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  Sure he had scored the winner, Louis retreated to his corner without even turning around to look. In fact, Baer was up on his knee at four. He could hear the count, but his legs were numb. “There were so many Joe Louises in front of me it looked like all Harlem had jumped into the ring,” he said afterward. Donovan counted him out. Never had he seen anyone take so many murderous punches; one more, he feared, and Louis might have broken Baer’s neck. Years later Louis said he was never better than he was that night. That a man so ferocious had married only moments before was simply unfathomable to some. “I wonder if his new bride’s heart beat a little with fear that this terrible thing was hers,” Gallico wrote. It didn’t. Marva had come to Yankee Stadium in a limousine; now, along with four girlfriends, she giddily returned to Harlem in a streetcar, happily springing for the nickel fare.

  Baer, bleeding so profusely that he looked to one reporter like an Apache in war paint, was jeered as he left the ring. When he got to his dressing room, he demanded a cigarette and a beer. “I guess I could have got up again but what was the use?” he asked. “He had me licked.” The press was merciless; Ed Sullivan and Ernest Hemingway called him a coward. But Baer didn’t care. “When I get executed, people are going to pay more than $25 for a seat to watch it,” he said. He signed autographs “Max Baer—Palooka.”

  “That’s a great fighter, the greatest I ever saw, I guess,” Dempsey said of Louis as he climbed out of the ring. As for Louis himself, he said he’d faced tougher opponents in the Golden Gloves. “If you folks is all through, I’d kinda like to go home,” he told the reporters after a decent interval. “I’m a married man now, you know.” A crowd at 381 Edgecomb Avenue awaited Louis’s return, and it took six policemen to get him on the elevator. Around one in the morning, the Chicago Defender later reported, Louis and Marva went out to the Cotton Club; they returned around two-thirty, then went to bed. Around four they were awakened by a sound below their window. A tin-can band was serenading them.

  Inside the stadium, under police surveillance, blacks had been subdued, but outside afterward, a few of them executed handstands and then sprinted away, as if rushing the news back to Harlem. Of course, Harlem already knew; some 200,000 people were quickly on its streets. The Savoy Ballroom had to close its doors, while at the Ubangi, the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, Big Apple, Pirate, and Horseshoe Bar, there wasn’t even standing room. “Why attempt to describe it?” the Amsterdam News wrote of the scene. “You probably were in it.” Never had there been anything like it, nor could there have been; when Johnson knocked out Jeffries in 1910, Harlem had been too small and too scared to celebrate.

  Downtown, the hot spots were jammed. At “21,” tables were set up in the foyer for the first time. At the Stork Club, Sherman Billingsley turned away seven hundred people. “Forget repeal. Forget Prohibition. Not since the old days, before Prohibition, has there been such a night on Broadway,” said the headwaiter at the French Casino.

  Not a single call had come in to the Detroit Fire Department during the fight, and only three came in to the police, one asking who’d won. Cars cruised up and down the streets in Paradise Valley, the center of black Detroit. “With one hand on the horn button and the other waving out the window, each driver let the world know Joe Louis had won,” a local paper reported. In Memphis, “Joe Louis has driven the blues away from Beale Street,” and outside town “many a cotton picker was sluggish and red-eyed in the field today.” In Portsmouth, Virginia, streets in the black neighborhood became “noisy canyons of romping humanity.”

  Richard Wright described the forces Louis unleashed on Chicago’s South Side:

  They seeped out of doorways, oozed from alleys, trickled out of tenements, and flowed down the street: a fluid mass of joy…. Four centuries of oppression, of frustrated hopes, of black bitterness, felt even in the bones of the bewildered young, were rising to the surface. Yes, unconsciously, they had imputed to the brawny image of Joe Louis all the balked dreams of revenge, all the secretly visualized moments of retaliation, AND HE HAD WON! Good Gawd Almighty! Yes, by Jesus, it could be done! Didn’t Joe do it? … Joe was the concentrated essence of black triumph over white. And it came so seldom, so seldom. And what could be sweeter than long nourished hate vicariously gratified? From the symbol of Joe’s strength they took strength, and in that moment all fear, all obstacles were wiped out, drowned.

