LOUIS, JOE 1914-1981

Boxer

Childhood

Joe Louis Barrow was born in a sharecropper's shack in Lexington, Alabama, the seventh of eight children. Two years after his birth his father was committed to Searcy State Hospital for the Colored Insane, where he died twenty years later. Mrs. Barrow remarried a man who had five children of his own, and moved her family in with his. The children slept three to a bed. In 1926, when Joe Louis was twelve, his stepfather moved the family to Detroit and went to work at the Ford plant. Louis was already behind in school, and the transition to a new setting only complicated his education. It seemed clear to teachers that he was not a candidate for graduation, so they referred him to Bronson Trade School, where he stayed until age seventeen, to learn cabinet making. In an attempt to keep her son off the streets, Louis's mother saved up to buy him a violin and pay for music lessons. He took the money and used it to rent a locker at the Brewster Recreation Center, where he could box. He took the ring name Joe Louis when he filled out his application for amateur competition. The space for his name was small, and Louis wrote big, so only his first two names would fit. Amateur boxers were paid in merchandise certificates for as much as $25, which they could redeem for goods at local stores. In 1933 Louis helped support his family by fighting more than once a week. At the end of the year he had won fifty of fifty-four fights, forty-three by knockout. That record attracted the attention of John Roxborough, a racketeer who had served time for manslaughter and was boss of the Detroit numbers racket; he signed up his friend Julian Black as Louis's manager. Under their management Louis won the light-heavyweight Golden Gloves championship and then the National Amateur Athletic Union championship. He turned pro on 4 July 1934.

Mike Jacobs

Joe Louis won ten of twelve fights by knockout in his first year as a professional and developed a reputation in the Detroit area as a devastating puncher. Boxing promoter Mike Jacobs discovered him and saw the opportunity to make a fortune. He negotiated an exclusive contract with Louis to promote all his fights; then he lined up a match in New York City with perhaps the most overrated fighter of the time, the huge Italian Primo Carnera. The prefight publicity was masterful: a primitive black man against a white giant. There was speculation about a race war if Louis beat the white fighter; the Ku Klux Klan opposed the fight and sent death threats to Louis supporters. On 25 June 1935, sixty thousand people filed in to Yankee Stadium to see the much smaller Louis punish Camera before knocking him out in the sixth round. Louis earned his nickname "The Brown Bomber" that night, and on 22 June 1937 he knocked out James J. Braddock in the eighth round.

Schmeling

On 19 June 1936 Louis fought Max Schmeling for the right to take on heavyweight champion James J. Braddock. In the fight with Schmeling, Louis was more than a representative of his race on fight night; he was an American hero fighting against a German champion when the anti-Semitism of the Nazis was already apparent. It was assumed Louis would win easily, and when he was knocked out in the twelfth round, the loss took on uncommon significance. He had been fighting for two years, and his record was twenty-seven wins, with twenty-two knockouts, and one loss. He had to fight another year, eleven more fights with ten more knockouts, before he got his championship shot. On 22June he knocked out Braddock in the eighth round and received a purse of $103,684 on gate receipts of $715,470. Joe Louis was the youngest heavyweight champion in history and the first black champion since Jack Johnson in 1915. He was also the most popular heavyweight boxer in history. In an era of undisguised racism, Louis fascinated white fans who were awed by his stony ferocity and raw power, and he stood as a symbol of racial pride for blacks. His fights were broadcast over radio and were heard by as many as two-thirds of all the radio listeners in America, audiences of as many as fifty million, and he attracted audiences of tens of thousands to the arenas for his every fight. In the most corrupt of all sports he maintained a reputation as a man untainted by scandal, whose natural talent made him unbeatable—except against Schmeling. When he fought Schmeling again, two years and three days after their first fight, he declared, "There ain't going to be any decision in this fight." Seventy thousand fans paid over $1 million at Yankee Stadium to see Louis fight the man now openly promoted as the Nazi champion, and Louis gave them what they wanted with a knockout in two minutes and four seconds of the first round. He had defeated Germany for them and for millions of radio listeners. Heywood Broun wrote the next day in the New York World-Telegram that Louis had "exploded the Nordic myth with a bombing glove."

