Start with 39,878 paying customers in Yankee Stadium. Add the papered seats, including those for Joe Louisâs mother, Lillie Barrow Brooks; his stunning wife, Marva, in a fiery red suede chapeau and gloves and shoes to match; seven hundred newspapermen; and the nonpaying hundreds who peered down from the upper stories and roofs and fire escapes of the surrounding Bronx apartment houses. Add the riders of Interboro Rapid Transit who caught a glimpse of the stadium from their train near the 161st Street stop.
Add the German movie star Anny Ondra, who never attended her husbandâs fights but listened via shortwave radio in a country house near Potsdam, Germany.
Back in New York, add the people listening to the radios in the Harlem gin mills with signs posted âJoe Louis Headquarters,â and the people downtown listening via loudspeakers set up on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington and outside Rockefeller Center. Heading west, north, and south, add all the radios in taverns, lunchrooms, general stores, railroad stations, pool halls, automobiles, and living rooms across the countryâone in two Americans owned a radio.
In sum, probably sixty million people experienced the tilt between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling on a cloudy, damp evening in June 1936.
On the radio Clem McCarthy, who always sounded like he had rocks in his cheeks, ground out the words faster than a telegraph operator. The only way to hear was to shush everybody in the room and lean in close to the Silvertone. âA right hand high on Louisâs jaw that made Louis rock his headâŠ.â
It was a strange beginning, considering that the odds were in Joeâs favor eight to one.
In the most general way, whites favored thorough, methodical Schmeling simply because he was white. They were willing to overlook the offense of his being so buddy-buddy with Hitler and his associates. He was whiteâthatâs what counted when you were going against a black man in the boxing ring. A Negro had no place in the ring.
Remember Jack Johnson? Who could forget the first black man to hold the heavyweight boxing title? Cocky, spoke whatever was on his mind, had no respect for white authority. Johnson had lost his title back in 1915, but memories were long when it came to rich niggers running with white women. Johnson not only ran with them; he married three of them. His biggest mistake, though, was a seemingly small thing: He paid a white ladyâs bus fare across state lines. That was against the Mann Act, passed to halt transport of females for âimmoral purposes.â Johnson fled the country rather than face the charges.
Louis was a different kind of man, but white folks didnât pay any mind. A Negro had no place in the ring.
Naturally, Negroes backed Louis, but not just because his skin was brownââcoffee with double creamâ in the eyes of one female admirer. And not just because he was quick and had a murderous right cross. Negroes stopped him on the corner, at the gas station, in a restaurant to tell him, âWay to go, Brown Bomber. Show the white man who we are!â Joe was serious and sober, respectful. Unlike Johnson, he had taken a woman from his race for a wife. He fought fair, and he gave a ton of money away. Goodness and ability made Joe the Last Great Hope, the one who was going to deliver Negroes from slavery once and forever. He was the New Day.
The Bomber had won twenty-seven fights in a row, all but four of them knockouts. He was twenty-two to Schmelingâs thirty, and six pounds heavier than Schmelingâs one hundred and ninety-two. No way could Joe lose. He himself was so casual about the match that he brought his new wife and his golf clubs to training camp in Lakewood, New Jersey. More than once he sneaked off to play eighteen holes. Meanwhile, Schmeling, at camp in the Catskills, ran uphill and down for hundreds of miles to build endurance, and drank exclusively German mineral water.
On the train ride up to New York, Joe played âI Canât Give You Anything But Loveâ on his harmonica for fifteen minutes and then slept soundly in his gray pinstripe suit for the rest of the two-hour trip. Max had a long, harrowing drive downstate in the pouring rain.
On the radio, McCarthy was spitting words like watermelon seeds. âA right hand high on Louisâs jaw that made Louis rock his head. Schmeling has sent Louis down. Joe Louis is down!â It was the fourth round, and the Bomber was on the canvas for the first time in his professional career. He was so unaccustomed to working the count to his advantage that he quickly stood up again. âHe did not wait for the count! He got up on the count of two! Schmeling came back at him and gave him another right! Schmeling is pouring in nowâŠâ It wasnât possible; Joe was taking a beating. The crowd was screaming so loud the fighters didnât hear the bell to end round four, and they went on hammering.