  In other places, joy transmogrified into anger. In Baltimore, revelers threw cabbages, old shoes, bricks, and tin cans at cars driven by whites. An unsuspecting white farmer carrying a truckload of tomatoes through a black neighborhood unwittingly furnished the protesters with an entire arsenal, which they threw at policemen. Cincinnati experienced two days of violence. In Utica, New York, an interracial street brawl tied up traffic.

  To those who followed the sport, the face of boxing had changed, but would not change again for a while. “Some young fellow now playing marbles or spinning a top” would be the first person to beat Louis, Grant-land Rice predicted. Ernest Hemingway called Louis “too good to be true, and absolutely true.” He wrote, “We who have seen him now, light on his feet, smooth moving as a leopard, a young man with an old man’s science, the most beautiful fighting machine that I have ever seen, may live to see him fat, slow, old and bald taking a beating from a younger man. But I would like to hazard a prediction that whoever beats Joe Louis in an honest fight in the next fifteen years will have to get up off the floor to do it.”

  Fleischer praised Louis so effusively and incessantly that Ring readers accused him of disloyalty to his race. “Warning: To my friend Max Schmeling—Stay in Germany,” wrote Gallico. “Have no truck with this man. He will do something to you from which you will never fully recover. You haven’t a chance…. And besides, Der Fuehrer wouldn’t like the pictures.”

  The next morning, as reporters and photographers recorded the scene, the newlyweds went out for a stroll. “Mr. Louis, what makes you happier, to beat Baer or to be married to this charming lady?” someone shouted. “I think to be married,” he replied. Who would he rather fight, Braddock or Schmeling? Braddock, he replied: “Much easier, and the championship, too.” “Mrs. Louis, what did you think of your husband?” “I thought he was grand,” Mrs. Louis replied. Praise rained down on Louis all day, but his expression never changed—not even when Mike Jacobs handed him a check for $217,337.93. Three evenings later, people standing near the corner of 138th Street and Seventh Avenue happened upon an impromptu, serendipitous show: Jack Johnson was reenacting the fight.

  Only Schmeling and Braddock now stood between Louis and the title, and neither seemed very formidable. (To Sharkey, in fact, Louis’s most formidable obstacle was Louis himself. “Joe will be the kingpin as long as he keeps his head about him,” he said. But the money could wreak havoc: “The first thing he knows he’ll find training distasteful. He’ll loaf for a month or two and then, when a big bout is announced, say two months hence—he’ll keep putting off the starting time for the daily workouts. By that time training will be an awful grind—after that anything can happen.”) There was renewed talk of finding a “white hope”; the man who’d discovered Carnera was said to have found a giant somewhere in China. Even to southerners, Louis appeared unstoppable, and that was mostly fine, for Louis had originally been one of them.

  To black America, Louis crystallized racial progress, and promised more. The Courier saw black champions in golf, tennis, and swimming. A Defender reader dared some major league baseball team to sign Satchel Paige. Louis had bridged the racial gap more dramatically than all individuals and organizations combined, wrote Sam Lacy of the Washington Tribune. “In deepest Mississippi as well as in highest Harlem, colored and white people listened at their radio loudspeakers without gnashing their teeth or cutting each other’s throats,” noted The Crisis. If blacks could only stand together as they stood behind Louis, one black commentator predicted, someone “could go down to Washington and say, ‘Mr. President, the Scottsboro boys must be freed. Lynch
ing must be stopped.’ And both would be done in a month.” Among South African blacks, the reaction was jubilant, if more understated. “All sportsmen, more especially the Coloured races of the world, are very proud of him,” stated Bantu World, which put a picture of Louis on its front page. (Among Louis’s South African fans was the young Nelson Mandela, four years the Bomber’s junior, and a boxer himself.) The Japanese papers offered blow-by-blow descriptions of the fight. In Paris, Josephine Baker was thrilled over Louis’s victory, which she’d predicted.

