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’tstand 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 youngballplayer’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 avaguely racist diminutive, the press variously ignored his request, spitefullygranted 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 asAllen’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
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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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 underthe heading “Baseball in Turmoil” (a reference to Curt Flood’s challenge tobaseball’s reserve clause, but Allen was the sport’s better poster boy for“turmoil”), and once in 1972, smoking what remains the only cigarette inthe history of SI covers.
Nor has Allen’s treatment mellowed over the years. The current entryfor Allen on BaseballLibrary.com (“The Stories behind the Stats”) beginsthis way: “Talented, controversial, charming, and abusive, Allen put in 15major league seasons, hitting prodigious homers and paying prodigiousfines. He was praised as a money player and condemned as a loafer.” Thesite does duly note Allen’s Rookie of the Year season in 1964 and his MVPseason in 1972; but its overall flavor tends fairly decisively toward “loafer”rather than “money player.” (The account of his stellar rookie season openson the odd—but for Allen, familiar—note, “He made 41 errors at thirdbase. . . .”)2 Total Baseball, the baseball encyclopedia, ranks Allen as theeighty-eighth best player of all time in an entry that begins, “Dick Allenfeuded 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 bringto mind Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale,the Black Panther Party, and other black radicals who came to prominencein the latter half of the 1960s. In the too-clever parlance of ’60s- and ’70s-era baseball writing, however, its appropriation conjured figures like HankAaron, 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 mightwere transforming the national pastime. (Absent its black stars, HankAaron points out, the National League’s stand-out player of the 1960swould have been Ron Santo.)4
But the two meanings of “black power” were not unrelated, as DickAllen’s career demonstrates perhaps better than most. The social drama ofthe Civil Rights movement constituted the inescapable context withinwhich black ballplayers of this generation were understood and measuredin 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 thespectrum, Richie Allen, Bob Gibson, and Dock Ellis at the other). “If[Allen] had been white,” writes Gibson, “he would have been consideredmerely a free spirit. As a black man who did as he pleased and guarded hisprivacy, 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-
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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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 socialcommentary on the racial questions of the day (indeed it was in relation tothe sports page that whites seem to have first acknowledged and acceptedthat there might even be such a thing as a “white press”). It is not just thatthe world of Orval Faubus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Strom Thurmond, andMalcolm X supplied the cues for writing about a figure like Richie Allen, butalso, contrariwise, that commentary on the likes of Allen—or MuhammadAli or Cookie Gilchrist or Lew Alcindor—was by its very nature a genre ofpolitical 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 inPhiladelphia, however, from 1964 to 1969, the political truths of the sportsworld were grasped and analyzed chiefly by athletes and writers on theblack side of the color line, and only very occasionally by a white com-mentator like Robert Lipsyte or Jack Olsen. Most often, black analyses ofhow race mattered—along with black protestations that race did matter—were simply folded into white power’s already-scripted tale of the “badNegro,” as when Cookie Gilchrist mounted a boycott of the AFL’s 1964All-Star Game in Jim Crow New Orleans, when Tommie Smith and JohnCarlos raised their gloved fists on the dais in Mexico City in 1968, or whenDick Allen or Frank Robinson raised the issue of Major League Baseball’sracist hiring practices. Bad boys all. By suggesting that race had anythingto do with his image as “the bad boy of baseball,” in other words, a figurelike 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 theCivil Rights era, “just about the premier bad boy in sports.”8 It is alsoabout 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 constitutedmy 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 enteredpolitical parlance, it signified Allen’s towering home run to straightawaycenter in the All-Star Game in Anaheim. But by age ten, always hungry foranother story, another AP wire photo, another stat on Allen, I could nothelp but notice that most of what I found was some brand of vilification.
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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22 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON
My fourth-grade teacher Miss Harms could lecture on Reverend King andthe freedom struggle; but what I learned about the injustices and the slan-ders of racism, I learned mostly by following Richie Allen in the DenverPost, waiting in vain for someone to write something good. (“Richie playedwith fire in his eyes, always,” says Orlando Cepeda. “Never read that in nonewspaper.”9)
Reflecting on the odd oasis of adulation that his own fame providedhim amid a wider, uglier world of racism, harassment, and danger, BobGibson once told baseball writer Roger Angell, “It’s nice to get attentionand favors . . . but I can never forget the fact that if I were an ordinaryblack person I’d be in the shithouse, like millions of others.”10 Allen neverdid quite get out, even despite his talent and his fame and the awed respecthe earned inside the lines. Here, in what stands as both a historical and apersonal reflection, I seek to discover what that might say about politicsand sport in the 1960s, and also to recover what it did mean to one whitefan, 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 bestbaby, I was a ball of confusion.”11 Allen was the National League Rookieof the Year, hitting .318 with 201 hits, 29 home runs, and 91 RBIs. He alsohad 38 doubles and 13 triples, a single-season combination that the likes ofMays, Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Pete Rose never matched. Or JackieRobinson, for that matter. (Joe DiMaggio bested it back in 1936, with 44doubles and 15 triples). But Phillies fans found ways to sour on himnonetheless, many blaming him for the team’s spectacular Septemberfreefall that cost them what had seemed a sure pennant. Fans’ mercilessbooing became so common at Connie Mack Stadium in ensuing years thatby 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 withhis spikes.12
Jackie Robinson and the magical date of 1947 seem to have longpassed 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, theplayers who come to mind in addition to Robinson are people like LarryDoby, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin, a generation born in the teensand twenties, who came of age in the forties and played in the Negro
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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23“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME
Leagues before entering the newly integrated majors directly on the heels ofBranch Rickey’s “great experiment” in Brooklyn. The intervening gloryyears make it hard enough to recall that Willie Mays and Hank Aaronplayed their first pro ball in the Negro Leagues (Mays with the BirminghamBlack Barons, Aaron with the Indianapolis Clowns); but even the playersslightly younger than they—players with no Negro League experience atall—spent the early part of their careers in a baseball environment no lesswhite 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, LouBrock. Though associated with the 1960s and a baseball era far removedfrom the Jackie Robinson moment, “most of them came through the minorleagues 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 comeup right behind them: most had grown up in ghettos, and their way into thebig leagues had been difficult, often through a still-segregated minor-leaguesystem. 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 WestOakland and whose initiation in the taunts of “Nigger, go back to Africa”came in Sally League towns like Augusta, Macon, and Savannah.15 AsDock Ellis—ten years younger still than Robinson—put it, “You learn morethan baseball in the minor leagues.” For his own part, Ellis recalls goinginto the stands in a game against the Geneva Senators, swinging a leadedbat at a fan who had called him Stepin Fetchit, or standing defiantly on themound, middle finger extended to a hostile crowd, after striking out the lastbatter 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 1953as 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 comeout to the ballpark and, for a tiny amount of money, yell at this one youngblack player, who symbolized to them a world beginning to change.” Hesometimes carried a bat with him as he left the clubhouse, according to Bob
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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24 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON
Gibson, in order “to get through the hostile crowds that stood between himand the team bus.”17 Aaron and Wes Covington broke the color barrier upnorth 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 presidentof 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 whatwas going to happen. Those people had awfully strong feelings about whatwas going on.”19 John Roseboro endured taunts of “chocolate drop” inSheboygan; Felipe Alou was barred from the Evangeline League because ofLouisiana segregation statutes (and shipped instead to the more hospitableCocoa Indians of the Florida State League, “a class D menagerie”).20 InFayette, North Carolina, Curt Flood “heard spluttering gasps, ‘There’s agoddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with those white boys! I’mleaving’”; 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 youcatch one ball out there.” “What kind of country is this?” Vic Powerwanted to know, upon confronting racial mores so different from those thatobtained in his native Puerto Rico.21
Even after they had safely reached the majors, far from the rednecksneers of the Sally League circuit, most of the 1.5 generation had to ne-gotiate the southern racial climate and the segregated facilities of Floridasites like Bradenton, Vero Beach, Clearwater, or Tampa during themonths of spring training. Most also had to deal with some element ofsegregation 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 hurledat 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 anovertly racist manager named Solly Hemus: “either he disliked us deeplyor he genuinely believed that the only way to motivate us was with in-sults,” remembers Gibson. During one clubhouse meeting, in the presenceof the full team, Hemus referred to an opposing pitcher as a “nigger.” Or-lando Cepeda, for his part, attributes the perennial also-ran fortunes ofthe Giants during the early ’60s to the breakdown of team feeling alongethnoracial lines. (Among other things, though his lineup featuredCepeda, all three Alou brothers, Jose Pagan, and Juan Marichal, managerAlvin Dark tried to ban the Spanish language in the clubhouse. Dark—who, ironically, had grown up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the very townthat barred Felipe Alou—also openly questioned the “mental alertness”of his “Negro and Spanish-speaking players.”)22
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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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), andWilliamsport (Pennsylvania), in 1963 and at the age of only 20, Allenlanded with the Arkansas Travelers, the Phillies’ AAA team whose homepark was in Little Rock (of Central High fame) and whose lineup had, tothat point, been white only. (As Lou Brock, who had been born there, likedto say, Arkansas was indeed “the land of opportunity”—at the very firstopportunity he had gotten the hell out.23) “When I arrived at the park,”Allen recalls, “ . . . there were people marching around with signs. Onesaid, DON’T NEGRO-IZE BASEBALL. Another, NIGGER GOHOME. . . . Here, in my mind, I thought Jackie Robinson had Negro-izedbaseball sixteen years earlier.” As if to underscore the militant whiteness ofthis white world, the season’s festivities began with the ceremonial throw-ing out of the first pitch by Governor Orval Faubus. Afterward Allen founda note on the windshield of his car: “DON’T COME BACK AGAIN, NIG-GER.” “There might be something more terrifying than being black andholding 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 mypath 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 codesand social rituals of pre-Civil Rights Act Little Rock.24
This was perhaps the beginning of bad blood between Allen and boththe Phillies’ white officialdom and Philadelphia’s white press. For one thing,Allen felt that he was ready for the majors already (his nine spring-traininghome runs in 1963 seemed to argue in his favor), and he saw himself as asacrificial lamb to the organization’s imperative to desegregate its farm sys-tem. This might have been workable if, for another thing, the Phillies hadhandled Allen’s situation with some of the forethought and sensitivity thatthe Dodgers had shown Jackie Robinson. But the organization was quitecalloused in its general disinterest in Allen’s Arkansas experience. As Ebonywryly noted in 1970, “During [the] 1963 season with Philadelphia’s minorleague team in Little Rock, . . . he complained about racial injustice (Phillywriters say they found no prejudice there).”25 Most telling, perhaps, wasArkansas manager Frank Lucchesi’s nonchalance toward the social burdenthat 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’snot in taste but the fan didn’t realize it. They say worse things to whiteballplayers. 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 afairly spectacular history of racism of its own: though Connie Mack had
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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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 Phillieslineup—remained the most stubbornly anti-integrationist in the NationalLeague. The black press of the 1940s reported that Mack himself wasamong the owners “most bitterly” opposed to integration; and accordingto historian Bruce Kuklick, when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in1947, “the cruelest taunts he received at Ebbets Field came from the visit-ing Phillies. . . .” As for Brooklyn’s visits to Shibe Park, Phillies GM HerbPennock pleaded with Branch Rickey not to bring Robinson at all:“Branch, you can’t bring the nigger here. Philadelphia’s not ready for thatyet.” When Robinson did turn up in Philadelphia, pitchers threw at him,infielders purposely spiked him, and Phillies players once lined up on thedugout steps, pointing their bats at him and making gunshot sounds. By themid-1950s, the Phillies were the only remaining all-white team in the Na-tional League; and even after the team finally did integrate, it remainedamong the last major league teams to end segregated housing during springtraining.27
Over and above the racialized traditions of Philadelphia baseball, thecity 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 Leaguedescribed it.28 In 1964 Allen arrived in a Philadelphia wracked by racial vi-olence over issues of job discrimination, housing, school segregation, andpolice brutality, and in which an aggressive (and aggressively white) formerbeat cop named Frank Rizzo was rising rapidly through the ranks towardthe commissioner’s office, which he attained in 1967.29 (Faubus and Rizzo:two-thirds of some weird, depressing hat trick. Later Allen worked for AlCampanis.) 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 NorthPhiladelphia, one boundary of which was marked by Connie Mack Sta-dium. Players had to pass through a “police state” to get to the ballparkduring those days. One black resident lamented, “The only thing I regretabout 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 wecould’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 Easteregg hunt,” as Bob Uecker once quipped, and even white outfielderJohnny Callison had objects thrown at him, still these fans found a veryspecial—vitriolic—place in their hearts for the new arrival from theArkansas Travelers. Even his Rookie of the Year stats (.318, 29 HR, 91RBI) were not enough to shield Allen from the tense, racial hatreds of
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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27“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME
mid-’60s Philadelphia.31 Fan animosity toward Allen seems a compoundof 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 expressionlessplaying style, which to many whites made him look “arrogant.” (Man-ager Gene Mauch’s more generous observation of Allen’s demeanor wasthat “He doesn’t get way up when things are going good, or way downwhen 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 harshestpress 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 squanderedtheir six and a half game lead in the final 12 games of that season. But themutual bitterness began in earnest the next season, in July 1965, when apregame 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 histeammates for his derisive comments toward Allen, Johnny Briggs, andother black players. One thing that particularly enraged Allen was whenThomas would approach a black player, pretending “to offer his hand in asoul 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 failedbunt attempt the night before, but Thomas chose to answer Allen insteadof Callison. He taunted Allen as “Muhammad Clay,” by some accounts,and “Richie X” by others—taunts that in either case Allen answered witha pop to the jaw before Thomas broke a cardinal baseball rule by swinginghis 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 $2,000fine; but Thomas, meanwhile, freely fed his (partisan, sanitized) version tothe press. Manager Gene Mauch, too, made some rather coy remarks to thepress that not only obscured the nature of the incident and Thomas’ part init, but also left an impression that the Phillies had unfairly and quite know-ingly scapegoated the white veteran in deference to Allen’s talent andyouth. It was here, most significantly, that the press began to tag Allen as a“troublemaker”—an appellation that would provide a convenient mediapeg for the rest of his career. “Baseball should never forget the Allen-Thomas fiasco,” says Bill White. “ . . . When Dick Allen came to the bigleagues, 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
