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  Aboard the chartered plane to Pittsburgh, Nunn scrawled emotionally on a notepad, trying to capture the larger meaning for black America. “Bill Nunn Writes His Story 10,000 Feet in the Air,” boasted the headline on Nunn’s story. “Special Plane Wings Through Night and Thus Makes Glorious History for Negro Journalism.” Reminding readers of the Courier’s special relationship with Louis, Nunn described what he had come to represent to so many of them. “To those of us know him well,” Nunn wrote, “we know that Joe is the answer to our prayers . . . the prayers of a race of people who are struggling to break through a dense cloud of prejudice and studied misunderstanding . . . a race of people who ask nothing more than a CHANCE . . . a race of people, who though bowed by oppression, will never be broken in spirit.”

  (The victory meant something else to black fans as well: a gambling windfall. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands on the fight,” another Courier story reported, as the “smart money” on the “Gay White Way” that had made Carnera an 11-to-10 favorite came crashing down with him.)

  With the Carnera win under his belt and Mike Jacobs’s promotional muscle behind him, Louis was on the way to the big time—and the big money. Over the next year, he fought four more contenders, requiring a total of ten rounds to knock them all out and take home tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. One victim was the once seemingly unstoppable Max Baer, who shook his head in befuddled surrender in the fourth round after Joe knocked him to the deck for the third time. White bigots, particularly in the South, still couldn’t stomach seeing a Negro boxer go so far, so fast. Before the Baer fight, Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich described them as clinging to the chance that Baer “will surpass himself in the knowledge that he is the lone White Hope for the defense of Nordic superiority in the prize ring.” But when the Associated Press named Louis “Athlete of the Year” for 1935, it was a sign that the rest of America had started to embrace “the Brown Bomber” as their hero, too, particularly as he prepared to defend the country’s honor in a fight against the German Max Schmeling.

  In the pages of the Courier, meanwhile, Ches Washington saw the Joe Louis story as a vindication of the Great Migration, the exodus that had brought so many Negroes to Pittsburgh and other cities across the Northeast and Midwest. “Today Joe Louis stands as America’s Public Hero No. 1,” he wrote in his weekly “Ches Sez” column. “He has scaled the ladder of success by ability and diligent application in his chosen field in this land of Opportunity in the North. But what might have happened if Joe Louis had stayed down in that little community near Lafayette in prejudiced Alabama? He wouldn’t have had a chance. His opportunities would have been curtailed. His ambitions would have been smothered. He probably would have been ‘kept down’ in some menial job and even browbeaten into an inferiority complex by his Nordic neighbors. That vicious Jim Crow complex of the state of Alabama would have ‘licked’ Joe Louis in his struggle for survival. It might have ‘knocked him out.’ He never would have arrived at the threshold of the world’s championship, where he now stands.”

  That spring, the bonds between Louis and Pittsburgh grew even closer as the city experienced the worst flood in its history. It had been a cold and snowy winter, followed by an unusually warm March thaw. The Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers had already swelled to the official flood line when a torrential rainstorm added another twenty feet of water. On St. Patrick’s Day, the rivers jumped their banks and submerged the city. Thousands of homes were inundated. Steel mills shut down. Roads were washed out. Trains and trolleys were stranded. Electricity went out for a week, casting the city into darkness, freezing the pumps at its water plants and leaving firemen helpless to fight blazes that raged for days above the sodden horizon. As the rivers receded and the fires subsided, Pennsylvania’s athletic commissioner, D. W. McClelland, called Chester Washington at the Courier. Might he be able to persuade Joe Louis to appear at a benefit for the flood victims? McClelland asked. Washington immediately got Joe on the phone. “I’d like to come over, Ches,” Louis responded, “and I’ll try to make it.”