  But Louis could accelerate things only so much. Enforcement of the interstate ban on fight films enacted during Jack Johnson’s day had been lax—but only, it turned out, when two white men shared the card: Virginia’s state censorship board had already banned films of the second Louis-Ramage fight, and now films of the Louis-Baer fight were prohibited, too, on the grounds that they “might tend to arouse racial animosity.” Brisbane, the Hearst columnist, thought Louis nothing special: send Jack Blackburn to Somaliland and give him “a promising young savage of 17 or 18,” and you’d have yourself a champion. But for the next decade, he warned, only another black man had a prayer against Louis, and since fights between blacks were box-office poison, a separate “colored championship” might be necessary. Louis’s managers would in fact not match him up with another black fighter, fearing that such a fight would not draw.

  It was a voice from the outside—the music critic of the New York Post, Samuel Chotzinoff—who best captured what Louis’s victory did and didn’t mean. Louis was “sweet recompense for a degrading past and a hopeless future,” he wrote. “Booker T. Washington and Duke Ellington are all right in their way, but they do not represent Might.” With Louis charging toward the championship, he went on, “it will be easier to bear the usual number of lynchings in the year. If you are riding by compulsion in a Jim Crow car it is something to know that Joe Louis is ready and willing to take all comers.”

  Ten days before the Louis-Baer fight, the Nazis had held their annual party congress at Nuremberg, and Schmeling had met with some Nazi leaders there. Though he’d clearly had nothing to do with it, it was at that gathering that the Nazis had unveiled the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which defined, expansively, who was a Jew, then stripped of German citizenship all those who fit the criteria. Marriage and sexual relations between Germans and Jews were also barred. Within a few weeks, the same restrictions were placed on “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards.” But wherever Louis and Baer would have fit in the new Germany, their fight was followed closely, for in their fortunes lay Schmeling’s, too.

  The Angriff conceded that Louis had revitalized boxing, creating great moneymaking opportunities for Schmeling. Baer, it noted, had said after the fight that Schmeling could give Louis a hard time, and maybe even beat him. The 8 Uhr-Blatt doubted whether the Americans would offer Schmeling a shot; they preferred an American, even a black American, to “a purebred white European” as champion. The journal of the Reich Association of the German Press took umbrage that coverage of “Negroid-Jewish matters” had crowded out information about German athletics from the country’s newspapers. “In America, once so full of racial pride, a Negro is fighting a Jew!” exclaimed the Fränkische Tageszeitung. “It’s a disgrace if you can’t come up with any other contenders for the title of world champion.”

  The night after the fight, Rudy Vallee interviewed Joe Louis’s mother on the Fleischmanns Yeast Hour radio program, and asked whether she worried about her son in the ring. “Just a little,” she replied. “I don’t want him to get hurt. You know, Joe is very delicate.” Hearing a black mother talk endearingly about her son was another of the ways in which Louis was touching mainstream America as no black man ever had. Walter White marveled at it all. “Isn’t it superb the way the press and public have reacted to Joe’s smashing victory?” he wrote Roxborough and Black. The task of bringing Louis along had been “loaded with T.N.T.,” he went on; “only your skilled handling has achieved the impossible—promoting racial good will and respect for the Negro through a Negro’s defeating white men.”

  As for Louis himself, he wanted nothing more than to get back to the Midwest to watch the Tigers and the Cubs in the World Series. He arrived in Detroit on Sunday, September 29. Word leaked out that he planned to attend services at the Calvary Baptist Church; two hours beforehand, 2,500 people awaited him inside, with another 5,000 outdoors. As if to warm up the crowd, the preacher proclaimed that Louis had done more than anyone since Lincoln to uplift the race and extolled him for neither smoking nor for letting any red-hot liquor pass down his throat. Finally Louis and his bride pulled up, in a black limousine with red wheels, then walked through the cheering throng to greet Louis’s mother on the steps of the church. The preacher announced that Louis would speak on “The Ideal Son and a Devoted Mother.” Louis stepped up to the pulpit, his hands trembling. Once again, he said nothing, fleeing to the comforts of the communal lunchroom instead. “The assembly whistled and stamped approval for just his smile,” the Afro-American reported. Before departing, Louis put $100 in the collection plate. Three members of his entourage each put in an additional $5. The total raised that day was $118.34.

