remove an
honorific on behalf of a man who exacerbated racial tensions in the
city and to reestablish a highly visible tribute to another who
presumably bridged that racial divide.2
Named for 1950s-era three-term mayor Albert Cobo, who
campaigned on a segregationist platform and inflamed racial
sensibilities by raising the specter of a “Negro invasion of white
neighborhoods in Detroit,” the convention center glorifies “someone
who literally didn’t want black people living next to white people,”
Riley explained. In fact, his “Detroit Plan” displaced thousands of the
city’s African Americans when Black Bottom, the neighborhood in
which Joe Louis grew up and where he had purchased a home for
his mother, was leveled to make room for Interstate 75. Her decision
to champion the disposition of Cobo’s name while restoring to Louis
“the honor he deserves” came in the midst of growing national
discussions about public remembrances of a racist past, specifically
the Civil War and leaders of the Confederacy. As American disquiet
over such tributes grew, current Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan
endorsed the removal of his predecessor’s moniker from the
building, though he was less committed to replacing it with Louis’s.
Ultimately, the city settled on the dedication of a twenty-six-mile
greenway that will encircle the Motor City and unite neighborhoods
from all corners of the sprawling metropolis, much as Louis had
“unit[ed] the country,” Duggan said at the public announcement of
the project.3
The debate about how to honor Louis has revived enduring
mythologies about the heavyweight champion and his
accomplishments outside of the ring from his rise to prominence in
the mid-1930s until his death in 1981. The popular narrative about
him stresses his apparent ability to bridge the racial divide of the Jim
Crow era, to become, as W. E. B. DuBois described the dream of all
black people, “both a Negro and an American, without being cursed
and spit up by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity
closed roughly in his face.”4 During an interview with ESPN, Louis’s
son claimed that his father had achieved precisely that: “What my
father did was enable white America to think of him as an American,
not as a black.”5 But Louis Jr., was wrong. While the heavyweight
champion did, indeed, become the first black man to receive the
widespread acclaim of white Americans, they never forgot—and
never let him forget—that he was black. Louis “enabled” white
people’s acceptance of him, but he only achieved that by deliberately
conforming to the racial norms of that era. In particular, he
unfailingly exhibited humility, a trait that he insisted in his
autobiography could not legitimately be ascribed to him. But this
behavior, however unnatural it felt to Louis, helped to convince the
nation writ large to view him as a hero in a specific moment when
American democracy was in competition with Nazism and fascism on
the rise in Europe. White people embraced Louis as an acceptable
standard-bearer for American ideals only because his comportment
reassured them of his acceptance of the racial order. As such, he
never achieved the racial unity that so many have claimed he did.
Joe Louis never escaped the limitations of being black in America.
The desire to preserve a romanticized vision of Louis’s popularity
says more about white people than it does about him. It reveals an
eagerness to imagine an enlightened America that has finally
overcome its history of racial oppression. Perhaps Louis’s greatest
legacy is in paving the way for the use of sports to propel that
narrative. The integration of sports, beginning with boxing,
continuing most famously with Jackie Robinson and Major League
Baseball in 1947, and eventually encompassing all professional
athletic organizations (some more willingly than others), continues
to be widely upheld as evidence that American race relations are on
a relentlessly progressive path. Sports have been identified as the
singularly most successful experiment in racial integration (with the
possible exception of the military), and the idolization of black
athletes by whites, beginning with Joe Louis, offers powerful
ammunition to the assertion that America has become “colorblind.”
To be sure, in many ways sports provide an ideal forum for
demonstrating the country’s commitment to egalitarianism; sports
imagery has become a fixture in our rhetoric of equality (consider
the metaphor of a “level playing field”). In the idealized mythos,
athletes unite around their mutual respect for one another, and
victory is always earned through unimpeded personal effort. During
Joe Louis’s heyday, the renowned sports columnist, Bill Corum,
initiated this vision of athletics as proof of the vitality of the
American Dream: “[W]e must be all one. All Americans. All friends.
All sportsmen,” he effused in 1939 in reference to his nation’s
acceptance of a black athlete.6 Through sports, America could
overcome its divisions and disagreements. And through the embrace
of a black athlete, the country could demonstrate its moral
superiority over fascism.