Champ

For eleven years he fought all comers—ninety-two matches, including eighteen exhibitions during the war, and he took a year off when he was serving in the military. He won more than $4 million in purses, but owed money when he retired. As a champion Louis was magnanimous. He supported more than twenty friends and family during the 1940s, and when his large purses were divided, he had little left over for himself. When he retired, he rebelled against promoter Mike Jacobs, who had used his right to promote Louis's fights to establish a dynasty and make a fortune. Louis went into fight promotions himself, and he became a partner in the International Boxing Club (IBC), which superseded Jacobs's Twentieth Century Sporting Club as the dominant power in professional boxing, but Louis's partners saw to it that his 20 percent share of IBC was not worth much, as they drained profits for themselves. Louis was a celebrity though, and he survived on value of his name, though money went out faster than it came in and the IRS took whatever it could to discharge the income-tax debt Louis had accumulated during his salad days. By early 1960 he was reduced to acting as a greeter at Las Vegas casinos, first at the Thunderbird Hotel and then at Caesar's Palace. He began smoking, drinking to excess, and taking drugs, a habit that nearly killed him when he overdosed in 1969. He died on 12 April 1981 after a long illness punctuated by periods of dementia.

Death

Joe Louis laid in state at Caesar's Palace Sports Pavilion, where thousands of former fans paid their respects, and then at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., where he was flown in Air Force One, the presidential plane. Jesse Jackson delivered the eulogy before Louis was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Sources:

Joe Louis Barrow, jr., and Barbara Munder, Joe Louis: 50 Years an American Hero (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988);

Chris Mead, Joe Louis: Black Hero in White America (New York: Scribners, 1985).

Louis, Joe (1914–1983), boxer and heavyweight champion.Born near LaFayette, Alabama, Joe Louis moved to Detroit with his mother at the age of ten. He became an amateur boxer in 1932 and two years later turned professional. Under the guidance of his trainer and confidant Jack “Chappie” Blackburn and managers John Roxborough and Julian Black, Louis quickly established a reputation as a devastating puncher and skilled fighter. He captured the heavyweight championship from James Braddock in 1937 and went on to defend his title a record twenty‐five times. Among his many legendary fights was a first‐round knockout of the German fighter Max Schmeling in a return match in 1938, a final‐round knockout of Billy Conn in 1941, and a highly controversial defeat of Jersey Joe Walcott in 1947. His defeat of Schmeling took on symbolic importance, as many Americans viewed it as a triumph of American democracy over Nazi racism and totalitarianism. Louis retired as heavyweight champion in 1949, only to be thwarted in comeback attempts against Ezzard Charles and Rocky Marciano over the next two years. As with many former boxers, Louis's postretirement years were troubled. He married four times (twice to Marva Trotter), failed in the fast‐food business, at one time owed over a million dollars in federal taxes, and spent five months in a mental hospital. Louis spent his last years as a greeter at Caesar's Palace Casino in Las Vegas. In 1990, he was posthumously honored by election to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. An American hero, Joe Louis was especially revered in the African‐American community.
See also Boxing; Sports: Professional Sports.

Bibliography

Anthony O. Edmonds , Joe Louis, 1973.
Chris Mead , Joe Louis: Black Hero in White America, 1985.

David K. Wiggins

Louis Honoré Fréchette , 1839–1908, French Canadian poet and politician, b. Lévis, Que. He worked (1865–71) as a journalist in Chicago and while there wrote a volume of poetry entitled La Voix d'un exilé [the voice of an exile] (1866–68). Returning to Canada, he served in Parliament (1874–78), tried journalism again, and in 1889 received a government clerkship, which he held until his death. His volumes of poetry include Les Oiseaux de neige [snowbirds] (1879), on old Quebec, and La Légende d'un peuple [the story of a people] (1887), an epic of the French Canadians. He was the first Canadian poet to be honored by the French Academy. His collected poems appeared posthumously in 1908.