  The next day, Louis took the train to Chicago, where he and Marva installed themselves in a third-floor apartment in the Rosenwald Houses on Forty-sixth Street and South Michigan, a common address for the black elite. An Afro-American reporter found them listed as “Mr. and Mrs. James McDonald” and revealed that their “unusually attractive bedroom” had twin beds. Louis met with the mayor of Chicago, Edward Kelly, and officially ruled the city for ten minutes. A black pastor urged local congregations not to compete for Joe and Marva Louis too aggressively. “You busy businessmen, who crowd everything into your heart and life but Christ and His church, ‘Go to the Brown Bomber’ and be wise,” another minister sermonized.

  Joe Louis busts—“in fighting pose”—were being sold for one dollar. Babies named for Louis abounded. Joe Louis Wise, born in Georgia during the Baer fight, was even white. “We only hope that he will be as clean a sportsman as the man for whom he was named,” his proud parents wrote. Marva had only enhanced the interest. When their appearance at the annual Wilberforce-Tuskegee football game at Soldier Field in Chicago was announced at halftime, a thousand people “streaked pell-mell across the field,” gathered below their second-row seats, and stared. The state of their marriage was always newsworthy, as were constant rumors that they were, as Walter Winchell liked to say, “blessed-eventing.” Marva’s every comment, activity, garment, purchase, and ailment was followed, analyzed, and assessed. Soon she, too, was getting lots of mail, from black women urging her to watch over her husband as conscientiously as his mother did, or asking her for discarded clothes or handkerchiefs or money, or requesting that she be godmother to their children. They admired her thrift and her extravagance alike. She could do no wrong.

  “She’s nice to look at, and what’s better, she doesn’t seem to mind working,” the “Feminine Viewpoint” column in the Journal and Guide observed. “In addition, she acts genuinely honest and her disposition seems to be O.K. She didn’t mind riding home from the fight on a street car, but on the other hand, she made no bones about ordering twenty dresses at one clip, or picking expensive furniture with 18-carat gold knobs for the drawers. It just happened to be what she wanted and she got it without apologizing. And that’s grand!” “Marva is sweet… that is the appropriate description of her soft beauty and her child-like simplicity,” said the Courier. Some readers choked on all the adulation. “Instead of beautiful headlines of interest commenting on some of the good deeds done by some of our leading educators,” a Defender reader griped, “the front page of the ‘World’s Greatest Weekly’” was “graced, adorned and magnified with the picture of a woman who hasn’t done anything to help bring her people out of chaos, or help in any way to develop manhood or womanhood into a ‘downtrodden’ race.” But most would have thought that curmudgeonly.

  Black intell
ectuals began taking an interest in Louis. Eslanda Robeson, the wife of Paul, interviewed Louis for three hours for a book she hoped to write on prominent black Americans. “I found him charming, and very very simple and natural,” she wrote to Carl Van Vechten, who was to take photographs for the book. “He only goes clam when you take him out of his field. He’s as sweet as he can be, and crazy about the RACE. So, all you have to do to go great with him, is put him at his ease.” Writing to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Van Vechten predicted in November 1935 that Louis, along with Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Bill Robinson, Josephine Baker, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia would keep blacks very much in the news that winter.

  White reporters began making pilgrimages to Louis’s birthplace, and wading into his gene pool. They heard of his paternal grandfather, a well digger who was “just about the toughest darky we ever had in these parts.” And of Louis’s mother, who as a girl could pick more cotton than most men. And of Louis’s father, “big and strong as an ox.” (Not everyone was sure he’d really died, but neither the family nor the press bothered to check.) The stories traced Louis’s ancestors back to a white slave owner named James Barrow and a Cherokee chief named Charles Hunkerfoot. Some of the Barrows “could easily pass for Indian braves and princesses,” one visitor wrote, while others were “as fair as any Anglo-Saxon.” “None of them is dark-skinned like the average southern Negro, though many are the typically freaky-looking zambos,” one article explained. Their light skin was said to be a source of pride to the family and resentment from others. One of Louis’s black forebears was supposedly a former slave who entertained Union soldiers by wrestling with a baboon. One writer steeped in Louis’s bloodlines pronounced that his “coolness and cunning” were Indian, his “quick wit and shrewdness” white, and his “brute strength and endurance” black.