Contemporary popular culture reflects this same neo-conservative
yearning to sound the death-knell of racial strife. Popular movies
such as Disney’s Remember the Titans (2000) or The Blind Side
(2009) portray sports as the altar on which racism has died. The
image of racial divisiveness being subsumed by the brotherhood of
team-play holds wide appeal for an American public eager to
demonstrate that equal opportunity now genuinely exists in the
United States. The 2007 Superbowl offered powerful grist for this
mill. Falling within Black History Month and boasting the first African
American head coaches ever to lead their teams to the annual
football championship game, the Superbowl generated a remarkable
amount of discussion about its significance even prior to the event
itself. But during the spectacle, two major corporations, Coca-Cola
and Frito-Lay, seized upon the symbolism of the moment to promote
the message of racial harmony. The Atlanta-based Coca-Cola
company, in its silent “Black History Timeline,” highlighted the
“journey of what [African Americans] went through to become who
we are today.” After tracing achievements such as “Tuskegee, 1941:
Pilots prove heroism has no color;” “Brooklyn, 1947: Baseball shows
us courage, it’s #42;” and “Montgomery, 1955: Woman remains
seated. And stands for justice;” the beverage company declared,
“Coca-Cola Celebrates Black History. Especially today.” Never mind
that Coca-Cola had a long history of refusing to market to black
consumers, a situation that only changed after the emergence of
Pepsi and its success at capturing that clientele. On this day, the
company asserted itself as a beacon of progressive ideals.7
In a similar vein, Frito-Lay presented a commercial entitled, “Enjoy
the Game,” in which it asked a simple question: “Who’s winning?”
The camera passes over somber-faced black spectators, including
young children and the elderly, a man changing a baby’s diaper
while he anxiously catches glimpses of the television set, and a
church group dispensing of their prayers in order to watch the game.
At the end of the commercial spot, after the voice-over refers to the
“two terrific coaches” while panning their faces (should anyone
watching be uncertain of their racial identity), a simple line of text
offers an inspirational and heartwarming answer: “We all are.”8
These two advertisements highlight the symbolic use of sports to
suggest genuine accomplishments in advancing American
progressivism. However, as recent controversies over former National
Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel
during the national anthem reveal, the embrace of black athletes is
often limited to those who do not challenge racial discrimination or
behave in ways that whites interpret as “ungrateful.”9 What made
Joe Louis palatable to the white public was his unassertive public
persona. While he defeated challenger after challenger in the ring,
outside of it he never complicated the story of his good fortune for
being granted the opportunity to fight for the title.
Because Louis has been accepted as the apotheosis of the humble
black athlete, a second public memorial to the heavyweight
champion, the “Monument to Joe Louis,” provoked controversy and
even outrage when it was unveiled in 1986 at one of Detroit’s
busiest intersections. More commonly known as “The Fist,” the
8,000-pound, twenty-four-foot-long sculpture situated outside Cobo
Hall in downtown Detroit and commissioned by Sports Illustrated has
generated unease and confusion among whites and blacks alike.
Appearing to throw a punch across the Detroit River, the Fist was
immediately denounced by many observers as a symbol of violence
or of “militant black power.”10 (In response, a full statue of the boxer
as a young man in fighting stance was erected inside the lobby of
Cobo Hall the next year.) In 2004, the monument was vandalized by
two white men who covered it in white paint.11 It continues to evoke
strong reactions today; most Americans, white and black, prefer to
imagine Louis as a symbol of unity.
Nevertheless, whites and blacks understood Louis very differently
when he was the heavyweight champion, and in many ways his
memory continues to have disparate meanings for the two
populations. White people insisted on remembering Louis as simple,
humble, and even tragic. After Louis retired from boxing in 1951, the
once mighty man gradually became a pathetic figure in the white
mind. His well-publicized money woes confirmed whites’ beliefs
about Louis’s intellectual shortcomings. Although precipitated by the
U.S. government’s intransigence in its pursuit of back taxes, most
white people attributed his poverty to corrupt black “advisors.” And
many white people felt embarrassed that he finished his life in the
humiliating role of greeter at a Las Vegas casino, despite his own
insistence that he loved his job.12
On the other hand, black Americans’ regard for their beloved Joe
Louis derived (and still does to this day) both from his success in
obligating white people to accept him and from his literal realization
of their most cherished fantasies of overcoming their subordination.