Lillie, seated ringside, screamed, âDonât kill my boy, dear Lord!â A family friend carted her out of the stadium before she got too hysterical. Marva, in the fifth row, would have left, too, but some magazine woman was peppering her with questions, pinning Marva in her seat. âJoe, honey, get up! Get up!â she shouted.
In general stores, mothers perched on upturned wooden boxes let squirmy children slip from their laps. In taverns, nearly full beer bottles stood still as soldiers along the bar. At intersections, automobiles idled, their drivers unseeing as stoplights shone green, red, and green again.
In Kansas City, in the stuffy parlor at Aunt Lucyâs boardinghouse, where everybody was glued to the radio turned up all the way, Bill Basie couldnât take it anymore. He was thirty-two, a short, stocky man, very dark, with surprisingly long fingers: a piano player. He had a small, neat mustache and a full lower lip that was often turned up in a sunny smile. But not right now. Basie went outside and lay in the floppy hammock strung between two trees, to wait.
More bedlam in rounds five and six as Schmeling staggered Louis with his specialty right-hand punch to the head, and the gasping, screaming crowd was again too loud for the bell to be heard. The referee got wise and stepped between the sweat-drenched fighters each time the bell sounded, or there would be no end to the pummeling.
Round twelve came: âAfter hard rights and lefts to the jaw, Schmeling has puffed up Louisâs left cheek. And Louis is down! Louis is down, hanging from the ropes!â
Thirteen million Negroes standing in doorways, sitting on kitchen chairs, hanging from fire escapes stopped breathing.
âHe is a very tired fighter. He is blinking his eyes, shaking his head. The count is ten. The fight is over! The fight is over!â
Thirteen million Negroes gave a shout, a groan, or a moan. Over? It was not possible.
Joe, barely conscious, staggered to his dressing room with the help of a flock of blue-clad policemen. His forehead was swollen to his eyelids, and he had an enormous lump on his left cheek. His lips were puffed out like balloons. He was crying.
In Kansas City, Bill Basie stopped rocking when he heard shouts followed by deep quiet as radios clicked off and people sat unmoving. The screen door creaked. Aunt Lucy poked her head out to tell him what he already knew.
It was not possible. The strongest man in the world did not lose. Could not. If he lost, it was not just Joe Louis, the hard-training fighter, fair-minded man of dignity, idol of his people, who lost. The Race lost whatever few yardsâ ground it had gained since slavery days. If Joe Louis lost, Negroes were what the crackers said they were: reptiles; low-down niggers; stupid, ugly, lazy, dirty; only slightly higher than the apes.
In Potsdam, Anny Schmeling accepted congratulations from her host, Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Goebbels sent off a cable to Max, which read: âWe know you fought for Germany; itâs a German victory. We are proud of you. Heil Hitler. Regards.â
In Harlem, people fled their crowded apartments and spilled onto the cracked sidewalks just as they had for Joeâs many victories. Only this time, instead of shouting and yelling and banging pots and driving around and more shouting, people were quiet, more or less. Some wandered with no aim but to relieve their misery. The Harlem poet Langston Hughes walked and walked down Seventh Avenue and saw men weeping openly and women sitting on curbs, cradling their heads in their hands.
Other Harlemites took action, of a sort. Thirty black men jumped a single hapless white WPA worker crossing 119th Street at Fifth Avenue. The man was treated at Harlem Hospital for a cut over his right eye and bruises. Boys stationed themselves along Amsterdam Avenue to throw stones at the windows of automobiles returning from the fight. Just to do something.
So Joe Louis was no Great Hope after all. He was just another Negro beaten by a white man. How in Godâs name were they supposed to go on from here?