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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28 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON
The result was that Allen came out looking unjustly favored andvaguely militant—a ready-made script for many whites, given the city’sracial 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; DailyNews 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 homeruns), and Allen recalls seeing one father pointing at him and teaching hislittle boy how to boo. It was soon after, too, that people started to throwthings at Allen, to vandalize his home, and to harass his family. Across thebalance of the 1960s, Allen was “booed mercilessly,” as Newsweek re-ported, and he received “hate mail . . . so brutal that he now refuses toopen anything that looks like fan mail”; “people smeared paint on his car,threw rocks and shot BBs through his windows and booed his children onthe 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 contentin the knowledge that his three-run homer in the twelfth inning won agame 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 afterthis particular game that Allen started speaking openly about wanting outof Philadelphia.38
The Thomas incident may have marked a turning point for Allen andthe city, but it was scarcely the only factor in that souring relationship. AsDon Malcolm suggests, the “Angry Negro Problem”—a thematic conven-tion for writing about a certain kind of athlete, from Dick Allen to GarySheffield—derives not only from the fact that “white Americans still aremanifestly uncomfortable with demonstrative black males,” but also, sig-nificantly, that they are “probably most uncomfortable with the ones whoare 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 justin time to witness the flames of the Watts riot.40)
Dick Allen, emphatically, was not utterly unappreciated by the baseballworld, and this, paradoxically, may have fueled the animosity against himin 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 Soxfor a quarter of a million dollars, he was to become the highest-paid playerin Major League history to that point). “His salary has risen faster thananyone’s ever did before,” remarked Newsweek in 1968. “ . . . And hispopularity has plummeted just as fast.”41 In the calculus of Philadelphiarace relations—and of the nation’s—these two developments may have
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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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 ofsocial 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 “thefirst black man . . . to assert himself in baseball with something like the un-accommodating force of Muhammad Ali in boxing, Kareem Abdul-Jabbarin basketball, and Jim Brown in football.”42
As the economics of the game shifted in the late 1960s, too, there wasthe volatile matter of the sheer power attaching to a player’s contract: manyamong the white press and white fandom were troubled that the Phillies or-ganization found even Allen’s white managers (first Mauch, and then BobSkinner) more readily expendable than this black star, impetuous though hewas. As Jim Bouton had it in Ball Four, “There is a pecking order in themajor leagues which goes like this: owner, general manager, superstar, man-ager, established player, coaches, traveling secretary, trainer, clubhouseman, marginal player.”43 Black superstar over white manager—this was aproblem for many white fans in the 1960s. And while much discussion ofrace in baseball has focused on the suspicious paucity of black managersand team executives, the “problem” of the black super star—the tensionbetween the racial hierarchy of the culture and the natural pecking order ofthe 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 onAllen’s career both on and off the field: Allen was militant, a malcontent, atroublemaker, 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 shockand scandal of a book like Bouton’s Ball Four in 1970—what Bowie Kuhncalled 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 brawlin 1968 (which, like the Thomas incident, began with a racial slur); andalso in 1968 a few missed days of spring training, an instance of reportinglate 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
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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“the fast highball”); and in 1969, income tax problems, a missed plane toSt. 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 toshowing up at the park “unfit to play,” either, for instance, as we laterlearned and as the press corps had surely known at the time), Allen’s everymove 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 myside of the story, I wouldn’t take it because I just don’t trust the white pressin general.”46 If Allen was a perpetual story, race and racism were never anacknowledged part of that story. But the “race neutral” language of thewhite press makes for some interesting reading: Allen “marches to amournful tune that only he hears, moving with an insolent grace,” for ex-ample, according to the Philadelphia Daily News; though one might fairlyask 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 abuilt-in distaste for discipline” (New York Times); he is “a player of enor-mous talents and mercurial moods” who is “known less for his awesomebatting 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” (SportsIllustrated).47 So infamous did Allen’s movements become, that at the All-Star Game in 1969 President Nixon sent a personal message throughAllen’s teammate Grant Jackson: “You tell Richie Allen to get back on thejob.” By that same year—his last in Philadelphia, as it turned out—Allenhad begun to “wish they’d shut the gates . . . and let us play ball with nopress 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 rakingin 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 atPhils’ 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 thewhite press’s racism, as “the questions continue[d]” regarding Allen: peo-ple ought to “question the questioners,” the black journal protested. Toquestion 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 thebasis of what they’ve heard or what they’ve read in the white press.” Thewhiteness of the press, in this equation, was as inescapably significant asthe blackness of the ballplayer: “Richie Allen is black and he’s proud and
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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he has the gumption to be a proud, black man in one of America’s mostconservative sports. He sprouts a lush Afro that’s anchored with long andwide sideburns”—“his natural and long wide sideburns were targets ofwhite criticism in Philly for six years.” After pointing out that Allen wasknown to read the Bible with some regularity, and that one of his infamousmissed games had to do with his son’s illness, Ebony argued that “Richie’sstands on baseball’s controversial issues and the fact he’s black” were whatmarked him as a “radical.” “Basically, he’s just a ‘regular brother,’ hippedwith all the jive-time routines of coolness, arrogance and a happy-go-luckyattitude.”50
His were, indeed, the Afro and the pork chop sideburns with whichSports Illustrated would choose to illustrate its cover story on “Baseball inTurmoil” in the spring of the Allen-Flood-McCarver trade. Although Allendid hold out for more money from St. Louis, it is true, the “turmoil” hadmostly to do, not with him—“I’ll play anywhere: third, short, anywherebut 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 Allencase . . . we are going through a hell of a turmoil right now.” Though Buschwas having his problems with the Steve Carlton contract, too, the turmoilseemed to him largely racial, apparently, and also connected to the broadersocial currents of 1960s America: “I can’t understand what’s happeninghere or on our campuses or in our great country.”51
Flood’s protest was, in fact, “racial,” even if it was Allen who morelooked the part in SI’s estimation. For one thing, Flood was not eager togo to Philadelphia, “the nation’s northernmost southern city,” as he put it,“ . . . to succeed Richie Allen in the affections of that organization, itspress and its catcalling missile-hurling audience.”52 And for another, asmany have remarked over the years, given the bondage and emancipationmotifs of the legalities involved, it was perhaps inevitable that a blackballplayer would be the first to challenge Major League Baseball’s reserveclause and seek free agency. Flood himself begins his autobiography, TheWay It Is (1970), with an epigraph from his brother Carl: “Pharaoh, youbetter let them chillun go, honey.” Later, noting that “the word slavery hasarisen in connection with my lawsuit” (and conceding sardonically that“the condition of the major-league baseball player is closer to peonagethan to slavery”), Flood appeals to the language of a 1949 court decisionin the case of the Giants’ Danny Gardella: “Only the totalitarian-mindedwill believe that high pay excuses virtual slavery.”53 The reserveclause/slavery analogy was neither casual nor incidental, in Flood’s view:“Frederick Douglass was a Maryland slave who taught himself to read. ‘Ifthere is no struggle,’ he once said, ‘there is no progress. Those who profess
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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to love freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want cropswithout 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’spowers “to a plantation owner, allowing his players to play for him inthe same way that the plantation owner allowed the sharecropper towork his land while at the same time keeping him deep in debt and con-stantly beholden.” The slavery analogy was also clearly among the thingsthat Gibson had in mind when, during the spring of the Flood-Allentrade, 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, butwith 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 thatDevine had “emancipated” Philadelphia from Allen.)56 And Allen, for hispart, drew from the same lexicon: “You don’t know how good it feels toget out of Philadelphia. They treat you like cattle. It was like a form ofslavery. 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. Youhandle horses.”57 Curt Flood might have said that; so might FrederickDouglass.
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 DickAllen” vividly captures the death grip that Allen and the white racists ofPhiladelphia had on one another during those years. Recalling his first evervisit to Connie Mack Stadium as an eight-year-old in 1965, Vilensky writesof the “batteries, bottles, paperweights” that were hurled in Allen’s direc-tion, and the “nigger, nigger, nigger” and “fuckin’ nigger, nigger” thatswirled around the stands.
I guess it was about the seventh inning when Richie came up for his third atbat. I don’t recall what he had done in his two previous at bats, but thechanting started anew. “Nigger.” “Big mouth nigger.” “Fuckin’ nigger.” “Goback to Africa, Nigger.” Yes, someone actually yelled that. . . . [S]uddenlythere was a crack of the bat as Richie Allen crushed a line drive over ourheads. I turned around just in time to watch the ball bounce off a little eaveabove the top of the grandstand, then go completely out of the stadium. Ashot of more than five hundred feet in distance. Not a high, arcing, majestic
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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home run, but a cold, vicious, angry drubbing of the ball. A loud slap. Thepower of it scared me. It made people quiet. Took all their air like a punchto the gut. As Richie touched home plate, the man next to me said to no onein particular: “Fuckin’ nigger can hit.”58
2. Boulder
Dick Allen and biographer Tim Whitaker stand on the diamond wheredecades before the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords of theNegro Leagues had played, directly across from the vacant lot whereAllen’s boyhood home once stood. “Imaginary baseball,” says Allen. “It’sthe purest version of the game.”
Allen tugs at his shirt sleeves and pushes his cowboy hat down on top of hishead, mimicking the same routine he went through whenever he stepped tothe plate against major league pitching. He takes a few practice swings withhis 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. Iwould 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. “Nowbattting,” 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 JackieRobinson stone,” he says, tossing the pebble in the air and catching it, “wasalways the one that broke a window.”59
When I was growing up there must have been millions of us who wereright with Allen on this: that real players played real games in real stadiumswas 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 inthe pregnant hours after dinner, as dusk edged into darkness. This scene de-scribes much of my own childhood, though for me the Richie Allen stonewas the window-breaker. (Well, our developing suburban neighborhoodwas still rural enough, the distances still great enough, that no windowswere ever really in danger. Besides, I couldn’t hit that well. But one timewhen I was about nine, pretending to be Juan Marichal, pitching off theside of our brick garage and mowing down the hitters 1–2–3 through the
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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innings—a real gem—in the top of the eighth I couldn’t resist giving up ahome run to Richie Allen. Num-ber fiff-teeen. In my effort to recreate oneof those awesome shots that cause opposing fielders immediately to slacktheir bodies and look skyward in resignation, I threw the ball too highagainst the wall, breaking the narrow pane of glass that ran the length ofthe garage just beneath the awning. Later, when my dad asked me if I knewanything about the broken window, I came this close to telling him RichieAllen did it.)
Why Allen would have idolized Jackie Robinson is pretty obvious, buthow 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 theMajor Leagues by Jim Brosnan. The chapter on Allen was enough to makea huge impression on an eight-year-old, but it was not exactly calculated todo 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 bekilled by a ground ball.” This piece of baseball hagiography also featureda four-panel sequence of photographs depicting Allen letting a grounderpass 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. ABraves 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 itspublication), I adopted Allen as my hero at once. It may have been becauseI was enthralled by his appearance: the chapter itself goes into great detailon 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 tocompare with the pure poetry of form in some of the Allen photos—I see itthis 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 aplayer 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 glorywould surely be strewn with similar obstacles, not to mention the qualmsand 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 gravitatednaturally toward the one figure in the book who was clearly being pickedon. (“He . . . turns to watch it roll into the outfield.” It might have been afew more years before I could articulate this, but even at age eight I feltsome version of hey, what the fuck, man?) Within two years—1968—whenI 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
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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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—andhere he drops his voice to an awed whisper—“BLACK.” My neighborhoodgrowing up was a lot like that, except in white. It was not the militantwhiteness of South Boston (or Connie Mack Stadium); it was not even theleast bit self-conscious. On the contrary, the neighborhood was so white asto 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 beforegoing 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 whitewomen.61)
There is a longer-term history that is relevant here, because I did growup in a liberal household in which civil rights sympathies were never inquestion. Since my father is a New York Jew, naturally we used to listento Mahalia Jackson every year when we decorated the Christmas tree. Hehad grown up in the Bronx in the 1930s, and at age thirteen, the year hewas not bar mitzvahed, he somehow discovered Harlem and jazz. Thoughhis was probably not the kind of childhood that encouraged much fellowfeeling with “the shvartzes” (to judge from my grandmother’s social out-look), from those early jam sessions onward, his glimpses of Harlem andhis captivation by the black aesthetic of the jazz scene translated into avery 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 herTipp City upbringing could not have been much less white—or“WHITE”—than my own. But as theirs was what was called a “mixedmarriage,” both of my parents had some experience with prejudice—theirparents’, for example.