These inconsistent—indeed contradictory—perspectives suggest a
pernicious racial chasm that has yet to be bridged. From his earliest
years as a boxing sensation, black people invoked Joe Louis’s name
in moments of crisis and desperation (as in Dr. Martin Luther King’s
apocryphal story about the young black man on death row pleading,
“Save me, Joe Louis,” at the instant of his execution13 ). Still today,
Louis enjoys iconic status among many black Americans who treat
his memory with the utmost reverence. White people, conversely,
never envisaged Louis in deified terms, nor do they now. Today, they
remember him as “decent” and “honorable” (as commentator Frank
DeFord noted during a morning broadcast on National Public Radio
some years ago while complaining about the comparatively appalling
behavior of contemporary athletes14 ), but certainly they did not see
Louis as a messiah.
This book complicates the simplistic story of a humble Joe Louis
who rose up from a sharecropper’s cabin in Alabama to become one
of the world’s most recognizable figures in the middle of the
twentieth century. Contrary to proclamations during his era and in
contemporary times, Louis never succeeded at overcoming his racial
identity. White people celebrated him only because he conformed to
their vision of black men’s appropriately humble and acquiescent
behavior. Once he reassured them of his compliance with racial
norms, they hailed him for demonstrating democracy’s preeminence
over fascism. On the other hand, black people venerated him for
appearing to dismantle their subordination, for humanizing black
people in whites’ eyes, and for offering a psychic balm to their
suffering through his powerful fists. In truth, Louis was both. He did
not publicly challenge the racially driven expectations of his behavior.
But he also refused to permit the inferior treatment of black people
when he had the power to intervene. He used his renown to push
for change, eschewing white people’s vision of unity in favor of
genuine progress on behalf of black Americans.

NOTES
1. Rochelle Riley, “How Do We Honor Joe Louis? Rename Cobo Center,” Detroit Free
Press, May 8, 2017, www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/rochelle-
riley/2017/05/08/replace-cobo-name-joe-louis-convention-center/101442120/
(accessed November 22, 2017).
2. Rochelle Riley, “When Joe Louis Arena is Gone, How Do We Honor Detroit Legend?”
Detroit Free Press, February 18, 2017, www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/rochelle-
riley/2017/02/18/joe-louis-arena-statue-detroit/98048462/ (accessed November 22,
2017); Riley, “How Do We Honor Joe Louis,” Detroit Free Press, May 8, 2017.
3. Stateside Staff, “The Racist History of Albert Cobo, and the Complicated Push to Rid
Detroit of His Name,” Stateside, Michigan Radio, Ann Arbor, MI: WUOM, September 8,
2017; Riley, “How Do We Honor Joe Louis,” Detroit Free Press, May 8, 2017; Rochelle
Riley, “Detroit Cements Honor for Joe Louis with a Giant Greenway around the City,”
 Detroit Free Press, October 27, 2017, www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/rochelle-
riley/2017/10/27/greenway-joe-louis-detroit/807346001/ (accessed November 22,
2017).
4. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 3.
5. Barrow, Jr., quoted in Larry Schwartz, “’Brown Bomber’ Was a Hero to All,” ESPN.com,
www.espn.com/sportscentury/features/00016109.html (accessed November 22, 2017).
6. Bill Corum, “Sports,” New York Journal and American, June 28, 1939. In Joe Louis
Scrapbook Vol. 65, Fiche 188.
7. Coca-Cola, “Black History Timeline,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgR92otjoUk;
Grace Elizabeth Hale, “When Jim Crow Drank Coke,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 2013,
23.
8. Frito-Lay, “Enjoy the Game,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjYf66pHn8.
9. See, for example, Jelani Cobb, “From Louis Armstrong to the N.F.L.: Ungrateful as the
New Uppity,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2017, www.newyorker.com/news/news-
desk/from-louis-armstrong-to-the-nfl-ungrateful-as-the-new-uppity (accessed
November 28, 2017).