  But on the morning of the planned benefit, McClelland received a worrisome telegram. The private train compartment that had been reserved to bring Louis, Roxborough, and Julian Black to Pittsburgh was empty. “What’ll we do now?” he asked Washington. “I’ll call Detroit,” Ches replied. It turned out that their guests had had an accident on the way to the station and missed the train. Instead they were making the trip to Pittsburgh by car. Around 6:30 in the evening, they pulled into town in a green Packard. After dinner at the home of Julia Bumry Jones, the society columnist, they proceeded to the Syria Mosque, where hundreds of fans engulfed Louis like the rivers that had swamped the city just weeks before. He signed everything in sight—photos, gloves, even pants pockets—until his hand cramped up.

  When McClelland tried to offer Roxborough reimbursement, the manager waved him off, telling him to consider the visit a gift to the people of Pittsburgh. Before leaving town, the Louis party paid their respects to Gus Greenlee at the Crawford Grill, confirming the status of the redheaded racketeer as the King of the Hill and of the Grill as one of the top black nightspots west of Harlem. “Veni, vidi vici!” Washington declared in a gushing column describing the visit.

  By now, Washington had grown so close to Louis, and so influenced by his special access, that he refused to believe the talk that Joe wasn’t training hard enough for the Schmeling fight. Ed Sullivan, the columnist and future TV variety show host, had given the fighter a book on golf, and other sportswriters noticed that Louis was suddenly sneaking off for long rounds at a course near his training facility in New Jersey. With his new bride—Marva Trotter, a stenographer he had married before the Max Baer fight—home at their new apartment in Chicago, there were also rumors that Louis was consorting with comely showgirls who were part of the curious crowd buzzing around the training camp. Washington returned there to try to reassure Courier readers. “JOE IN TIP TOP CONDITION—CHES,” read one headline. Week after week, he filed accounts of impressive sparring sessions, confident assurances from Chappie Blackburn, and predictions of why it would be “Louis Before the Fifth” for the 10-to-1 favorite.

  Washington liked to compare Joe to a panther, and in one column he explained why cats are better fighters than dogs, because of their ability to attack from all angles. “Just like a cat beats a dog, the panther-like Louis will lick Max Schmeling!” he wrote on the eve of the fight, as thousands of Negroes arrived in New York City aboard trains and buses from across America, filling the hotels of Harlem. “Joe’s left is as disturbing as a taxicab meter to a college boy,” Washington wrote. “It clicks on and on, like an electronic clock that will never stop . . . . When the right lands solidly, the foe usually has a right to sing the blues. Because the right plays such a tune on the face and body that the opponent feels like singing, ‘I Just Couldn’t Take It, Baby.’ ”

  Yet by the end of Joe’s first encounter with Max Schmeling, at Yankee Stadium on June 19, 1936, it was legions of Louis fans who were singing the blues. The thirty-year-old German had trained hard for his younger opponent, and it showed. He got to Joe with a right cross in the second round, and knocked him down with another in the fourth, the first time Louis had gone to the mat as a pro. From then on, Louis seemed disorientated, unable to elude Schmeling’s jabs or land solid blows of his own. By the twelfth round, Louis could barely see out of one eye. Schmeling pounded him with two rights to the body and the jaw that put him down for the count. From Harlem to the Hill, from the Deep South to the Far West, black America went into mourning. “I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands,” poet Langston Hughes recalled. “All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

  After the fight, Washington went to the Yankee Stadium dressing room and found Louis with his blood-streaked head in his hands. He accompanied the fi
ghter and his entourage back to their hotel and helped apply an ice pack to Joe’s swollen jaw. Ches tried to console him, to tell him that he would “come back smarter and better than ever before,” but Joe was like a brokenhearted kid. “I’m not worried about myself,” he said somberly, “but I’m sorry that I let down all those folks who were for me.”

  Washington was aching, too, but he was also embarrassed. In their own way, he and the Courier had also let down their readers, with their overconfident predictions. Less starstruck coverage of their hero in the pages of the rival Chicago Defender was making them look like shills. To prove that the Courier was truly “the Joe Louis paper,” they would have to be honest about their man’s poor performance. In his next column, Washington faulted Louis for not heeding Chappie Blackburn, who had warned him about Schmeling’s right and told him to circle away from it.