And so, with the Civil Rights movement rumbling in the distancethroughout my childhood, and my parents’ attention to questions of “dif-ference” and justice remaining fairly salient, racial matters were not as farremoved from my immediate experience as the demographics of my townwould 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 wasprobably too young for anything beyond “impulsive vengeance.” My sis-ters and I got the liberal lecture on the stupidities of prejudice on the rideto Denver to see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. A bit later, it became apoint 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
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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quarterback. (“He’s not all that good,” my best friend’s father said, “he’sjust 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 educationwas, 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-gradeteacher Miss Harms’ very interesting prediction of racial retribution in thewake of the King assassination. When I think closely, I recognize that at thetime I did not actually see much—or any—of the Civil Rights imagery thatnow occupies my “memory” of the era—Bull Connor’s German Shepherdsand 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 in1968; but most of the rest of it is later documentary footage, not actualmemory.
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 havebeen positioned by the work that culture does.” It is culture above all thatoutfits us to behave politically in certain ways and not in others—culture ispolitics by other means.62 But rarely have I asked the question: If I was justcoming to consciousness during the Civil Rights years, what was I learningand how was I taking it in? America’s liberal culture was undoubtedlyteaching a lot, though it may not always have been teaching liberality. Themost potent message of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for instance, doesnot involve our common humanity across the color line, but rather a nat-ural submission to the authority of the Great White Father (in this caseSpencer Tracy): ultimately nobody can make a move without his approval.Shows like Love American Style and Barefoot in the Park taught that blackis 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—aswhen he joked that there could never be a black quarterback because therewere not seven white guys who would turn their backs on him at the lineof 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 hostof other films from my childhood in which bad guys were the good guysand 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 regardingthe badness of the black radical; perhaps it was this strain that equipped meto sympathize with a bad boy like Richie Allen, doing battle with “theman” in the white front office and the white press. How far is it from theunorthodox authoritarianism of The Mod Squad to the unorthodox anti-
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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authoritarianism—consciously “raced” or not—of Richie Allen, CookieGilchrist, 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 nonethelesspoetic 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, theon- and off-field lore in Sport, Sporting News, Sports Illustrated.) “I can’t sayit was because of the bombs and the Bull Connors that black players tore upthe National League in 1963,” writes Hank Aaron, “but I can’t say it wasn’teither.”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 angrypoint 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, butI can’t completely dismiss the fact that nobody gave me any shit whatsoeverfor about two months after Bobby Kennedy died.”64
Aaron and Gibson might rightly have claimed the whole decade forblack dominance, not just the isolated moments of 1963 and 1968. (Takethe offensive statistic for total bases, the most dramatic instance: from 1960to 1969 white players made it into the National League’s top three exactlyonce—Pete Rose was third in 1968. Aaron, Banks, Mays, Cepeda, Robin-son, Pinson, Allen, Williams, Alou, Clemente, Brock, McCovey, and Perezaccount for the other twenty-nine top-three finishes.65) But in any case,from the suburban picture window of Boulder, Colorado, the ball field andThe Movement read as being intimately connected. “Baseball was sociallyrelevant,” wrote Curt Flood, “and so was my rebellion against it.”66 Thisis a lesson I imbibed fundamentally but wordlessly between 1966 and1969. The hateful, swirling “nigger, nigger, nigger” that Lee Vilensky heardin Connie Mack Stadium, and Richie Allen’s cold, angry drubbing of theball 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 ofthe Week every Saturday.
For one thing, while Gibson, Aaron, Allen, and others may have beenplaying “angry,” they looked to me, above all else, to be simply serious; andthe regular access that baseball afforded to African American seriousnesswas no small thing. The seriousness of King and the historic moment cameacross 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. Peoplelike 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
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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sports, baseball games unfolded at a contemplative pace that was well-suitedto conveying the force of an athlete’s character—neither concealing it behindthe armor of the NFL nor blurring it in the flying speed of the NBA.
“Quiet dignity” is almost certainly a racist construction—or at leasta racialized one—as the phrase never appears in connection with whitepeople, I notice; and it probably dates from a period when “quiet,” fromNegroes, was especially prized in U.S. culture. But nonetheless, somethinglike “quiet dignity” is a part of what the 1.5 generation of black starscommunicated to me, at once a contrast and an antidote to the vapiddronings-on of play-by-play announcers like Curt Gowdy and Joe Gara-giola; and the “dignity” in the equation tended to keep their “quiet” fromcoming 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 butdecisively dismantled any facile cracker assertions about the brutish ca-pacities of “the Negro.” That Solly Hemus or the white fans in variousSally League locations had either failed to acknowledge this, or, perhaps,had not allowed themselves to see it in the first place, just goes to showhow desperate they were.
But if baseball held the power to dislodge the slanders of racism, so didit have a tendency to generate some slanders of its own—the denigratingtrope 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 the1970s, “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 NewYork, 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 youngerMuhammad Ali, Duane Thomas, Dick Allen, Alex Johnson.67
This is where Allen was so significant to me, not just as a personalidol but as a social emblem: the dissonance between what I felt aboutAllen and what the press reported about him became so taut as to snapmy youthful ingenuousness, because to me Allen was clearly a figure ofdignity, too, no less than Gibson or Aaron or Brock or Clemente. I wastoo young by about one season to catch and appreciate the Frank Thomasincident and Allen’s initial falling-out with the press; but it was a stunningand deflating lesson to me when, in 1967, the media so openly questionedAllen’s “claim” to have injured his hand while pushing his car, and whenin 1968 and 1969, they so openly denounced him—not just as an outlier(on the order, say, of Jay Johnstone)—but as someone uncontrolled anduncontrollable, 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 theDirt,” folksinger Chuck Brodsky—another white kid of almost exactly
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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39“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME
my vintage—reflects upon the racial dimension, as he saw it, in Allen’streatment by the fans and by the press: “He stood a bit outside the lineswhich / 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 RichieAllen who occupied my imagination in 1970, when the Cardinals’ roadschedule and my family’s summer vacation intersected for a moment at a daygame in San Diego? Can I see my young self any more clearly than I seeAllen? Allen would not answer, or even look up, when I called out to himfrom behind the Cardinal dugout after infield practice, but I had not expectedit 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 situationas “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 oran AA battery—another white boy who had been taught by some jeeringpeckerwood how to boo? I believe I did, because for one thing, this was oneof the very first times I had ever addressed an African American directly; it isdoubtful that I was unaware of my whiteness and his blackness, notwith-standing the era’s liberal bromides on the virtue of being colorblind. And foranother thing, even if I did not know his precise thinking on “Whitey’sways,” I had figured out some things by watching Allen and his career fromafar. I understood at least dimly the burden in our exchange; and, rightly ornot, in an inarticulate way I felt his rebuff to concern not me, exactly, but thelarger web of relationships ensnaring us both. I had entered history, in otherwords, and this was perhaps the first time in my eleven years that I was awareof 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 foremblems of reconciliation; the Richie Allen narrative was convenientlypressed into service. Following his bitter years in Philadelphia, and twoyears of marked underappreciation in St. Louis and Los Angeles, Allenlanded in a brief dream sequence with the Chicago White Sox. Not only didhe put up the kind of numbers in 1972 that the best of his early years hadpromised (.308, 37 HR, 113 RBI), but in Comiskey Park he found a wel-coming and comfortable home. The difference, according to Allen, wasWhite Sox manager Chuck Tanner: “He’s from home and he’s like abrother.” (The two knew each other from the old days in Pennsylvania—Tanner’s hometown of New Castle is about seven miles from Allen’sWampum—and they often called each other “Homey,” which perhaps hintsat Allen’s intended meaning in the phrase “like a brother.”) Tanner thought
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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1.1 Allen heads for the dugout afterinfield practice, ignoring my callsfrom the stands. Old habits die hard:note that Allen wears a batting helmetin the field, even far removed from theprojectiles of Connie Mack Stadium.Photo: Jerry Jacobson
1.2 “Dick Allen and me in San Diego,summer 1970. Allen is the distant figuredirectly above my left hand. The glassesmake me look like Pirate pitcher BobVeale, don’t you think?” Photo: Jerry Jacobson
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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41“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME
Allen “not only the best player in the American League, but the best in themajors . . . When he’s through with the White Sox, he’s going to walk rightinto the Hall of Fame.”69 Tanner thought that Chicagoans ought to build amonument to Dick Allen.
The manager’s appreciation for Allen transcended baseball by a longway. “He has a magnetism,” said Tanner, “—like Clark Gable, say, or Marilyn Monroe.”70 This is an astonishing thing to say: daring to comparethe appeal of a black man to the enchantment of these white icons—andone of them a beauty queen at that—strikes me as more radical in its waythan 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 thecosmos 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 “withFrank 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 tobuild a monument to him.
From Allen’s White Sox years onward, the baseball establishment fellin love with the story of its own acceptance of Allen, even if it did notquite learn to love the ballplayer himself as Chuck Tanner did. (He neverdid come near the Hall of Fame, for instance.) But Allen “is a man whomarches to his own wry drummer,” reported Sports Illustrated in 1972.“On the day his teammates were going out on strike, Allen signed his1972 contract.”71 “His own wry drummer” is a far cry from the portraitof the trouble-making militant that had predominated in the coverage ofAllen as a Philly. After Chicago, the press began to find something lov-ably quirky in Allen’s history of unorthodoxies; but more important, thepress seemed to find something laudable in its own warming up to Allen:it was as if, in embracing Allen, the white sports establishment could atonce prove and celebrate just how far it had come. “He wrote dismissivenotes to his general manager in the base-path dirt with his foot!” com-mented Sports Illustrated in tones of mock scandal in 1973. “What kindof man would do a thing like that? And why didn’t anybody think of itbefore?”72 Now Allen was “a team player who has bounced around . . .a mentor to the young, a seasoned veteran whom managements haveseen as a discipline problem. The more you learn about Allen from out-side sources,” remarked Sports Illustrated, “the more he swims beforeyou.” Even the press’s conventional disregard for Allen’s point of viewbegan to shift: as SI now described it, when Allen entered pro ball, “Firstthing, his name got changed . . . he did not care to be issued a new nameby an organization.”73 Dick “Don’t Call Me Richie” Allen suddenlyseemed fairly reasonable.
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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42 MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON
America’s favorite Dick Allen story is the one about how he got astanding ovation when he returned to the Phillies in 1975. Although hefound himself “wondering where all the brothers had gone” as he lookedaround the Phillies’ new, suburban ballpark, evidently Allen is fond of thisone, too. “Things had changed,” he wrote, “ . . . blacks were beginning torun the city. In the old days, I represented a threat to white people inPhiladelphia. 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 comearound to accepting that things had changed and were going to keep chang-ing, like it or not.”74 The movement, had, after all, accomplished somethings; the logic and the accepted idioms of American race consciousnesshad shifted significantly; the terms of sports celebrity, too, had changed, un-orthodoxy taking its place among the new orthodoxies—Jim Bouton, JoeNamath, Rosey Grier, Steve Carlton, Bill Lee. Perhaps Dick Allen hadmerely been a few years ahead of the curve, and there was no depth to thetragedy of his Philadelphia story after all. Many found it comforting tothink so.
And yet the reconciliation narrative—the Allen/Philadelphia story, andthe national healing for which it is an implied allegory—cannot plow underall the chicken bones, the bolts, and the batteries that rained onto the fieldin those earlier years in Philadelphia, nor can it wipe from memory Allen’swhimsical sorrow songs, the letters in the dirt. Perhaps this is why theplayer who had integrated professional baseball in Orval Faubus’ Arkansasand who had later distinguished himself as one of the most powerful hittersin 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. . . . Hesaid I had power and I could run, the two most important requirements inNegro League baseball.” Even he recognized the irony in his being “a bigleaguer who felt like he lost out because he never got a chance to play inthe 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 Leaguestar, does say a bit about the operations of race in the game, even twodecades after Jackie Robinson had broken down the color barrier. “Peoplesaid 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 oreat 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.
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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43“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME
Notes
1. Dick Allen and Tim Whitaker, Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen (NewYork: 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; June12, 1972.
3. John Thorn, Pete Palmer, Michael Gershman, Total Baseball: The Official En-cyclopedia of Major League Baseball [Seventh Edition] (Kingston, NY: TotalSports, 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 Autobiographyof 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 hisinfield 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 fieldon 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 withHerm Weiskopf, My Life and Baseball (Waco, TX: Word, 1967), 29. (Even
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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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 SpecialHunger (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; Halland Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, 134; Orlando Cepeda withHerb 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, “ColorMe 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 CameIn, 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, Fall2000, 151. On Allen’s general mistreatment by the press, see Craig Wright,“Dick Allen: Another View” (originally published in SABR magazine), postedat 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 andthe 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.
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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45“RICHIE” ALLEN, WHITEY’S WAYS, AND ME
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.
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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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.