10. James Risen, “Is It Thumbs Down for ‘Fist’ in Detroit?” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16,
1986, http://articles.latimes.com/print/1986-10-16/news/mn-5641_1_joe-louis
(accessed November 22, 2017); Isabel Wilkerson, “Great Lakes Journal,” New York
Times Nov. 3, 1986, www.nytimes.com/1986/11/03/us/great-lakes-journal-a-symbol-a-
bother-an-honor.html (accessed November 28, 2017).
11. Sarah Karush, “Police Arrest Two Men Suspected of Vandalizing Joe Louis Statue,”
USA Today, Feb. 23, 2004, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2004-02-
23-louis-statue_x.htm (accessed November 28, 2017).
12. Joe Louis Barrow, Jr., and Barbara Munder, Joe Louis: 50 Years an American Hero
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1988), 234.
13. Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (1964; reprint New York: Signet Classics,
2000), 100.
14. Frank DeFord, “Sweetness and Light: The Legacy of Joe Louis,” Morning Edition
(National Public Radio, April 12, 2006).
 CHAPTER 1
THE SON OF AN ALABAMA
SHARECROPPER

The early part of the twentieth century was not an auspicious time
to be black in rural Alabama. Some fifty years after the end of the
Civil War, the Old Confederacy had effectively reestablished the racial
subjugation of the slave era through exploitative and brutal forms of
labor: sharecropping, tenant farming, debt peonage, convict leasing,
and chain gangs. The ever-present specter of violence helped to
ensure black submission; at least 300 people were lynched in the
state of Alabama alone between 1882 and 1922.1 And the
combination of crushing poverty and illiteracy destroyed much hope
for better prospects in the future.
Into this bleak environment, Joe Louis Barrow was born on the
morning of May 13, 1914, “in a sharecropper’s shack off a dirt road
that runs between Lafayette and Cusseta in Chambers County,
Alabama.” He was the seventh child of cotton farmers living in “red-
clay country” in the eastern part of the state “near where Georgia
backs into it.” A train depot in LaFayette served as the hub of the
cotton economy that thrived in the area despite the hard red clay
that local farmers struggled to till. Louis’ father, Munroe “Mun”
Barrow, fought to give his family some financial stability despite the
difficult conditions; four years before Louis’ birth, he rented a 120-
acre farm in an attempt to become upwardly mobile and
economically independent. But the workload proved to be too much,
and by the time Louis became another mouth to feed, the family
worked a far smaller parcel of thirty acres, cultivating cotton and
corn and barely eking out an existence. Mun and his wife, Lillie
Reese Barrow, welcomed one more child to the family after Joe, and
they also fostered an orphaned cousin.2
The eleven of them—Munroe, Lillie, Susie, Lonnie, Eulalia,
Emmarell, DeLeon, Alvanius, Joe, Vunies, and cousin Turner Shealey
—lived in a cramped, ramshackle wood-framed cabin that looked
“like a good wind would have blown it down.” The unpainted
structure was typical of sharecropper shacks, with loose boards that
sagged and allowed the cold to penetrate almost unimpeded (one of
Louis’ strongest memories of his years in Alabama “was how cold I
used to get”), no electricity or running water, and no possibility for
privacy. The family lit their home with kerosene lamps, and in the
darkness the smoky light cast eerie shadows on the walls that made
the house look “broody.” Louis also recalled the revelation of
discovering indoor toilets after he moved to Detroit; in Alabama, the
Barrow family, like all sharecroppers, relied on outhouses.3
True to the relentless pressure to grow ever more cotton, the field
backed right up to the cabin, and the agricultural cycle of cotton
harvesting dictated the life of the Barrows, as it did for almost all
rural blacks in the Deep South. The overriding mission of white
landowners in the South’s cotton belt was to ensure the availability
of a cheap, abundant, docile labor supply, and even after the fall of
slavery in 1865, whites could not conceive of any other productive
work for black people than as agricultural laborers working in cotton
fields. “The Idea of a Southerner,” admitted a white Tennessee man
in a letter to his sister in Massachusetts in 1904, “is to keep the
negroes as nere the line of pauperism as is compatibel with self
support.” Poverty was essential to black docility. “As long as they are
poor they are all right,” he continued, “but as soon as they get some
money they get uppity.”4
The sharecropping system virtually guaranteed the inescapability of
black poverty. White people owned almost all Southern agricultural
land, and black people worked it. The exclusion of black people from
other economic pursuits forced the vast majority of them into
sharecropping arrangements. Under a standard share agreement,
the tenant worked on “halves,” supplying the labor while the landlord
provided the land, seed, tools, and work animals. At the end of the
harvest, each party received half of the crop. Because the laborer