  Bill Nunn was even tougher in a piece that he stayed up to write on the night of the fight. “I confess that I’m still groggy, Joe, but I do want so hard to try and be fair,” Nunn wrote. “I know that my people—and a lot ’em can’t take it—are going to be searching both Heaven and Hades for an alibi. I know what they’re going to say. They’re going to talk about dope—and a fix—about ‘wise money’—about this and about that. But you know, Joe—and so do I—that you were beaten by a man who was your mental superior within that hempen arena tonight. Tonight, Joe . . . you were beaten by a Better Man.”

  • • •

  AT THAT MOMENT, EVERYONE assumed that Louis had also lost his shot at the title, and that Schmeling would get the next chance to fight Jim Braddock, the reigning champ. Yet what followed was a six-month standoff that ended with the announcement that it was Louis, not Schmeling, who would take on Braddock first. In “Ches Sez,” Washington attributed the turn of events to “Economics, Liberality and Popularity.” In a sign that attitudes toward Negroes were improving, he wrote, calls for a Louis challenge had come from Americans of all races. Washington praised more than a half dozen white newspapers for speaking up in favor of a Louis-Braddock bout. Most of all, he credited the power of cold hard cash. “While it is true that Schmeling deserves a shot at the title,” he wrote, “it is also true that all parties concerned are likely to make more money under the new setup for the heavyweight championship merry-go-round.”

  That was an understatement. The reality was that Louis had been the beneficiary of one of the most cynical deals in the shady annals of boxing. By all rights, Schmeling did deserve a shot at the title, and Madison Square Garden, which had a contract to promote the next championship bout, had supported him. But almost everyone in the fight game thought that Schmeling could take Braddock, the “Cinderella Man” whom they considered lucky to have beaten Max Baer. If that happened, there was loud talk that Hitler would refuse to let Louis take on Schmeling again.

  At the same time, Braddock knew that he could expect a much fatter gate if he fought Louis. And his manager, Joe Gould, figured that he had Mike Jacobs, Joe’s promoter, in a corner. So Gould offered to let Louis cut in line in front of Schmeling in exchange for 10 percent of Jacobs’s profits for the next ten years—including whatever he might make from future Louis fights if Joe won the title. Once in cahoots, Jacobs and Gould conspired to fend off a legal challenge from Madison Square Garden and to drum up threats of anti-Nazi protests if a Braddock-Schmeling fight went forward.

  Whatever scheming was involved, Louis didn’t want to blow his chance this time. As the Braddock fight approached, he went to train in the woods of Kenosha, Wisconsin, far from the temptations that lurked around his New Jersey camp. Ches Washington tagged along and recorded his every move. No detail of Joe’s grueling workout routine or evening relaxation ritual was too small to share. (At night, Joe liked to play badminton and organize sing-alongs of “Dedicated to You,” his favorite ballad.) And no omen of victory was too distant to invoke. (In 1758, Ches reminded Courier readers, another Braddock—General Edward Braddock, the British commander of the American colonies before the Revolutionary War—had met his doom at the hands of soldiers fighting for France’s “King Louis” at the Battle of Fort Duquesne, the site where the city of Pittsburgh was founded shortly afterward.)

  On Tuesday, June 22, 1937, Ches Washington, Bill Nunn, and Robert L. Vann were at ringside for the title bout at Comiskey Park in Chicago. After suffering an early knockdown, Louis patiently peppered Braddock for seven rounds, then knocked him cold with a brutal left-right combination in the eighth round. As the announcer lifted Joe’s arm in victory, the crowd went wild. The Courier men joined the deafening roar, then rushed home to assemble the special edition they had dreamed of for three years, since their hero’s first trip to Pittsburgh. Rather than wait until Saturday, the usual printing day, the Courier editors went to press the next day, on Wednesday, so they could have the paper in the hands of readers across the country by the weekend. “The King is dead, long live the King!” proclaimed Washingon’s front-page story. In a celebratory ode entitled “Our Champ,” the editors captured the emotion felt by millions of Negroes who danced in the streets of Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and so many other cities and towns that night, overjoyed to see one of their own, a black man, so decisively disprove notions of black shiftlessness and corruptibility:

  In days of old,

  When men were bold,

  They had no foe

  Like Bomber Joe

  He clouted up

  The Fistic path—

  And dealt his cup

  Of Fistic wrath.