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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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 colorwho watches a brown-skinned boy like Joe Louis, from Alabama, themost backward State in the Union, fight his way up from the coal mineand 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 MaxSchmeling, white America embraced the black heavyweight champion asa national hero. Amid increasing reports of Hitler’s imperialistic aggres-sion and persecution of the Jews, the mainstream white press highlightedthe bout’s worldwide implications, claiming Louis’s triumph as an Amer-ican victory in the larger fight against fascism. As Heywood Broun of theNew York World-Telegram mused, “One hundred years from now somehistorian may theorize, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi
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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48 THERESA E. RUNSTEDTLER
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 intoa celebrated epic of American patriotism and democracy. Brimming withpostwar 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 idealsthat motivate us, I would certainly make use of the case history of JoeLouis.”2
However well-known the narrative of Louis as the quintessential U.S.citizen became, another story, one that white America and history haveoverlooked, meant more to African Americans in the 1930s: Joe Louis asRace Man. That Louis earned the customary title of “Race Man” was amark of high distinction, since this phrase had long been reserved for menwho best exemplified racial progress and leadership in areas like business,academics, and politics.3 Writing for the New Masses in 1938, a skepticalRichard Wright derided the Louis-Schmeling fight as “a colorful puppetshow, 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. Threeyears earlier, in September 1935, when Louis garnered a swift victory overJewish American Max Baer in front of 90,000 fans at Yankee Stadium,Wright described the “religious feeling in the air” on Chicago’s SouthSide, where over twenty thousand “Negroes poured out of beer taverns,pool rooms, barber shops, rooming houses and dingy flats and floodedthe 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 “aconsciously-felt symbol . . . the concentrated essence of black triumphover white.”5
Wright was certainly not alone in recognizing Louis’s influence as theperiod’s iconic New Negro. African Americans’ limited access to legal andpolitical channels of protest meant that sports, and in particular boxing,became one of the preeminent mass media through which they articulatedtheir conflict with the racial status quo. Until 1947, when Jackie Robin-son joined baseball’s Major League, boxing was the only professionalsport that allowed whites and blacks to compete in the same arena. More-over, in this individual sport of hand-to-hand combat, fighters emerged ascontested symbols of race, manhood, and nation among the Americanmasses. By 1933 Louis was already a fixture in the black press, supplyingAfrican Americans with the cultural ammunition to critique their persis-tent lack of democratic rights and dignity. Louis graced the front page ofthe Chicago Defender more times than any other black figure during the
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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49IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS
Depression, including Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie.6 Not only did hislife story become the focal point of sports and human-interest sections invarious weekly newspapers, but his pugilistic exploits sparked larger de-bates about black representation as editorialists evaluated his role inracial 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 JimCrow provided a public outlet for diverse expressions of black struggleacross the socioeconomic and political spectrum.7 The term “New Negro,”meaning a progressive, politically savvy African American, initiallyemerged 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 Chicagohad a radicalizing effect, infusing the New Negro movement with a height-ened sense of militancy, urgency, and racial pride. In revisiting the HarlemRenaissance, historians have begun to expand on its traditional interpreta-tion as a middle-class, bourgeois literary movement to uncover the variousfacets of New Negro activism from black theater companies to leftist inter-nationalism.9 The sport of boxing offered yet another arena in which NewNegroes could express their racial militancy, albeit vicariously, through thehard 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 the1935 Italo-Ethiopian conflict, capped off with a suggestive re-reading of hiswell-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 themale 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 coincidentaltiming 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 fascismon two fronts—at home and abroad.11 Taken from this vantage point, theLouis story obliges historians to expand their understandings of the NewNegro’s popular dimensions as a cultural conduit through which AfricanAmericans of the 1930s continued to address the interlocking questions ofrace, gender, nation, and class.
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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Biography of a Race
Triumphant tales of the young boxer’s rise to fistic fame filled the pages ofblack and young communist publications, along with mass-circulated bi-ographies. Even though each had a differing agenda, they all spun his lifestory into a kind of utopian biography of the race. While the sympatheticwhite writer Edward Van Every engaged in hyperbole when he claimed theboxer’s life made “story book tales of fight heroes seem tame,” the popu-lar depictions of Louis’s struggles from southern sharecropper to northernmigrant to industrial worker to successful boxer must have resonated withthe experiences of many of his African American fans.12 Providing a myth-ical link that connected an oppressive black rural “past” with the promiseof a prosperous urban future, the young boxer’s personal story defied re-gional, class, and even generational boundaries to offer an accessible, yetdecidedly masculine vision of collective progress.
According to the composite story that emerged in the black press, JoeLouis 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 kinjoined the Great Migration to the North, settling in one of Detroit’s blackghettos. Soon after their arrival, twelve-year-old Louis developed his youngmuscles in a part-time job delivering ice to the city’s wealthier citizens.Trained in cabinetry at the Bronson Vocational School, Louis later workedat 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’sBrewster Recreation Center during his teenage years. By the time he wonthe national Amateur Athletic Union light heavyweight championship inApril 1934, the youthful pugilist had participated in fifty-four bouts, win-ning forty-three of them by knockout, thereby garnering the support of theAfrican American management team of John Roxborough, Julian Black,and Jack Blackburn. Writers bragged that at twenty-one, Louis was alreadytwo hundred pounds, standing six feet, one and a half inches tall, with fif-teen-inch biceps.14 Showcasing his muscular physique, groomed hair, andboyish smile, the black press helped mold him into a statue of strength andcharm 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 AfricanAmerican worker. As one journalist related, “He was born in the slums ofBirmingham, Ala. When only a mere lad, he carried cakes of ice to eke outa living. He worked in King Henry Ford’s plant in Detroit. Always on thefringe of starvation, he learned how to struggle for self-preservation.” Im-buing Louis with a black labor consciousness, the writer continued, “Hecan see that as a worker, he will end up just where he started from, in the
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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51IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS
slums, because of the widespread discrimination that is practiced againsthis race.”15 Portraying him as an everyday man with “a chance to cash inon his skillful dukes,” the Young Worker used Louis to not only advance apositive image of African Americans to white youth, but also to show blackworkers 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 maleprotagonist.
By the time Louis entered the ring against Primo Carnera in June 1935,his humble beginnings and subsequent climb to international success hadtaken on an epic quality, as sympathetic journalists fashioned his biographyinto the ultimate story of racial and economic uplift. In an era when imagesof bumbling Sambos, feminized male minstrels, and confused primitivesstill held currency, Louis’s public personification of forcefulness and fair-ness, virility and respectability, stylishness and responsibility, resonatedwith popular understandings of manhood, civilization, and modernity.Thus, from the footnotes of the well-known narrative of Louis as Americanhero emerges not only the buried history of a black diasporic icon, but alsoa larger story about the intersection of gender and resistance in America’srace wars.
From Uncle Tom to New Negro
Writing in the New York Amsterdam News, editorialist Theophilus Lewisdubbed Joe Louis a “Boxing Business Man.” Lewis praised him as a modelof mature focus, telling readers, “Joe Louis prefers to be Joe Louis and notwhat white people think Joe Louis should be. Professional boxing is hischosen road to success.” As Lewis continued, “A man’s success is not aplayful 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 obviouspassion and respect with which Louis’s African American contemporariesfollowed his career, sports historiography, much like popular memory, hastended to overlook black representations of Louis. For the most part,scholars’ focus on mainstream daily newspaper accounts has skewed theirassessments of him as a moderate and even ineffectual figure of whitecooptation.17 While several historians challenge this “Uncle Tom” cri-tique, most still emphasize Louis’s contributions as a crossover Americanhero, without deconstructing whites’ and blacks’ differing perceptions ofhis cultural and political importance.18 Overall, these approaches obscurethe reality that various segments of black America acknowledged and evenlauded Louis’s accomplishments, fashioning him as a gendered expressionof public resistance.
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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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, scholarAlain Locke had declared that “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on,”and now the “American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changedNegro.” 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 aspiritual 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 theProgressives’ tradition of weaving race and gender into a web of white malesupremacy. According to popular, early-twentieth-century thought, onecould determine a group’s civilization based on their extent of sexual dif-ferentiation. In keeping with this pseudoscientific doctrine, black men andwomen were supposedly identical, while the patriarchal organization of the“civilized” white race signified that they were not only the furthest along inthe 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 helpedto reify this overall paradigm of white male supremacy. Concerns over fam-ily stability and conflicts over female labor led to the retrenchment of whitepatriarchy after the gender subversions of the 1920s such as the passing ofthe 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage, the rise of the assertive NewWoman, and the racy culture of the flapper.21 Not surprisingly, as whitescontinued to articulate their racial supremacy through an assertion of malecontrol, many African Americans attempted to prove their equality usingresistance strategies that embraced male dominance.
Even though the African American political and intellectual movementsof the 1930s shared a common focus on promoting the legitimacy of blackmanhood, 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 differingphilosophical and tactical aims, but also their varied constituents. While es-tablished organizations like the National Association for the Advancementof Colored People (NAACP) and Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist UniversalNegro Improvement Association (UNIA) had long appropriated the whiteVictorian principles of patriarchy, propriety, industry, and thrift as thefoundation for black advancement, Harlem’s up-and-coming cadre of NewNegro writers and poets began to challenge these rigid ideals by exploring
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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53IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS
homosocial bonds and masculine pursuits beyond the realm of bourgeoisdomesticity.22 In turn, the public assertion of militant black manhood be-came a rallying cry for the emerging politics of collective race and classprotest led by groups like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP)and the Communist Party.23 Whether they worked within the framework ofAmerican democratic ideals, or rejected their hypocrisy, African Americanactivists 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 theone hand, the period’s constructions of black manliness incorporated thecontradictory ideals of savagery and civilization, as metaphors of battle andphysical prowess existed alongside discussions of intelligence, artistry, andrespectability. On the other hand, the New Negro movement also signaleda nascent shift toward a more modern sense of masculinity grounded lessin middle-class notions of gentility, and expressed through recreational pur-suits, the conspicuous consumption of mass-marketed commodities, andthe 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 thepart of Louis, but rather a collective spectacle involving a complex processof 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 critiqueof racism inevitably rise to the surface. Trapped in a paradox, Louis, hisblack fans, and members of the black press challenged white superiority byengaging the same constructions of patriarchal authority that were simul-taneously confirming their racial inferiority. Not only did they ultimatelylegitimize 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 blackpress 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 finesttype of American manhood,” they granted him two labels that blackness didnot 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 stepacross the threshold of boyhood, the hopes of a race and the best wishes ofa nation are with you.” Recognizing Louis’s importance as an emblematic
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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figure through which gender and race coalesced in a narrative of blackprogress, the writer warned the young fighter to “live a clean, honest life . . .and always remember that your very qualities of modesty and manliness arethe 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 thecollective 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 dubbingthe “battle of the century.” With bold optimism, one writer in the Pitts-burgh Courier maintained that Louis would defend successfully “the ardenthopes of more than twelve million Americans” when he stepped into thering at Yankee Stadium. Another pre-fight feature in the Chicago Defendernamed 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 themonth preceding the fight, Harlem buzzed with expectant energy asAfrican Americans of all ages kept Louis as their favorite topic. The NewYork Age even noted that “women from all walks of life, some who hadnever taken any interest in fights,” prayed for a race victory in the ring.27
As widespread interest in the Louis-Carnera match cut across raciallines, many African Americans relished the fact that the black fighter’s risewas revitalizing the entire boxing industry after years of sparse ticketsales.28 In a bid to bring Louis closer to a title bout, his African Americanmanagers, Roxborough and Black, had formed a pragmatic alliance withMike 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 bythe 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 crankout 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 schemeensured that overlapping portrayals of the “official” Louis appeared inboth presses, a comparison of white and black sources reveals that writersreinterpreted and reshaped the Louis image along racial lines, often usingmanhood as a metalanguage for race.