was physically limited in the amount of cotton he could pick at
harvest time, the acreage allotments to croppers were typically small
—rarely more than thirty acres, as the Barrow family held. And every
member of the family was expected to work during the periods of
frantic activity: in the planting and hoeing season in the spring and
early summer, and the picking season in late summer and early fall.5
Maya Angelou, who grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, in the 1930s,
described the physical and mental toll wrought by sharecropping. A
long day in the field left workers “dirt-disappointed” as they realized
that no matter how large their haul, it would never be enough to
free them of debt. They expressed their frustration in grumblings
about “cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and
dusty rows.” But they kept their complaints within their own
community, ever-fearful of whites’ wrath. “I had seen the fingers cut
by the mean little cotton bolls, and I had witnessed the backs and
shoulders and arms and legs resisting any further demands,”
Angelou wrote. And it filled her with “inordinate rage.”6
Louis vividly recalled his own family’s experience with
sharecropping. Although he was too young during the majority of his
years in Alabama to participate in the most grueling tasks, he
remembered that his older brothers and sisters joined their parents
in the fields each morning at sun-up and stayed out all day until
sundown. Joe had chores around the house to perform, including
feeding the chickens and hogs and cleaning the house. On hot
summer days, the boy would fill a bucket with cool water from the
well and haul it out to his family members in the cotton fields where
they would gratefully drink from a long tin dipper. During the peak
picking season, even the young Louis would be commandeered for
work; every hand had to contribute in order to make the harvest
successful. Most nights, the family went to bed early, the result of
both sheer exhaustion and the need to be ready to do it all over
again the next day.7
Under this exploitative system, the essential socioeconomic
patterns of antebellum agriculture persisted. At the end of each
season, sharecroppers routinely discovered that their portion of the
harvest did not yield them enough money to ever escape poverty or
to lay away savings. “It was pretty bad with the poor man in the
South,” observed Turner Shealey, the Barrows’ cousin. “All of us had
to obligate ourselves to the merchants to get a livelihood. We had to
be subservient to get sufficient funds to operate a crop.” White
people had tremendous control over black people’s lives. If “you
didn’t do what you shoulda did,” Shealey continued, whites would
“take everything you had—all the crop; the foodstuffs you had
grown in the garden; your animals such as hogs, mules or cows; the
farmer’s tools—and you had to move away from his plantation and
go obligate yourself with somebody else.” The Barrows often
struggled to produce enough crop each year, and Shealey
remembered that they had to move often.8
Conditions like those endured by the Barrows meant that the great
mass of Southern black laborers remained tied to the land as a
propertyless peasantry, dependent on white people, and relegated to
a nearly unbreakable cycle of poverty and ignorance. Violence, or
the threat of violence, guaranteed the perpetuation of this debt-
labor system just as it had during the slave era, and corruption or
the acquiescence of local officials was openly tolerated. Whippings
on plantations continued unabated as a replication of slave-era
punishments. An Alabama legislator defended the practice in 1901:
“Everybody knows the character of a Negro and knows that there is
no punishment in the world that can take the place of the lash with
him.”9
Even worse than the punishments that harkened back to the
antebellum era was the rampant persistence of unfreedom
throughout the South. The nefarious practice of ensnaring black
people into a web of debt peonage and convict leasing haunted
every black person toiling in the South. Any black person who ran
afoul of the law, either legitimately or on any number of fabricated
charges, might find himself thrust into the dark, impenetrable
underworld of convict leasing that spurred the New South’s
industrialization and functioned almost unimpeded until World War
II. Through spurious claims of criminal activity, tens of thousands of
random, innocent black people found themselves caught up in the
dragnet, seized on largely arbitrary grounds, and hauled hastily
before provincial judges, mayors, or justices of the peace who often
held economic interests in the businesses employing convict
lessees.10
By 1903, Alabama had become the peonage capital of the nation,
and convict leasing fueled the growth of the coal industry centered
near Birmingham. Perpetrators of the system survived a rash of legal
challenges brought by federal investigators during a short-lived
moment of concern. Despite judicial rulings that struck down state
laws creating peonage, federal officials lacked the tools and the will