  His eyes were set

  Upon his goal—

  He never bet

  Away his soul.

  He courted fame

  And power, too;

  But stayed the same

  To me and you.

  And now he’s won

  He’s broken camp.

  His task is done—

  He’s now OUR CHAMP!

  The next day, the new champ dodged hundreds of reporters who were begging to talk to him by spending the day looking after John Roxborough, who was ill, at the fighter’s apartment on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. But in the afternoon, he invited Ches Washington over and offered him an exclusive account of the title bout. Louis admitted that the early Braddock barrage that put him on the mat in the first round—and threw a scare into his fans—was a “clean knockdown.” But he shook it off and listened to Chappie Blackburn’s advice to take his time. “Jes be careful, Joe,” the trainer told him. “Just wait for your chance. You got fifteen rounds if you need ’em.”

  By the fourth, Louis told Washington, he could feel Braddock weakening. In the fifth, he hit him with a left to the midsection that “knocked all the wind out of him.” Finally in the eighth, another left to the body made Braddock lower his guard and “left the jaw wide open,” Joe recalled. Seizing the chance for a “payoff punch,” Louis reared back and threw the hardest right he could. Braddock fell to the canvas and Joe walked away, knowing that the fight was over.

  Louis had finally earned the name that Blackburn and Roxborough called him in private—“Champ.” But he told Washington that he wasn’t satisfied. As far as he was concerned, he wouldn’t deserve the title until he avenged his loss to Max Schmeling. Praising the valiant Irishman he had just beaten, he offered a few choice words about his German nemesis. “There was never a gamer fighter than Braddock,” Louis said. “He’s a tougher fellow than Schmeling.” How did it feel to be champion? Washington asked. “I don’t feel any different,” Joe replied. “But I do want to beat Schmeling.”

  The following New Year’s Day, after defending his new title several times, Louis invited Washington to Detroit and declared his resolution for 1938. “I’m going to beat Schmeling if I fight him this year,” Joe vowed as the two dined at the Brown Bomber Chicken Shack, a restaurant opened with the champ’s winnings. But this time, Louis had another motive for giving his favorite reporter a private audience. The week before Christmas, Joe had been spotted enjoying the company of sever
al beauties at a nightclub in Harlem while his wife, Marva, was home in Chicago. Walter Winchell, the syndicated gossip columnist, had described the champ as “contributing to the hilarity of the Uptown House on West 134th Street.” Winchell went on to report that “insiders of the sports world will wager anything that the Louises are definitely apart.” So it was no accident that when he arrived in Detroit, Ches found Joe and Marva reunited, sharing the holidays with Joe’s mother, Lillie. “There’s nothing to it!” the fighter told Washington about the latest reports of his wandering eye, a response that the watchful guardian of Louis’s wholesome image was only too happy to repeat on the front page of the Courier.

  Soon a date for the second Louis-Schmeling fight was set—June 22—and as it approached the political symbolism surrounding it continued to build. When the rivals had met two years earlier, Adolf Hitler had only begun to make good on his expansionist bluster by remilitarizing the Rhineland. Since then, Hitler had formed alliances with the Fascist regimes in Spain, Italy, and Japan and declared Germany’s right to Lebensraum. By March 1938, Nazi troops had occupied Austria and incited demands for the surrender of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. Across America, Negroes burned with memories of the disrespectful treatment of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics, and Jews rallied to Louis as Hitler’s anti-Semitic designs grew more ominous. As Joe would put it in his memoir: “The whole world was looking to this fight . . . . Germany was tearing up Europe, and we were hearing about the concentration camps for Jews. A lot of Americans had family in Europe and they were afraid for their people’s lives. Schmeling represented everything that Americans disliked and they wanted him beat and beat good.”