While most journalists in the mainstream press certainly favored Louisto win, they were not ready to count out Carnera, even though a streak offixed fights and messy dealings with the mob underworld soiled the veteranboxer’s seven-year record.31 Despite their high praise of Louis’s technicalabilities and well-mannered conduct, many white writers held reservations
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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55IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS
about his physical and mental toughness. Invoking the emasculating stereo-types of black cowardice, infantilism, and emotionality, they charged thatLouis’s encounter with Carnera would determine if this “beardless” boycould hold his own against boxing’s big men. After all, in addition to beingeight 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 Telegraphobserved, the question of “Can he take it?” was the “one predominant noteof skepticism” among the white, fight-going public.32 Nationally syndi-cated sports columnist Grantland Rice agreed that if Louis failed to scorean early knockout, the “rugged” Carnera would “outmaul” the boy to winby decision. Moreover, Rice and many of his colleagues questioned whetherthe 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 manyyears.33 Casting Louis as the “dusky David” to Carnera’s “Goliath,” whitejournalists wondered whether the youthful, black technician possessed thegritty manhood to defeat the roughhousing Italian Giant.34
As Louis’s rite of passage to boxing manhood, the fight also became alitmus test for the strength and maturity of the race. However unconvincedthe white press was, black writers supported Louis with great resolve, pre-dicting an easy knockout in two to five rounds.35 The question of whetheror not Louis could “take it” reportedly drew a loud chuckle from ManagerRoxborough, who bragged that the young fighter had already prevailed inthe face of knockdowns, a fractured knuckle, and even punches to thejaw.36 Louis’s manly battle against Carnera not only had “colored Americalooking 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 designson 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 conflictduring the spring and summer of 1935. While mainstream publicationstended to bury the reports of Abyssinia, the black press featured themprominently, often as front-page news. They carried not only current, buthistorical 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 itspotential takeover had grave implications for struggles of black autonomy
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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and equality throughout the world. In particular, the perception of a parallelbetween 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, AfricanAmericans recognized the close connections between their plight and that oftheir Ethiopian brothers. As poet Langston Hughes declared:
Ethiopia, Lift your night-dark face,Abyssinian Son of Sheba’s Race!. . .May all Africa ariseWith blazing eyes and night-dark faceIn 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 growingsense 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 themajor black weeklies, stories and photos of Louis’s training regimen, hisvictory, and the subsequent celebrations ran side-by-side with reports of theAbyssinian crisis and pictures of the Ethiopian emperor. Arguably, evenAfrican Americans who did not read the papers must have picked up on theobvious analogy. Enthusiastic discussions of the Louis-Carnera bout, fromstreet corners and front porches to local barbershops and beauty salons,surely touched on the boxer’s symbolic role as he went fist-to-fist withMussolini’s Darling. Not only had Louis become a ubiquitous folk hero by1935, but as historian William R. Scott argues, Italy’s imminent invasionstimulated an unprecedented period of black American militancy and groupprotest. From Los Angeles to New York, the black masses organizedAbyssinian-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-
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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cal, international critiques of racism. He offered a public embodiment ofthe intellectual discussions of the conflict that graced the pages of periodi-cals like the Crisis, Opportunity, and Marcus Garvey’s Black Man. Variousblack groups even met with Louis during his training camp to underscorethe 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 beathim 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 thathis 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 utopianvision of not only the black American body politic, but also that of theEthiopian 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 physicaland metaphorical parallels between the real and ring conflicts enablingAfrican Americans to engage in a gendered critique of domestic racism andforeign fascism.43 In particular, contemporary black American discourses ofAfrican redemption were suffused with the language of manly battle, inde-pendence, and honor. To black writers and political figures of the NewNegro era, the colonized continent represented black womanhood, whilethe 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 [theAfrican tricolor of red, black, and green] . . . means loyalty to our countryand the protection of our women in our motherland Africa.”44 Labelingcolonized Africa the “motherland,” she placed men at the head of both na-tion-building and the defense of black womanhood. Since white imperialjustifications 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 anoverwhelmingly masculine bent.
The conflict between Italy and Ethiopia became anthropomorphizedinto a duel between Mussolini and Selassie, as the black press portrayedAbyssinia’s struggle to remain autonomous as a test of the tiny country’sracial manhood. At a time when a boxer’s moniker usually had ethnic over-tones, Louis, dubbed the Brown Bomber, the Ethiopian Exploder, and theAfrican Avenger, became a natural stand-in for the Abyssinian emperor, andby extension, black nationhood.45 African American cartoonist Jay Jacksonencapsulated this connection in a clever drawing that showed a muchsmaller Louis boxing against a bestial caricature of Carnera in front ofEthiopian and Italian fans, while a seat reserved for the League of Nationsremained empty in the foreground.46 (See Figure 2.1)
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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As the celebrated “Crown Prince of Fistiania,” Louis was, in manyways, the ultimate “Abyssinian Son of Sheba’s Race.”47 While some whitejournalists 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 matchwith the Italian, Primo Carnera, Joe Louis became a natural stand-in for the Ethiopianemperor, Haile Selassie, and by extension, black nationhood. Used with permission.Source: Chicago Defender.
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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59IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS
as strong Race heroes. White biographer Edward Van Every’s attempts toconnect Louis’s athletic prowess with his tri-racial “blood strain” resonatedwith numerous reports in the mainstream dailies that sought to deempha-size the boxer’s African roots. Although the biographer acknowledged thatLouis “insists . . . the Negro predominates in his blood,” Van Every stressedthe possibility that Louis was “a good part white and more Indian thanAfrican.”48
Flying in the face of such efforts to undermine Louis’s role as RaceMan, African American writers positioned him as the “Black Hope,” argu-ing that Louis was a “badge of racial prestige . . . in man’s most honoredsphere of endeavor—the noble art of self-defense.”49 Similarly, the blackpress showed impressive pictures of the emperor Selassie in his full regalia,underscoring his links to the ancient kingdom of Cush and claiming him asthe “King of all Negroes everywhere.” One editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American even maintained that “one glance at . . . [Selassie’s] hair” surelyproved that Ethiopia was a black nation.50 Louis and Selassie’s sharedAfrican roots became a reservoir of strength, and thus, their victories inmanly 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 asa popular platform for the fascist leader’s chest-beating propaganda. Justfive years earlier in July 1930, when Carnera’s criminal associations hadcaught up with him, Il Duce had personally intervened to prevent thefighter’s deportation from the United States. Moreover, when Carnera wonthe world heavyweight title against Jack Sharkey in 1933, Mussolini or-dered a uniform of the black shirt fascisti for his boxing champion andposed with Carnera in photos that he sent to newspapers throughout theworld. The fighter even addressed his leader with the fascist salute.51
Paralleling the Louis-Carnera pre-fight publicity, white Americanswondered whether the tiny Ethiopian nation would survive the onslaughtof 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’streacherous 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 similarguerrilla strategy in order to compensate for the gigantic proportions andlong reach of Mussolini’s Darling. Mapped out by trainer Blackburn andperfected by Louis, the ingenious battle plan involved breaking down the
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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Italian’s defensive stance with punishing body shots, and then moving in toattack Carnera’s head. While Marcus Garvey urged his pan-Africanistbrothers to “act manly, courageously, [and] thoughtfully” in mobilizing forthe crisis that would come with Mussolini’s invasion, the black press high-lighted Louis’s strict training regimen as another confirmation that hewould 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 appearedwell-equipped to conquer Carnera as he slashed his way through a host ofgargantuan 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 theItalo-Ethiopian conflict. Although Mussolini declared that he sought tobring 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’sviolent designs, Johnson questioned the conventional, Western definition ofcivilization, 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, TheGentleman, And Mussolini, The Braggart.” Not surprisingly, Rogers usedheavyweight boxing as a metaphor for this larger battle of savagery againstnobility, emphasizing Mussolini’s baseness by equating his “gesturing” and“clowning” to that of the irreverent black fighter Jack Johnson.55 In thisracial and gendered reversal, Mussolini became the minstrel, as Rogers notonly 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 withhis reputation for illegal wrestling and holding, the black newspapers’drawings and photos of the Italian Giant made Carnera appear more beastthan man, while their renderings of Louis retained a lifelike appearance. Al-though white journalists and cartoonists certainly portrayed Louis in morehumane ways than his predecessor, Jack Johnson, some still tended to de-pict him using Sambo stereotypes. Paul Gallico’s fight-day column in theNew York Daily News included a thick-lipped, hairy depiction of Louischasing after Carnera. Even though Gallico predicted that Carnera wouldface 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 andquoted him using full sentences. Moreover, while boasting of his strength,
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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black journalists also emphasized his kindness and generosity to his motherand family. In mid-April 1935, many black writers celebrated Louis’s dis-play of patriarchal responsibility when the fighter used one of his purses topurchase a fully furnished home for his mother.57 Whereas the Italian Giantembodied everything that was barbaric and violent about white racism andfascism, Louis came to exemplify an exalted form of civilized black man-hood, grounded in a mix of physical prowess and force of character.58 Bymore than just a case of coincidental timing, Louis became a genderedmetaphor of black militancy and nationalism that drew on the rhetoricalpower 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 dignityand citizenship rights of African Americans at home. In addition to his sym-bolic connections to more radical, transnational black activism, he becamethe focus of an interrelated debate over questions of black American man-hood and the state of the race. This discursive battle in the popular mediawas an equally significant race war being waged on the African Americanhome front. While he prepared for his match, black journalists shapedmany 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-classcitizenship. In the South, Jim Crow segregationists still ruled by legal andextralegal means, as struggling black sharecroppers and laborers sought tocombat economic exploitation, widespread disfranchisement, and the ter-ror of lynching.59 Many African Americans left the South in search of safetyand opportunity in the North, but even the Black Mecca of Harlem expe-rienced police brutality and high unemployment. On March 22, 1935, thefamed New York neighborhood erupted into violence after rumors circu-lated that the white manager of a local store had beaten and killed a PuertoRican boy. Even though several hours later the rumors were discounted,Harlem’s first-ever race riot continued into the night, as African Americansexpressed 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 Americansfrom the benefits of full national citizenship. Black journalists inscribed hisbody with the ideals of black manliness and masculinity, and they sculpted
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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his persona into a cultural vessel in which they poured their hopes anddreams. As an editorial in Opportunity described, “[t]he picture of a youngNegro boy working in the Ford plant at $5.00 per day . . . who literallyforces his way to a place where he can command a half million dollarswithin a single year” appealed to African Americans from “every walk oflife.”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 tocompete on level ground. As he climbed his way from the dirt of the cottonfields to the bright lights of the boxing ring, he linked African Americansfrom 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 andseeming invincibility of traditional African American ballad heroes like JohnHenry. Indeed, Louis was the only Depression-era athlete that popular bluesartists commemorated in recorded songs.62 As a man who faced the prospectof punishment alone in the ring, he enacted through sport the same kinds ofstruggles confronting many of his fans. Houston singer Joe Pullman’srecording, entitled “Joe Louis is the Man,” was the first song to honorLouis’s toppling of Carnera. Although Oliver describes Pullman’s creation asa “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 alsonoted 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 MemphisMinnie McCoy of Chicago recorded “He’s in the Ring (Doin’ the Same OldThing)” as a tribute to Louis’s two-fisted “dynamite.” The mix of MemphisMinnie’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 ofLouis 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 GrandCentral Station in New York City in the middle of May 1935. As the black
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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press included photos of Louis in chic suits enjoying the finer things in lifelike driving brand-new cars, he moved beyond his station as prizefighter tobecome both celebrity and socialite.64 His bodily display of impeccablefashion was one of the most integral aspects of his gendered performanceof black pride, since it allowed him to transgress racial norms, moving be-yond the ubiquitous black identity of poor worker to showcase his wealthand individuality. One black correspondent praised Louis for looking thepart of fistic champion in “his street togs,” while another carefully itemizedthe boxer’s wardrobe of a “dozen suits, nine pairs of shoes, two dozenshirts, 100 neckties, ten hats, six coats and countless sweaters, zippercoats,[and] suits of underwear and pyjamas.”65 Likewise, newspaper ads forMurray’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 menin America.” As the text of the advertisement claimed, Louis strived to be“well-groomed” both in and out of the ring. The company encouraged thereader to support Louis and to buy their product, since doing both wouldenable 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 manhoodthrough 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 abusy week in the Big Apple meeting with civic leaders like Mayor FiorellaLaGuardia, shaking hands with boxing legends like Jack Dempsey, and at-tending a series of charity benefits. Trading in his trousers for workoutgear four times a day, Louis also starred in a promotional, vaudeville showat 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 ofpacked houses. However, the respite was short-lived. With only a monthleft before the Carnera fight, Louis left for his training camp in PomptonLakes, New Jersey.67
Black correspondents painted an idyllic picture of the countryside estatewhere Louis prepared for battle, emphasizing its connections to old Ameri-can gentility, while also touting its modern conveniences. Celebrating Louis’srole as the temporary master of the “Big House,” they cloaked him in amantle of both bourgeois respectability and technological efficiency.68 Ac-cording to local lore, George Washington had slept there, and black writersclaimed that Louis now occupied the same room where the first presidenthad stayed. Reputedly “one of the most famous fistic training grounds in theworld,” the camp was “[n]estled in a nature-scooped nook of the RamapoMountains,” yet close enough to the city of Patterson to offer all of theamenities of rural and urban life combined. Although Louis spent most of
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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his days working out, in his few moments of leisure time he supposedly en-joyed freshwater fishing, boating, golfing, and even horseback riding.69 Thetraining camp itself became an expression of not only Louis’s nobility andmodernity, but also the dignity and advancement of his people.
As the first fighter to ever rent the entire grounds for the exclusive useof 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 ofLouis’s disciplined, “two-meal-a-day diet,” countering white reports of thefighter’s supposed penchant for ice cream and tendency to overeat.70
Editorials in the black press insisted that African American fighters nolonger needed to seek out white assistance to get ahead. Louis reputedly re-jected the possibility of white patronage, saying that he would “hang up thegloves for good” if Roxborough and Black sold any part of his earnings. Bythis time Jacobs certainly provided much of Louis’s financial backing, butblack 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 animportant 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 theirown enterprise.71
A steady stream of cars and pedestrians traveled to the estate to seeLouis in action. In this seemingly apolitical space, showing support forLouis enabled his black supporters to publicly express their own status andworth and to gain vicariously the strength of his fists. By the middle ofJune, 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-Americanprovided weekly lists of the VIP spectators—judges, sportsmen, entertain-ers, entrepreneurs, orchestra leaders, morticians, and politicians—whoranged from local to national elites. Many of those who saw Louis in theflesh 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 expressionof 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-
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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ied an undeniable, yet understated sexuality that appealed to the youngergeneration of New Negroes without upsetting the traditional conventionsof respectability. Even though the Louis team’s “official” position was thatthe fighter did not associate with women, black fans still celebrated hisbodily perfection. As public school teacher Helen Harden recounted in aletter to the New York Age, many spectators visited the camp “with onepurpose,” and that was “to gaze on the Detroit Bomber.” Harden gushedthat he was simply “lovely to look at. Not a blemish on his saffron huedskin.” Another black female fan refused to believe the official reports thatclaimed Louis would keep women out of his life until he won the worldtitle, arguing that “Joe is a real man, after all.”74
Although the young boxer obviously appealed to women, many articlesin the white press twisted the Louis party line to unsex and infantilize theblack fighter, claiming that “iceberg” Louis had “no time for women” andthat his only “sweetheart” was his mother.75 Challenging these images, theblack press fashioned him as an idol of masculinity, showing suggestivephotos of Louis washing himself in the shower and gazing at the camerapartially disrobed. While black writers did acknowledge that Louis had noserious plans for marriage, they also reported that camp intimates swore hewas a “lady-killer.”76 However, concerned with dissociating their fighterfrom the negative legacy of Jack Johnson, Louis’s handlers kept the youngman’s sexual escapades with white women, along with his love of speedingcars and frivolous spending, out of the press.77 In an era when black malesexuality connoted rape and recklessness, Louis’s carefully constructed bal-ance of physicality and decency offered a positive model of virile blackmanhood.