to enforce those decisions. Investigators retreated and the architects
of the program became further emboldened. A new state
constitution adopted in 1901 effectively stripped black Alabamians of
the franchise, making them powerless to mitigate the rampant use
of forced labor. At the constitutional convention in the state capital,
one white delegate brazenly declared, “I believe as truly as I believe
that I am standing here that God Almighty intended the negro to be
the servant of the white man.”11 This brutal system of involuntary
servitude terrorized black people throughout the South and made
them into “slaves in all but name.”12 As historian Douglas Blackmon
has explained, “A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man
—even a black child—was viewed as neither criminal nor
extraordinary, had reemerged. Millions of blacks lived in that shadow
—as forced laborers or their family members, or simply as people
who heard the whispers of hidden terrors and lived in fear of the
system’s caprice.”13
The pressure of raising and providing for a family, to preserve one’s
dignity, and to not succumb to utter hopelessness under these
conditions proved to be too much for some black people, including,
apparently, Joe Louis’ father. Munroe Barrow was a tall, lean man
measuring over six feet tall and weighing just shy of two hundred
pounds. According to his wife, Lillie, he “wanted to be a good family
man” and provide the best for his wife and children. But the “strain
and hard work was too much for him,” and he was intermittently
hospitalized for mental illness during a ten-year stretch that began in
1906. In 1916, two years after Louis’ birth, Mun was finally
committed permanently at the Searcy Hospital for the Negro Insane
in Mt. Vernon, Alabama. “I guess it makes a man feel bad not to be
able to give his family more,” Louis observed laconically, “especially if
you can see beyond the cotton balls and those hard red hills.”14
Left alone with nine children, the youngest still under a year old,
Lillie confronted the daunting challenge of providing for her family.
Fortunately, she had the fortitude for the prodigious task. Lillie Reese
was born in Chambers County and, according to her famous son,
knew how to work “as hard, and many times harder, than any man
around.” Her determination meant that the family continued to
produce a crop every season despite the absence of an adult man.
“She could plow a good straight furrow, plant and pick with the best
of them—cut cord wood like a lumberjack then leave the fields an
hour earlier than anyone else and fix a meal to serve to her family,”
Louis declared with admiration. During the episodes of Mun’s
temporary hospitalizations, she managed the family and fields on her
own, and after he was permanently institutionalized, the strong, five-
and-a-half-foot woman spent a number of years coping alone with
the tremendous responsibility of feeding nine hungry children and
keeping the family intact. The Barrows also had the support of a
strong community, and while the neighbors “were real poor people,”
they nevertheless helped out in myriad small ways. Some people
gave bits of change to the young Barrow children; others shared
their food “when the crops didn’t come through like they should.”15
But times were hard, and Lillie took another husband sometime
around 1920. Pat Brooks came to the marriage as a widower with
eight children of his own (five still living at home), and Joe became
very close with his stepbrother, “little Pat.” The two were the same
age and “kept happy” by spending much of their time together when
the older children worked in the fields. The boys played in the cotton
and rode atop the huge pile as the crop was hauled to the cotton gin
in Camp Hill, where the two watched, enthralled, as the machine
sucked it off the wagon. “The mules would go slow down the dirt
road and we would bounce on the cotton in the cart,” Louis recalled
fondly. On other days, the two would play a hide-and-seek game
called “skin the tree” or tramp around the swamps hunting for
snakes. According to local lore, if you cut the snakes apart, they
would join back together and become whole again. At night, they
might join the other children in a dangerous pastime of fire ball
before going to sleep. “You make a ball out of rags, tie it tight with a
string, soak it in kerosene, light it and throw it to each other,”
explained Joe’s sister, Eulalia. “You had to be quick to get rid of it
before it’d burn you.” But the most fun Louis remembered from
those years were the rides into the small town on Saturdays with his
stepfather and the younger Pat and looking at the stores that lined
the main street while Brooks conducted his business. “[W]hat I
remember most about those Saturday nights waiting out in the
wagon, he would bring Pat and me cheese and crackers, and that
made a kind of holiday. We had to stay in the wagon. He was strict
about that. Didn’t want us getting into trouble.”16 These simple, rural
pleasures marked Joe’s boyhood in Alabama.
