![]() I grew up in the Ali era,” Louis Barrow Jr adds. And I’m going to believe Ali, because that was my man. ![]() “Muhammad Ali told me at my father’s funeral that Joe Louis was truly the greatest. Luminaries from boxing heaped praise on Louis too. How he was a man who proved to America that black people were more than just slaves.” “I knew John Lewis, the congressman from Atlanta, and every time I would see him he’d talk about what my father meant to him. Jesse Jackson, said before there was a was a Jackie, meaning Jackie Robinson, there was a Joe,” he says. “Many of the civil rights icons said they were only able to do what they did, because of my father. It was a national admiration that didn’t stop at the naming babies born in the shadow of his win. Many young boys were named Louis or Joe, many young girls who were named Marva, after my mother, and that was because of the admiration that they had for my father.” “I think all of America admired him and black America had a special affection. “He was on the front page above the fold of every newspaper, without killing a white person,” Louis Barrow Jr says of the coverage. His win not only avenged the sole loss of this career to that point, it propelled him into the center of American culture and adoration. Louis was in the shape of his life and carried a ferocious hunger into the ring that night. It meant different things to different people but to Max and my father it was really just the meeting of two gladiators,” says Louis Barrow Jr. “To some it was freedom and democracy versus fascism, FDR versus Adolf Hitler. Not that the fighters involved necessarily shared the polarization of the build up. Schmeling was held up by Nazi propagandists as a poster boy of an Aryan race with a sacred destiny, all of which added to the drama of the fight which had sold out the 75,000 tickets soon after being announced. Over the same time period, Hitler had opened the Buchenwald concentration camp and annexed Austria, ramping up global tensions. He took the heavyweight title from Jack Braddock in 1937 proving the perfect lure for a belt-less Schmeling to agree to a rematch. Such was the thirst for action in the 1930s, Louis fought and beat 11 opponents in the two years he waited to meet Schmeling once again in Yankee Stadium. ![]() It made Louis’ fight to avenge his loss all the more compelling to fight fans of the era. He was spending more time on the golf course.” “It resulted in him not preparing to fight the way he should have. “My father was the invincible Joe fighting a man eight years older,” says Louis Barrow Jr. “It provided them with hope.”īeneath the veneer of political narrative however, the reasons for sporting loss can often be far more prosaic. “You know, Nelson Mandela, when he came over to the United States after he was freed from Robben Island told me that he, along with thousands of black people in South Africa, had stayed awake to listen to my father’s fights on the radio,” he wrote. Indeed in Louis’s prime, his actions in the ring reverberated around the world, as Louis Barrow Jr details in his book Joe Louis: 50 Years and American Hero. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions – or on mine.” All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried. Langston Hughes, a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote of the defeat’s aftermath by saying: “I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. ![]()
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