Despite the more daringly masculine aspects of his persona, Louis stillstood as a paragon of manly productivity in the face of racist, white reportsof his laziness. Even a sympathetic white writer like Van Every betrayed hisprejudice when he claimed that Louis’s trainer had to “force Joe . . . to cutout his dissipation . . . even if it infringed on his sleep.”78 In refuting thesetypes of disparaging comments, one journalist in the New York AmsterdamNews declared that “[n]o fighter during the past twenty years has trainedwith more earnestness than this Detroit boy.”79
Following the conventions of contemporary boxing manuals, the blackpress provided detailed descriptions of Louis’s routine, arguing that hisabilities were not just “natural,” but cultivated.80 With scientific precisionand 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 counternotions of black indolence that one sportswriter even maintained thatLouis was a model of efficiency when he slept, taking “it as seriously as he
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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does his fighting. No faking, no lost motion.”81 In this way, Louis’s personacombined the traditional watermarks of gentlemanly respectability with therising 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 Ethiopiapermeated local politics as the Hearst Milk Fund contemplated canceling theLouis-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 thepotential for black-Italian violence at the match. Pointing to the rioting ofHarlem’s black population in March 1935 and the ongoing furor over theAbyssinian crisis, white sportswriters Westbrook Pegler and Arthur Brisbanewarned that a boxing match pitting a black American against an Italianfighter would furnish the fuel for racial unrest in both the stands and streets.Pegler deemed the bout a “new high in stupid judgment,” while Brisbaneworried that it might inspire “a fight bigger than the scheduled fight.”82
Given Pegler and Brisbane’s predictions, it became clear that not justLouis’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 recognizedwhite America’s unease with the sudden rise of the Race Man Louis, whoseburgeoning popularity was “moving ‘out of control.’” He dismissed thewarnings of violence, claiming that his Nordic counterparts had no inten-tion of writing “the real facts.”83 In turn, while the New York AmsterdamNews claimed that “Negroes today are unlikely to riot over anything lessthan deep-seated social injustice and economic exclusion,” they alsowarned that “Negroes ARE likely to be forced to defend themselves againstattack 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 Ledgercalled 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 preventLouis from advancing to the heavyweight championship, reporting thatblacks and Italians in Newark’s “hill” sections had responded with theirown boycott of the Ledger. Linking it to larger political questions, theChicago Defender placed the ultimate blame in Mussolini’s lap, declaringthat the dictator’s shameless use of the Louis-Carnera fight as fodder forrace hatred in the Italian American press had provoked the Ledger boy-cott.85 Just as Louis’s individual victory would prove his boxing manhood,
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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so too would his black fans have a communal chance to prove their matu-rity and respectability as spectators. Characteristic of the period’s widerquestioning of the merits of bourgeois respectability alongside the rise ofpopular strains of more aggressive, mass politics, class tensions surfaced inthis aspect of the pre-fight publicity. Recalling the controversy overHarlem’s first-ever race riot in March, black journalists understood thatmuch was at stake. Their arguments were not just defensive, but prescrip-tive. While Louis’s win would certainly be cause for celebration, it had toremain civilized. Otherwise, his ultimate strength would remain locked inhis fists, unable to transfer its impact to the larger struggle against racismand fascism at home and abroad.86
On the morning of June 25, 1935, the Brown Bomber and Mussolini’sDarling readied themselves “to clash for the synthetic championship of twocontinents.”87 Despite the reassurances of the black press, the Hearst MilkFund was taking no chances with the possibility of violence, and for thefirst time in New York City’s boxing history, a troop of armed police wouldsurround the ringside at Yankee Stadium as Louis and Carnera fought.Over 1,000 patrolmen and detectives would also be stationed at strategicpoints throughout the arena.88
Since the major radio networks of NBC and CBS refused to air thematch 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 ofspectators.89 For weeks before the fight, several black newspapers had ad-vertised organized bus trips to the event, along with special railroad ratesand flights that welcomed both men and women.90
Under a sunny, steamy New York sky, most of the nearly 15,000African Americans on hand to see Louis arrived long before the white spec-tators with ringside seats. They congregated in the right- and left-fieldbleachers as soon as the Yankee Stadium gates opened at five o’clock,singing, cheering, and performing ad hoc speeches during their two-hourwait for the preliminary fights. A journalist for the New York Age spokewith 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 andrace pride that urged him and thousands of others from Chillicothe, KinderLots and many other hidden hamlets” across the country to attend thefight.91 In addition to the lively crowds in the bleachers, black America’sroyalty, 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 packedthe stadium, with gate receipts totaling nearly $350,000, a new high for anontitular match.93
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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As ring announcer Hugh Balogh urged, “in the name of Americansportsmanship. . . . [R]egardless of race, creed, or color, let us all say, maythe better man emerge victorious.”94 As the fighters approached eachother, Carnera looked like a massive beast alongside the young David. Yet,it was Louis, expressionless and calm, who commanded the center of thering, while Mussolini’s Darling danced around him. By the end of the firstround, Louis had already drawn blood, cutting the Italian Giant’s lip witha smashing right to the mouth. Louis continued to explode with hard bodyshots, followed by rights and lefts that bruised Carnera’s face. Toward theend of the fifth, Mussolini’s Darling looked ready to collapse, with bloodstreaming down his face, but Louis, still fresh-legged, blasted him withmore head and body combinations. Louis rocked Carnera with a series ofhard rights in the sixth round, sending Mussolini’s Darling to the canvasthree times. As Carnera staggered to his feet Referee Arthur Donovancalled 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 nota 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 inHarlem. As the Pittsburgh Courier reported, floods of African Americanspoured into the streets from Seventh to Lenox and 125th to 145th with acarnival spirit “reminiscent of Marcus Garvey’s best days.” The ravages ofthe Depression seemed momentarily suspended as celebrants in the tavernsoffered up toasts to Louis, while cars with plates from as far away as theDistrict of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, and Canadacrawled 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 anothermark of resistance. As a correspondent for the Journal and Guide asserted,“Contrary to unfounded anxiety expressed in some quarters, there was nosign 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 inwhich African Americans from different walks of life expressed their sup-port of Louis.
Articles in the white dailies presented a much more raucous picture ofthe post-fight revelry. By reading their accounts intertextually with theblack press reports, one can draw a more nuanced portrait of the vigorouscelebration without much regard to hallowed respectability. One elderly,black orator named Gill Holton reputedly declared, “It [wa]s the greatestnight Harlem . . . had since the riot.” Officers on foot and horseback, along
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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with those driving motorcycles and radio cars, monitored the thousands offans that surrounded the packed Savoy Ballroom. Mounted police had tointervene when members of the crowd stormed the entrance, breakingdown one of the doors and injuring a half-dozen people. When the com-munity’s honorary mayor, entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, arrived ina 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 moveddown the street. Belligerent youths postured on the hoods of moving cars,yelling at the tops of their lungs, while children who should have been inbed pounded ashcans on the streets and compared their flexed biceps.97
Even if Louis’s managers advised him against expressing his jubilation inthe 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 aneven clearer picture of this sense of militancy. According to a report in theNew 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 streetfighting on August 11. A verbal dispute over the impending Italo-Ethiopianconflict 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, alongwith police on foot with tear gas bombs, managed to quell the unrest.African Americans claimed that Louis’s recent victories had heightenedwhite aggression in the district. Yet, according to the whites involved, blackyouths 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 ninetyexchanged verbal challenges with a group of African American men.98
More than just an inspiration for the writings of New Negro elites, Louis’sdecisive win sparked an already smoldering sense of militant consciousnessamong the African American masses, bringing strong expressions of blackpride to the surface that defied the combined strictures of white racism andelite decency.
Brown Moses?
In addition to energizing the masses, Louis’s conquering of Carnera igniteda passionate debate in the black press regarding the proper representationof the race and what constituted legitimate forms of black progress. His vic-tory gave writers and intellectuals a symbolic slate on which they attempted
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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to negotiate and navigate their struggle for manhood rights. For the mostpart, black writers never questioned whether Louis had “sold out” to thewhite establishment or had shirked his duties to black America.99 Rather,they argued over whether Louis, as boxer, was a suitable male figureheadfor the future of the race, both nationally and internationally. After all, withhis success in the corporal realm of pugilism, Louis presented somewhat ofa dilemma to the traditional politics of bourgeois uplift. Many black elitesstruggled to come to terms with the fact that this popular hero was gainingunprecedented notoriety and wealth through muscular achievement, ratherthan education and erudition. As African Americans endeavored to escapethe 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 victoryas a source of racial pride and progress. Dan Burley of the Baltimore Afro-American dubbed Louis the “Brown Moses of the Prize Ring,” claiming thatthrough his win over Carnera, Louis had become a national leader in theway that Moses brought the Israelites out of bondage. Citing the fact thatTexas was now competing for a chance to host a Louis fight, along withMissouri’s decision to lift its ban of interracial matches, Burley maintainedthat Louis was literally knocking out Jim Crow, with his wins being everybit “as good as electing a Congressman to represent us in Washington.”100
In some respects, Louis could exert physical force and command whiteattention 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 ofLouis’s triumph, many black writers, conscious of its larger symbolic im-plications, could celebrate it in detail without fear of reprisal. Extensivephoto layouts of the Italian Giant’s boxing demise splashed across thepages of many black newspapers, presenting multiple pictures of Louisstanding over his conquered foe.101
Even though some African American journalists highlighted Louis’smix of muscular prowess and mental acuity, contending that “his cunningbrain work[ed] in accordance with fast and deadly fists,” others cautionedblack 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 orthe speed and power of his left hook.”103 Moreover, another editorial in theBaltimore Afro-American claimed that the contributions of intellectualRace Men like Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, along with thelegal advances in the anti-lynching campaign, were “worth a dozen suc-
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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71IN SPORTS THE BEST MAN WINS
cesses in the prize ring.”104 Regardless of its cathartic value, Louis’s winhad not altered the structures of oppression in America, nor had it blazedany new paths for racial progress. Placing more weight in the potential ofacademic and political tactics for achieving manhood rights, they ques-tioned the significance of sporting victories.
Falling between these two extremes, some editorialists believed thateven if Louis did not bring institutional changes, he was still an appropri-ate role model of racial uplift, especially for young boys. While not inclinedto view Louis as “a Moses of the race or as an Economic Hope,” one writerfor 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-Carnerabout, the New York Amsterdam News attempted to put these ideals intoaction, founding and sponsoring a “Joe Louis Boys Club” that encouragedyoungsters to follow in the footsteps of “America’s model young man.” Ac-cording to its advertisement, the club’s main purpose was to instil theyoung men of the community with Louis’s discipline and competitivespirit.106 Yet, however much adults wished that young boys would emulateLouis’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 moreabout black pride and militancy.
Ultimately, even if the heavyweight emerged as a contested symbol withlittle concrete effect on the realities of long breadlines and Mussolini’s im-perial designs, his win over Carnera still served to shine a critical spotlighton the struggles and ironies of black life. Both journalists and cartoonistsin the African American press used the gendered images of boxing to for-mulate political critiques that drew explicit connections between foreignfascism and domestic racism. The focal point of the Chicago Defender’spicture page showed a battered Carnera on the mat with a caption thatread, “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 Carneralook-alike that had “Pullman Company, Unionism” written across hischest.109 As a figure that embodied the deep connections between diasporicand domestic politics, Louis’s victory in the ring had underlined thehypocrisy 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
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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in one part of the nation into a murderous mob, while in another “theycheer to the echo a little brown boy who pummels the gore out of a bigwhite man mountain?”110 Louis’s victory over Carnera had exposed themany-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 suddenlybecame repositories of advice for Louis, offering cautionary tales of whatcould happen if the young fighter let amusement and overconfidence get inthe way of his boxing. Bill Corum of the New York Evening-Journalwarned Louis to stick to his “Ma” and to steer clear of the jazzy night lifein 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 histwenty-second birthday, along with the official opening of his trainingcamp 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 hisspectacular achievements over the last year.112 However, with his nextmatch only a month away, one of the most popular questions in the whitemainstream press was whether or not Louis “could take” the pressures ofhis newfound fame. As yet another test of his mettle as Race Man, Louis’sskirmish with Schmeling would once again become a stand-in for largerracial conflicts at home and abroad.