By Louis’ account, Pat Brooks was a good stepfather, and the only
father Louis remembered. He treated his stepchildren as his own,
giving them all “lots of father talk” but allowing them a fair bit of
latitude “before he put a hand to us—and he’d put it to his own Pat
quick as he would to me.” Although the elder Pat would discipline as
harshly as he believed necessary, Louis felt that the punishments
were meted out fairly. The Barrows’ financial circumstances
improved as well after Lillie’s remarriage. He moved the family to
Camp Hill, west of Lafayette, where he worked for a wealthy white
construction engineer and was relatively well-off. Pat Brooks owned
a Model T Ford with a “plastic top that snapped on.” Their home now
boasted an organ and rugs on the floor. Although the family
continued to earn their income primarily through sharecropping, the
days of surviving without shoes and of living hand-to-mouth seemed
to have passed.17
But as good a father as Pat Brooks proved to be, Louis’ mother was
the center of the boy’s universe. She demanded good behavior from
her children. “We didn’t know what it was to disobey Momma,”
Eulalia explained. “Momma used to always teach us to tell the truth.”
She whipped her children for lying, and Joe “would holler longer and
louder” than any of his brothers or sisters. But even as a little boy,
Louis was eager to please her, and so he sometimes scrubbed the
floors of their home unbidden. “When Momma came home and saw
what I had done, she’d grab me up and give me a big kiss for it.
Then I could have floated clear up to the sky,” he reminisced.18 Few
things gave him greater joy than to earn physical affection from
Lillie.
Lillie was a devout Baptist and inculcated those values in her
children. She insisted that the family attend church on Sundays; they
piled into a wagon dressed in the good clothes and shoes that they
kept especially for those days and traveled the three miles down a
dusty road for worship. Sometimes, services at Mt. Sinai Baptist
Church lasted all day, but the preachers “had a lot of spirit” and kept
the congregation enthusiastic. “It was good for all of us,” insisted
Louis. “I guess it took our minds off our problems,” especially for his
mother. The Sunday prayers “seemed to renew her for the hard
struggles she had to endure the next week.”19 Lillie always appeared
to face life’s adversities with equanimity, a characteristic for which
her son would later come to be known.
Louis and his siblings attended school in the same church building
in the years before Lillie remarried, and during the week they walked
the long distance between home and school. When it rained too
hard or the temperatures dropped too low, the youngest children
would stay home rather than risk the long trek on a path that cut
through the fields. As was typical of Jim Crow schools, the academic
term coincided with the planting and ­harvesting seasons, so it only
ran from October through April. The students had no desks, just a
slate on which to write, and a single teacher held the difficult
responsibility of educating pupils who ranged in age from seven
through seventeen. Joe had struggled with enunciation since he was
very little, “sounding as if he had a mouthful of marbles” when he
spoke. In school, the teacher singled him out to repeat words aloud
over and over in her effort to elicit correct pronunciation from the
boy. Instead, she provoked shame in him; in his embarrassment,
Louis eventually opted to remain silent in school and to avoid
attending whenever possible.20
After the family moved to Camp Hill, they transferred to a public
school for black children. In a flagrant violation of the mandate for
equal accommodations established in the Supreme Court’s 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson decision, Alabama’s Jim Crow schools received
approximately one-tenth the funding appropriated to white schools,
and the school year lasted a mere 115 days as compared to 167 for
white students. Still, conditions at this school were an improvement
over those at the church (“for the first time,” explained Joe’s sister
Vunies, “we weren’t being taught by people who were mostly
illiterate because they’d had a limited education themselves”), and
despite Louis’ concerted efforts to play hooky as often as possible,
he nevertheless managed to learn the basics—reading, writing, and
rudimentary arithmetic. However, Louis never overcame his reticence
about speaking, and he remained soft-spoken throughout his life.21
These formative years of Louis’ childhood helped him establish
some long-lasting habits, perhaps foremost of which was his desire
for solitude. “Shoehorned into a household overflowing with people,”
Louis resisted when he needed to sleep with his brothers, three to a
bed. Over the years, he came to crave privacy, and as an adult he
sometimes took off alone and without warning, disappearing for
days at a time. Louis also established his enjoyment of swimming
and fishing, frequenting a special swimming hole during the hot
summer months (sometimes when school was still in session). He
also discovered horseback riding and played a little baseball in
Alabama; both activities became an important part of his adult life.
