JOE LOUIS
1914-1981

Louis, Joe (b. May 13, 1914, Chambers County, Ala.; d. April 12, 1981, Las Vegas, Nev.), one of the greatest boxers in modern history, widely viewed by white Americans as a symbol of racial harmony and by black Americans as a symbol of black triumph in a racist society.

Joseph Louis Barrow was born on a sharecropper's farm near Lafayette, Alabama, the seventh of eight children. His father, Munroe Barrow, was committed to a psychiatric hospital soon after Louis's birth. The family was told a short while later that Munroe had died, but in fact he lived for two more decades. Lillie Barrow remarried another farmer, and when Louis was ten the family followed the Great Migration north to Detroit, where Louis's stepfather found work. Because of Louis's poor schooling in the South, he attended school in Detroit with students much younger than himself. Louis was reportedly humiliated by the experience and developed a stammer. Later he attended a trade school to study carpentry, but his real interest lay in boxing. He spent hours watching boxers spar at a local gym, and after leaving school at the age of 17, he began training on his own.

Louis lost his first amateur bout but racked up an impressive string of victories over the next three years. They included more than 40 knockouts and only a handful of losses. In 1934 he won a national amateur title in the light heavyweight division, then opted for professional boxing. John Roxborough and Julian Black, two African American businessmen who were also involved in illegal gambling and running numbers, agreed to manage Louis. They encouraged him to drop Barrow from his name, thereby making it easier to remember. They also hired Jack Blackburn, a former lightweight fighter and well-regarded trainer. Discovering that Louis had little foot-speed, Blackburn encouraged him to use a flat-footed shuffle. The shuffle, along with Louis's compact punches, became his signature traits.

Roxborough and Black were also keenly aware of how much the white public hated the first (and last) African American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. Johnson, who reigned from 1908 to 1915, offended whites by gloating over his defeated (often white) opponents and by having relationships with white women. Louis's managers counseled him to be a gentleman in the ring and shy with the press; he was also to avoid drinking, smoking, and being seen alone with white women in public. Publicly, Louis followed this advice, and whites, who nicknamed him the Brown Bomber, widely championed his modesty and dignity. Even white southerners hailed him as a nonthreatening black man. Privately, although Louis neither drank nor smoked, he enjoyed an active nightlife as well as discrete romances with both black and white women.

Louis's professional career was nothing short of brilliant. In his first year, he won more than 20 fights without a loss, typically over white opponents. His many knockout victims included former heavyweight champions Primo Carnera and Max Baer in 1935. Boxing was the only major sport that then allowed blacks to compete against whites, and many African Americans lived vicariously through Louis's punishing blows to whites. After a victory by Louis, entire black neighborhoods were known to burst into spontaneous celebration.

On June 19, 1936, Louis met German fighter Max Schmeling, a former world champion, in New York's Yankee Stadium. At the time, Adolf Hitler's fascism was encroaching upon Europe, and the press seized on the fight to portray Schmeling as a representative of authoritarianism and Louis as a symbol of democracy. To a lesser degree, Louis was also touted as a symbol of racial harmony and of the possibilities of upward mobility in America. In the 12th round, Schmeling knocked out the heavily favored Louis, dealing him his first professional defeat. Hitler cited Schmeling's victory as proof of the superiority of the Aryan race.

His popularity reduced, Louis rebounded to seven straight victories and the right to fight heavyweight champion James Braddock on June 22, 1937, in Chicago's Comiskey Park. Braddock knocked Louis to the ground early in the fight, but Louis recovered and in the eighth round sent Braddock to the canvas with a sharp punch. Louis, only 23 years old, became heavyweight champion of the world. The fight was followed, one year to the day later, with a rematch against Schmeling. With the possibility of a European war looming, the second Louis-Schmeling fight took on even more significance than the first. In the first round Louis scored a stunning knockout, making him one of the most popular athletes in America and, indeed, much of the world.

By the early 1940s, however, Louis was deeply in debt as a result of poor investments, gross financial mismanagement by his handlers, a habit of giving money away freely, and high living. To pay his creditors, Louis accepted a challenge to his title every month for most of 1940 and 1941 - a number of contests unheard of among boxing champions. Many of the contenders posed Louis little challenge, prompting reporters to call the fights the Bum of the Month Club. The matches, however, were not all easy; Billy Conn, for one, all but destroyed the champ before Louis mustered an incredible last-round knockout.

In 1942, with World War II under way, Louis entered the U.S. Army and boxed in nearly 100 exhibition matches for troops. Although to that point he had rarely taken political positions, he now protested racial segregation in the armed services and refused to sit on segregated military buses. After the war, he resumed his professional career. In a 1947 fight Jersey Joe Walcott knocked him down twice, but Louis won a victory in a controversial split decision. Louis settled the controversy in a rematch by knocking out Walcott.

In 1949, a few months before turning 35, Louis retired with only the loss to Schmeling on his record. His finances, however, were in even worse shape than before, and in 1950 he returned to the ring. Louis compiled several victories but lost twice, once to heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles and, in a knockout on October 26, 1951, to Rocky Marciano. After the Marciano fight, Louis retired for good. His final record was 68 wins, 54 by knockout, and three losses.

Louis's personal life was in shambles. He was divorced three times before marrying Martha Jefferson in 1959. Overwhelmed by his debts, he tried professional wrestling, then established an unsuccessful chain of fast-food restaurants before entering a deal with alleged Mafiosi to promote boxing. He would later admit that he used cocaine in the late 1960s, and in 1970 he was committed to a psychiatric hospital after suffering paranoid delusions. In his final years, he worked in Las Vegas as a greeter and companion to wealthy guests. Despite his failings, Joe Louis remained one of America's most loved sports heroes.