As Louis began his preparations, Corum’s foreshadowing of the youngboxer’s potential downfall seemed to be coming true. Over ten poundsheavier and reputedly more interested in improving his golf game than hisfighting skills, Louis appeared disinterested and sluggish during his initialpractices. Even though Louis was the younger and more talented boxer,journalists from both presses wondered if his apparent smugness wouldcause 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’slistlessness confirmed that blacks could not handle positions above theirusual station, the African American press responded with continued faithin the abilities and ambition of their New Negro of the manly art. Althoughone journalist in the New York American argued that “success and plenty”were spoiling the former “canebrake baby” turned “million-dollar corpo-
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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ration,” most reports in the black press tended to take on a more positiveview of Louis’s training efforts by the beginning of June.114
Outside the ring, African American writers celebrated Louis’s newrole as husband and provider for his sophisticated, beautiful bride, MarvaTrotter, 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’sboy,” promoting the young couple as black America’s first family. Freedfrom 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 formof celebrity, admired by black women for her poise, charm, and fashionsense, 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 preventedmost African Americans from fulfilling these patriarchal ideals, journal-ists shaped Louis and his wife into a public display of healthy blackAmerican 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 herhusband’s loss to Schmeling. Even before their nuptials, many of Louis’sblack fans made it clear that they thought his managers needed to shieldhim from the corrupting influences of women to protect his strength. Asone editorialist in the Baltimore Afro-American argued, “An athlete whomarries is usually no good for a year, trainers say. And this is the reasonmanagers of Joe Louis will be shooing sweet girls away from their chargeuntil he is champion.” The temptations of female sexuality were apparentlya dangerous distraction in the field of manly battle, and the editorialistwent on to warn Louis’ handlers not to take any chances “with someDelilah who might snear [sic] their Sampson.”116
In addition to this sexualized, domestic plotline, the Louis-Schmelingmatch up became a metaphorical battle in which African Americans couldcombat the theory of Aryan supremacy that stripped the Jews of their rightsin Nazi Germany and kept blacks from achieving equality in the UnitedStates. The African American press had already been reporting the Nazi’spersecution of the Jews and its links to American racism as early as1933.117 Arguably, the Jewish question did not acquire the same kind ofpopular resonance in the black press in comparison to the Abyssinian cri-sis, which still continued as a featured news item even in the summer of1936. 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
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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ethnic comparisons, offering side-by-side photos of the fighters’ physicalweapons, 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 littleinterest in promoting their ties to the match, since they assumed thatSchmeling would lose.119 In the weeks before the bout, many white Amer-ican dailies appeared to put aside their national allegiances to promote theGerman in articles and pictures. While the text of the Atlanta Constitutiongrudgingly 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 towin.120 Other white sportswriters were more transparent with their alle-giances to Schmeling, like Pat Rosa of the New York Post who claimed thatthe 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 Americanhero that he would later become in his rematch against the German in1938. For many white fans, the upcoming bout was decidedly racial ratherthan 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 weathercoupled with a Jewish boycott of the fight made for a relatively small crowdof 45,000 spectators. Unlike the cool, lean panther of just a year ago, Louislooked thicker around the waist, while Schmeling possessed the bestphysique of his career. In pre-fight interviews, Schmeling revealed that hehad discovered a weakness in Louis’s supposedly impenetrable defense, andhe intended to exploit it. Throughout the bout as Louis consistentlydropped his left guard when throwing his right, Schmeling hit him with stiffcounterpunches to the jaw. In the fourth round, the German fighter rockedLouis with a hard right, sending him reeling. Although Louis managed tostand his ground in the face of many punishing blows, in round twelveSchmeling smashed him with a right, sending him to his knees against theropes. As Louis rose to his feet on the count of four, Schmeling finished himoff with another stiff right. Louis dropped to the canvas and lay prostrateas if sleeping.122
A shell-shocked black America went into mourning. African Americanfans all across the country hung their heads in gloom. Their Race Man hadfallen to the representative of Aryan supremacy. As one report from Louis’shome base of Detroit described, “It was like a sudden death in the fam-ily.”123 With black America grieving, the white press quickly threw theirsupport behind Schmeling, arguing that the so-called Nazi boxer had proved
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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“[h]e was too smart for the Negro.” While Grantland Rice exaggeratedwhen he deemed the fight the “most severe beating in ring history,” the NewYork 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 BeatenBoy.”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 thefinger of blame at Marva, charging that she had distracted Louis before thematch by showing him a recent love letter from her former boyfriend. Inthe Black Man, Marcus Garvey maintained that Louis had simply marriedtoo 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 theraces. Their male-centered conceptions of the fight for racial equalityseemed to leave little room for the meaningful participation of women. Ul-timately, Garvey hoped that Louis had “learned a lesson from the fight, thatwhen a white man enters the ring in a premier bout with a black man, herealizes that he has in his hands the destiny of the white race.” ApparentlyLouis 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. Ina 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 thatblack America take its lead from Louis in the midst of this crisis becausethe young fighter’s denial of the rumors, along with his willingness totake responsibility for his mistakes, illustrated his true sportsmanshipand dignity.126
While their pillars of racial manhood toppled one by one, with theItalian conquest of Ethiopia and the continuing problems of the GreatDepression, some journalists in the black press worried about the futureprogress of the race. As one post-fight headline in the Chicago Defenderasked, “Haile Selassie First, Now Louis; Who Next?” Louis’s loss againstthe German fighter had managed to bring things full circle, intensifyingblack Americans’ fears about the implications of the Abyssinian defeat atthe hands of Mussolini. Depicting the instability of racial uplift in theform of a “Stool of Achievement” lying on its side with two broken legslabeled “Louis” and “Selassie,” one cartoonist argued, “It can still be re-paired.”127 In the wake of the Brown Bomber’s defeat, Race Men acrossthe nation called upon each other to stand up and take charge. (Seeimage 2.2.)
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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By the time white America embraced Louis as a national hero with hisfamous knockout win in his 1938 rematch against Max Schmeling, blackfans, 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 youngAfro-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, “Insports, 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 justthe symbolic overthrow of Nazi fascism; it challenged the masculine foun-dations of white supremacy. For the young Afro-German, it was not just anAmerican triumph, but the triumph of a fellow black man connected to himthrough a cultural and political identity forged in the transnational crucibleof racist and fascist oppression.
2.2 “It Can Be Repaired, “ June 27, 1936. Joe Louis’s loss toGermany’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 searchelsewhere for viable Race Men. Used with permission. Source:Chicago Defender.
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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Undoubtedly, Louis was neither an uncomplicated hero of Americandemocracy nor a simple figure of racial cooptation, for the real moral of hissuccess stands as one of the most important cultural legacies of the NewNegro 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 nationremained intimately connected to the imagined status of black manhood.From popular culture to academics to political organizations, the “crisis ofblack masculinity” moved to the forefront of discussions on racial progress,with increasingly visible and vocal calls for the “proper affirmation ofblack male authority.”129 While political, economic, and social equality re-mained elusive, the fantastic successes of African American athletes withthe racial integration of U.S. professional leagues in the following decadesmeant that sports emerged as the ultimate, public stage for this collectiveproject in the assertion of black manhood. Moreover, calls for black maleathletes 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 toinspire tolerance among white G.I.’s, African Americans had already laidclaim 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 laterreturned to take on Jim Crow again.
Notes
Parts of this article were presented at the 2003 Harvard University GraduateConference on “Performing Ethnicity” and at the 2003 Annual Meeting of theAssociation for the Study of African American Life and History. The authorwould like to thank all of those who graciously helped this piece to evolve overmultiple drafts, including Glenda Gilmore, Seth Fein, Paul Gilroy, Matthew Ja-cobson, Amy Bass, Jeffrey Sammons, Pamela Grundy, and the members of theSpring 2002 Yale Research Seminar in American History.
1. Heywood Broun, New York World-Telegram, 1938, qtd. in Chris Mead, JoeLouis: 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 “RaceMan” concept in Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City (NewYork: Harcourt and Brace, 1945). They argue that this social type developedas a means for black Americans to resist their second-class status by pointingto black superiority in particular areas of expertise. In other words, the successof 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 asa 1930s Race Man, this article builds on the gendered critique of twentieth-century black politics in Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity, 1998). Black feminist scholars like Carby argue against the popularpractice of equating the redemption of black patriarchal manhood with racialprogress, 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, thisassociation of patriarchy with progress has often foreclosed a united frontagainst 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 HarlemWas In Vogue; and Cary Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance(Houston: Rice University Press, 1988). For research that expands the scope ofthe New Negro movement see David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant : AfricanAmerican 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 ofDiaspora: 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 (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 8–9, 41. Louis’s victories offered mo-ments when African Americans’ “hidden transcripts” of grievances could bebrought into public view. Moreover, my discursive deconstruction of the vari-ety of covert ways that African Americans articulated their notions of blackrepresentation and resistance through Louis’s persona and accomplishmentsemploys Scott’s overall conception of “infrapolitics” (19).
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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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 furtherdemonstrate the extent to which antifascism and anticolonialism informedpublic 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 whogave Louis his first feature break in the daily press. Black newspapers like theChicago 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 LifeStory of Joe Louis, as told to Chester Washington and William G. Nunn.”Other major black press organs also included regular updates about theboxer’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, June8, 1935, section 2, 4.
15. B. Weinstein, “Joe Louis Comes to Town,” Young Worker, June 25, 1935. Alsosee “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, July6, 1935.
17. Much of the literature depicts Louis as a docile “Uncle Tom” who functionedas a “race ambassador” to white America. In these treatments, the quiet, gen-tlemanly Louis pales in comparison to supposedly less conventional boxers likethe flamboyant Jack Johnson and draft resistor Muhammad Ali. See OthelloHarris, “Muhammad Ali and the Revolt of the Black Athlete,” in MuhammadAli: The People’s Champ, ed. Elliot Gorn (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,1995): 56. Also see Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (NewYork: Free Press, 1969); Bill Hawkins, “The White Supremacy Continuum ofImages on Black Men,” Journal of African American Men 3, no. 3 (Winter1998): 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 DoubleConsciousness and the Involvement of Black Athletes in American Sport,” inEthnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture, eds. George Eisenand David K. Wiggins (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) 133–156; andGorn, ed. Muhammad Ali. See Ken Burns, “Unforgivable Blackness: The Riseand Fall of Jack Johnson.” USA: PBS, 2005; Gail Bederman, Manliness andCivilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 8–10; and RandyRoberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: TheFree Press, 1983). In particular, Ken Burns’ documentary for PBS has broughtthe Jack Johnson story to a mass audience on PBS. This biographical filmtraces Johnson’s public exploits and the heated controversies they createdwithin the context of Jim Crow America. In particular, it details Johnson’s
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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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 ofwhite sources. For a discussion of state-sanctioned constructions of Joe Louisin wartime propaganda, see Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Constructing G.I. JoeLouis: Cultural Solutions to the ‘Negro Problem’ during World War II,”Journal of American History 89, no.3 (December 2002): 958–983. Also seeJeffrey Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 97–129; Gerald Astor, “And aCredit 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 inthe Ring, the Self in Society’: Boxing and American Culture from Jack John-son to Joe Louis,” Ph.D. diss. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000); ArtEvans, “Joe Louis as Key Functionary: White Reaction Toward a BlackChampion,” Journal of Black Studies 16, no. 1 (September 1985): 95–111;William H. Wiggins, “Boxing’s Sambo Twins: Racial Stereotypes in JackJohnson and Joe Louis Newspaper Cartoons, 1908–1938,” Journal of SportHistory 15, no. 3 (Winter 1988): 242–254; and Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. andMartha Wilkerson, “Multifarious Hero: Joe Louis, American Society, andRace Relations During World Crisis, 1935–1945,” Journal of Sport History10, no. 3 (Winter 1983): 5–25. Even though several valuable works examineLouis’s black folk hero status, they still tend to overlook key questions ofgender. See A. O. Edmonds, Joe Louis (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. EerdmansPublishing Company, 1973); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and BlackConsciousness: Afro-American Folk from Slavery to Freedom (New York:Oxford University Press, 1977); Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and UncleToms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (UniversityPark: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982); Richard Bak, Joe Louis:The Great Black Hope (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1996); DonaldMcRae, In Black & White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens(London: Scribner, 2002); and Thomas Hietala, Fight of the Century: JackJohnson, 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 (NewYork: 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 andTheater (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1991): 43.
22. See Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culturein the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1996), 12–13; and Martin A. Summers, Manliness and its Discontents: The
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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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 inBlack America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2001), 7–12; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the BlackWorking Class (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994) 112–114. Bates’sanalysis of A. Philip Randolph’s BSCP places the trade union’s increasingly stri-dent demands for the “manhood rights” of full citizenship within context ofthe 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 ofself-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 itsown kind of depression. With the title changing hands almost yearly in the firstpart of the decade, public interest waned. Quickly becoming the sport’s biggestdrawing card, Louis ushered in what some contemporary authors termed thepugilistic New Deal. See Alexander Johnson, Ten—And Out! The CompleteStory 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, seeRichard 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 alignthemselves with Jacobs because the promoter’s influence insured that Louiswould 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 participationin 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 tohis 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 seeAstor, 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’salready tarnished image.