However, Louis admitted to not being particularly athletic in his
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News of the day.
R567417 - R567424.
R570429 - R570438.
R572657 - R572664.
R574062 - R574069.
R576809 - R576817.
R578731 - R578739.
Newspaper story.
MP24832.
New 2050A and 1850 loaders.
MP24990.
New voices in the South.
MP25105.
New York University.
LP43614.
Nicholson.
LP43233.
Night club boom.
MP25402.
Night cry.
LP43475.
Night in Casablanca.
R574926.
Night in paradise.
R570569.
Nightmare trip.
LP43437.
Night watch.
LP43413.
1974 cars: low speed crash costs.
MP24937.
1974 cars: low speed crash costs (foreign models)
MP25167.
1974 Chrysler and Plymouth station wagons.
MP25030.
1974 cleaner air system.
MP25023.
1974 Dodge station wagons.
MP25031.
1974 full size car body highlights.
MP25140.
Noah Films.
LP42940.
Noah’s ark.
LP43540.
Nobody loses all the time.
LP43034.
Nobody’s children.
MP25412.
Nocturne.
R570315.
Noise pollution.
LP43061.
No margin for error.
LP43476.
No medals.
LF155.
Nomination of Abraham Lincoln.
LP43359.
Nora Prentiss.
R571692.
Normal mitosis in plant cells (haemanthus)
MP25305.
North Carolina craftsman — Paul Minnis.
MU8975.
North Carolina craftsmen.
MU8975.
North from Mexico.
MP24896.
North Sea islanders.
MP24871.
No sanctuary.
LP43490.
Nosey, the sweetest skunk in the West.
LP43198.
Not just another woman.
LP42985.
Notorious.
R578231.
Not with a whimper.
LP43037.
Nova versus competition and Vega versus competition.
MU8944.
No way out.
LP43492.
Nowhere child.
LP43342.
Now is no more—A. J.’s family.
MU8905.
Now your injector.
MP25049.
Nurses wild.
LP43182.
 O
O’Brien’s stand.
LP43448.
Observation system - improving instruction.
MP25043.
Occlusive arterial disease.
MP25258.
Ocelots — den and cubs.
MP24777.
O’Connor, Rod.
MP25293 - MP25296.
MP25303 - MP25304.
MP25459.
Odd lot caper.
LP43049.
Odd man out.
R578287.
Ode to nature.
MP24909
O’Donnell, Robert H.
MP24914.
MP24915.
Odyssey Pictures Corporation.
LP43352.
Office of Education, United States. SEE United States. Office of
Education.
Officer training.
MP24931.
MP24932.
MP24933.
Offshore Productions.
MP25040.
Often and familiar ghost.
LP43410.
O’Hara, United States Treasury.
LP43229.
LP43231.
Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, Inc.
MP25357.
Old Pueblo Enterprises.
MP25293 - MP25296.
MP25459.
Old Pueblo Films.
MP25303.
MP25304.
Oldsmobile Division, General Motors Corporation. SEE General
Motors Corporation. Oldsmobile Division.
Oliver Twist.
LF146.
Ollinger’s last case.
LP43399.
Omnicom Productions, Inc.
LP43123.
Once a jolly swagman.
LF141.
Once the ferns.
LP42978.
Once upon a dream.
LF139.
O’Neill, Eugene.
LP42935.
One meat brawl.