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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32. “Joe Louis, Training for Carnera Match, Decides to Become First BeardlessHeavyweight 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 EarlyKayo, 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 StopPrimo,” 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 Winbefore 6th Round,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 15, 1935, 21; Russell J.Cowans, “Louis in Great Shape, Battle Predicted,” Pittsburgh Courier, June22, 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 AmericanReactions 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 Nationalismand the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict, 1934–1936,” Journal of Negro History 63,no. 2 (April 1978): 118–134. For contemporary explanations of the conflictand its implications for African Americans see J. A. Rogers, “Italy overAbyssinia,” Crisis, February 1935, 38–39, 50; Makonnen Haile, “Last Gobbleof Africa,” Crisis, March 1935, 70–71, 90; and George Padmore, “Ethiopiaand 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 offoreign fascism for African Americans, as reports on the conflict continued toappear on the front pages of black newspapers well into 1936.
39. See cartoon entitled “Maybe He Bribed the Guard,” Chicago Defender, March9, 1935. This cartoon shows an Italian burglar robbing an Ethiopian store-house of natural resources as a League of Nations security guard looks theother 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.
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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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, ButIt’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 didnot function as a representative of American democracy, but rather, he took onthe role of an Ethiopian auxiliary defending Abyssinia from the ravages of Ital-ian fascism. See Westbrook Pegler, “Emperor Goes in Training for His ‘Big BoyPeterson’: 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 ofItaly 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 andperformance of African redemption in Garvey’s UNIA, see Summers, “A Spiritof Manliness,” in Manliness and its Discontents, 66–110. In Garveyiterhetoric, 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 AfricanAmericans’ gendered imaginings of Haiti, see Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti:Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (ChapelHill: 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 pridethrough figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture.
45. For a list of Louis’s popular nicknames see Lenwood G. Davis, Joe Louis: ABibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983) 202–203. Also seeMead, 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, June6, 1935.
49. Dan Burley, “Louis Ready for Baer,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 20,1935, 21.
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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50. “Just let Italy Try it!” Chicago Defender, June 15, 1935; “One Look at HisHair,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 6, 1935, 4.
51. New York Times, November 28, 1930, 31; Astor, 95; and The Kings of theRings, 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 Plansto Grab Africa,” Chicago Defender, February 16, 1935; “Ethiopia Has500,000 Men for Conflict,” Chicago Defender, June 22, 1935, 1–2; “Ethiopiain Stern Reply to Mussolini,” Chicago Defender, May 11, 1935, 1; and “LookOut, Italy,” Chicago Defender, June 15, 1935, 1.
53. Compare Marcus Garvey’s treatise on the value of preparedness with respectto the Abyssinian crisis in “Lest We Forget,” Black Man, Oct. 1935, 4, withLouis’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 CarneraBout,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 22, 1935, 20.
54. Thomas O’Halloran, “Forced Civilization Hit By Educator in Talk onEthiopia,” 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 tothe 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 concurredwith Johnson’s assessment of the Italian aggression, critiquing Mussolini’splans 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 whitedailies’ infantilized, Sambo portrayals of Louis continued even after his defeatof Carnera. See Hoff, “Ink Pot-Pourri,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 21, 1935;Ed Hughes, “Another Case of ‘Bad Hands,’” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August17, 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 theNext 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 astark inversion of the traditional savage-civilized dichotomy, a picture of theclean-cut Louis in his defensive crouch stands alongside an enlarged photo ofCarnera’s scowling, teeth-baring mug. For examples of cartoons that followthese conventions see George Lee, “Sporting Around,” Chicago Defender, May18, 1935, 15; and Chicago Defender, June 1, 1935, 13.
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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59. For comprehensive treatments of black activism for economic and citizenshiprights in the South see Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama CommunistsDuring the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1990); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New DealEra (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
60. Jervis Anderson, This was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (NewYork: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982): 242–244. For contemporary descriptionsof 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 shirtlessLouis in his fighting gear. In comparison to the black press, mainstream whitepapers did not print as many photographs of Louis. Even though writers oftenmade 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 underdogslike Carnera.
65. Al White, “New York Likes Joe Louis,” Claude Barnett Papers, Part I, SeriesA, 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 severalother black newspapers. Although some may argue that Louis’s endorsement ofMurrays 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 whichblacks appropriated, transformed, and reinscribed coded oppositional meansonto styles derived from the dominant culture” (Kelley, Race Rebels, 168).
67. Al White, “New York Likes Joe Louis,” Claude Barnett Papers, Part I, SeriesA, Reel 10, May 20, 1935, 16; “Defender Cameraman Follows Joe LouisAround in N.Y.,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935, 17; “Joe Louis CapturesNew 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 PomptonLakes 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 IdealSpots in the Metropolitan District,” New York Age, June 8, 1935, 8; BaltimoreAfro-American, June 8, 1935, picture page; Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,”New York Age, June 22, 1935.
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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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, April6, 1935, section 2, 5; Chester Washington, “Visiting the Joe Louis TrainingCamp,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 8, 1935; “Joe Louis Going Great on 2-MealDiet—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 incontemporary 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 LouisGoing Great as He Trains for Big Bout with ‘Da Preem’,” Pittsburgh Courier,June 8, 1935; and “Joe and Jack—The Perfect Combination,” PittsburghCourier, July 20, 1935, section 2, 4. For discussions of Roxborough andBlack’s business smarts see “Joe Louis and His Board of Strategy,” PittsburghCourier, March 23, 1935, section 2, 5; “No White Managers,” BaltimoreAfro-American, June 22, 1935, editorial page; and “Joe Louis Wins,” ChicagoDefender, June 29, 1935, editorial page. According to Summers, young, blackradicals of the 1930s spoke out against the traditional avenues of white pa-tronage, even as they accepted white funds, in order to dissociate themselvesfrom the prevailing feminized image of the dependent black man (Manlinessand 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 JoeLouis 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, June22, 1935; Julia B. Jones, “How Does it Feel to Be the Mother of the NextHeavyweight Champ?” Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1935, section 1, 11.
75. Wilbur Wood, “Louis Iceberg in Ring or Out: Bomber Abhors Flattery andFlatterers 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,” SanFrancisco 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 ofetiquette for the young fighter printed in many white and black papers todemonstrate Louis’s dissociation from Johnson. According to the list, theBomber was never to have his picture taken with white women; he was never
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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to go to a nightclub alone; he would not participate in soft or fixed fights; hewas never to gloat over his opponents; he was to keep “deadpan” in front ofthe 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 thingsthat 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 aslazy and sleepy. See John Lardner, “Joe Louis Sleeps and Sleeps But He’sHappy, 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 ofWorld is Agog Over Win,” Birmingham News, June 28, 1935; HenryMcLemore, “Joe Louis May be a Whirlwind Killer Inside Ring Ropes, but Outof 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, ScientificBlocking 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, ScientificBoxing and Self Defence (London: Athletic Publications, 1927). These booksteach the reader how to be a skilful boxer rather than a brutish brawler.
81. Russell Cowans, “News from the Joe Louis Camp,” Pittsburgh Courier, June1, 1935, section 2, 4; Lewis E. Dial, “The Sports Dial,” New York Age, June8, 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 histraining day. See “Joe Louis at Work,” Chicago Defender, June 1, 1935, 15;and “Defender Scribe Does Road Work with Louis,” Chicago Defender, June15, 1935.
82. Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough: Plan to Stage Italian-Negro Prizefight at VeryDoor of Embittered Harlem is Called New High in Stupid Judgment,” NewYork Sun, 1935. Brisbane article qtd. in Mead 58.
83. Al Monroe, “Speaking of Sports,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935, 15. Alsosee “Pegler Inspires Race Riot,” Chicago Defender, May 25, 1935; “Do TheyWant Trouble?” New York Amsterdam News, June 15, 1935; and “ColumnistSpoofs 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 appropriaterace 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
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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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 intopeaceful channels” of protest. See “The Harlem Riot,” Opportunity, April1935, 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,” PittsburghCourier, 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,” IndianapolisCrusader, July 6, 1935. This was the first major fight in years that had failedto 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 Detroitstations also aired telegraphic reports of the fight.
90. For advertisements for organized trips see the Chicago Defender, June 8 andJune 22, 1935; and the Baltimore Afro-American, June 8, 1935.
91. “Distinguished Gathering Throngs Stadium for Heavyweight Battle,” NewYork Times, June 26, 1935, 24; Dan Parker, “Fans on Hand Early,” New YorkDaily Mirror, June 26, 1935; “Singing, Happy Negroes Jam Bleachers To SeeRing 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,” PittsburghCourier, June 29, 1935, section 1, 4.
93. “Louis-Carnera fight drew sport fans from all over country.” The fight alsobroke the record for newspaper coverage, with hundreds of journalists fromboth presses on hand.
94. Mead, 59. The following description of the fight is based on my viewing of thefight film acquired from private collector Ken Noltheimer of Ringwise, Inc.,along with contemporary white and black press reports, and secondarysources. See New York Daily Mirror, June 26, 1935; “Al Monroe in VividStory of Big Fight,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, 14; and “‘Ches’ GivesThe 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 DownGiant Opponent,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 29, 1935, 1; and Astor, 102. Sim-ilar scenes played out across the country. In Macon, Georgia, a throng of6,000, with an estimated 3,500 blacks, congregated in front of the press officesof the Telegraph to hear regular updates of the fight. In Detroit, thousands ofsupporters reportedly converged on the Joe Louis headquarters at St. Antoineand Beacon Streets, and in Chicago, around 10,000 fans blocked traffic out-
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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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, June27, 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 ofFight,” 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,” ChicagoDaily Tribune, June 27, 1935. This scene is also supported by pictures and de-scriptions contained in the documentary I Remember Harlem, SchomburgCenter 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 specialobligation to black America. However, this piece was the exception, ratherthan the rule. See Gordon B. Hancock, “A Letter to Joe Louis,” Journal andGuide, 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 theSpeed Camera the Guide Gives you a Louis-Carnera Ringside Seat,” Journaland Guide, July 4, 1935, 14; and “‘David Anoints Goliath’ with Barrage ofBruising 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, July6, 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, theartist has a black man with the words “you and me” on his back reading a
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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number of front page headlines like “Joe Louis Wins,” “Jesse Owens Sets NewRecords,” “Haile Selassie Defies Italy,” while gruesome caricatures of theBrain Trusters, Huey Long, Mussolini, and Hitler complain that the black menhave stolen their space. Once again, race progress, and even the racial subjectis 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,” NewYork American, June 16, 1936.
112. Fred Van Ness, “Louis Celebrates 22nd Birthday; Cuts Cake and Gets GoldBelt,” New York Times, May 14, 1936.
113. Lloyd Lewis, Chicago Daily News, June 17, 1936. For other examples fromthe white press that discuss Louis’s poor showing at Lakewood, see “LouisListless in Sparring with Mates,” New York American, May 27, 1936; andHype Igoe, “Bomber Can’t Resist Lure of Golf Course,” New York EveningJournal, June 4, 1936. For examples in the black press, see Al Monroe,“Bomber Fails to Slay ’Em in Workouts, Chicago Defender, May 30, 1936; andRalph Matthews, “Joe’s Camp Upset,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 6,1936.
114. James Cannon, “Fame and Riches May Bring About Louis’ Downfall,” NewYork American, June 2, 1936. For examples of positive reports in the blackpress, 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,” NewYork Amsterdam News, June 20, 1936. For examples of Marva’s exposure inthe black press, see “Sunday Workout Shows Look Like Social Affair,” Pitts-burgh Courier, June 6, 1936, section 1, 9; “Harlem Elite Deluge Marva Louiswith Favor!” Pittsburgh Courier, June 20, 1936, section 1, 9; “The Bomber’sBride,” New York Times, June 19, 1936. For examples of white press reportsthat 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 inthe 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 SundayUnder 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 theBaltimore Afro-American from July 13 to August 24, 1935, that described hisfan mail and the various incidents in which mobs of women rushed him for hisautograph.
117. Several secondary sources offer general analyses of the connections betweenJim Crow in the South and Nazi Germany. See Glenda Gilmore, “An Ethiop
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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Among the Aryans: African Americans and Fascism, 1930 to 1939,” unpub-lished manuscript; Stefan Kouhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, AmericanRacism, 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 toAmerican 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 MaxFighting 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, June18, 1936; “Mapping Out Maxie’s Battle Plans,” Atlanta Constitution, June 19,1936. This same trend was characteristic of other papers like the St. LouisDaily 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 hishard work at training camp. See Bill Farnsworth, “Industrious Max ChangesStyle for Louis Bout,” New York Evening Journal, May 13, 1936; MaryKnight, “Girl Reporter Discovers Civilized Fight Camp,” Dayton Herald, June13, 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 withcontemporary white and black press reports.
123. “Detroit, Harlem in Gloom as Idol Collapses,” Detroit Evening Times, June20, 1936.
124. Fred Digby, “Max in Sensational Win!” New Orleans Morning Tribute, June20, 1936; “Just a Scared and Beaten Boy,” New York Post, June 20, 1936;“Schmeling Knocks Out Louis in Twelfth Round; Most Severe Beating in RingHistory, 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,” BaltimoreAfro-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 HistoricalBass, 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 PeopleThink,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 28, 1935, section 2, 4, for a congratu-latory letter from “the colored young people of Costa Rica.” For a referenceto 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 ofAfrican American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), x.
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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