Smoketown Page 4
Louis had his own reasons to want to beat Schmeling soundly. He hadn’t forgotten the “tech” the German had thrown in round five of the first fight—boxer talk for a dirty punch landed after the bell. While reading the comics and sports pages one day, Joe had also come across a story from Germany in which Schmeling bragged about why he would win. He was in the best shape of his life, Schmeling boasted, and Louis feared him because he had discovered his weakness. What Max didn’t know was that Joe and Chappie had figured out the weakness, too. In the first bout, Louis had dropped his left too often, opening himself up to Schmeling’s right. Since then, Chappie had drilled Joe on keeping his left glove high at all times—all jabs, no hooks. They were sure that if the German came looking for that chink in his armor again, he wouldn’t find it.
On the day of the fight, Louis was as antsy as a caged cat. In the morning, he drove into New York from Pompton Plains for the weigh-in, but he barely spoke and remained poker-faced throughout the staged ritual. In his dressing room, where he usually waited to warm up until several minutes before fight time, he shadowboxed for forty minutes. “Okay, Chappie, I’m ready as a radio,” he said to his trainer as he made his way to the ring. Once inside the ropes, Joe bounced and shuffled to keep loose. The first time he had fought at Yankee Stadium, against Primo Carnera, the boisterous crowd had startled him, but this time he barely noticed what was happening outside the ring.
It was pandemonium. Seventy thousand people rippled out from the VIP seats to the corners of the outfield, jostling to get a better look. “Attaboy, Max!” Schmeling’s backers shouted. “Kill that Nazi, Joe!” answered the Louis crowd. More than a quarter of the spectators were black: Hollywood stars such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; smartly dressed Negro businessmen who had come from Chicago, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Detroit; working men and women who had paid to sit in the cheap seats and cheer on “our Joe.” Looking around, the Courier reporters at ringside counted no fewer than forty other members of the Negro press among hundreds of newsmen from around the world. In Harlem, the streets were choked with vehicles from forty states, including a convoy of two hundred cars from Pittsburgh. Across America, seventy million listeners huddled around radios for the live NBC broadcast.
At last the referee summoned the fighters to the center of the ring. The opening bell clanged. Louis went to work with a burst of left jabs. Schmeling threw a roundhouse right that grazed the champ’s head. The two clutched at mid-ring, trying to land more punches. Then as Schmeling backed away toward the ropes, Louis saw him lower his guard. He drilled a right into the German’s jaw and a second into his midsection. A yelp resembling that of a stuck pig, a sound Joe remembered from his boyhood on an Alabama farm, rose from his opponent’s throat. Suddenly Schmeling was helpless to fend off a furious barrage. Louis could smell fear. The German clung to the ropes to keep from falling. When he pulled away, he shot a panicked look toward his corner. Louis moved in and pounded him to the mat with a savage combination. Schmeling staggered to his feet, but another one-two punch knocked him to one knee. As Max rose again, Joe threw a left and a right to his head and floored him for a third time. A towel appeared in the ring, thrown from Schmeling’s corner. The referee tossed it back, refusing the attempt at surrender. But as the count reached eight, Schmeling was still crawling on the canvas, dazed and wounded, and the ref declared the fight over.
Revenge had taken a total of two minutes and four seconds. Louis had made such short work of Schmeling, in fact, that he needed only a brief rest before he joined the wild celebration that erupted in the streets of New York City and went on through the night. After calling Detroit to speak to his mother, who was so nervous she had gone for a car ride instead of listening to the fight, Joe showered and headed to Harlem. As his car inched through the teeming streets, thousands of revelers applauded him from the sidewalks. On one corner, a man waved a “Joe Louis for President” sign. Finally, Joe reached the apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue where Marva had listened to the bout on the radio with friends. He teased his wife about the $15 bet she had made that it would take him until the fourth round to win. The next morning, Louis went with John Roxborough and Julian Black to the office of Mike Jacobs to pick up his share of the earnings. The check was for $349,288, a third of the million-dollar gate.
“Joe was murderous,” the normally reserved Robert Vann wrote in an ecstatic letter to his wife, Jesse, who was touring Europe with lady friends from Pittsburgh. “If the referee had not stepped between him and the German boy, I am sure a death would have resulted in the ring.” The Courier edition that Vann published several days later was even more jubilant. “JOE KO’S MAX,” proclaimed the paper’s largest headline ever, and four large photographs on the front page and nine more inside re-created the decisive moments of the brief match. “To the poet, there is nothing so rare as a day in June,” Ches Washington waxed poetically, “but for Joe, this magic June night was the night of nights for the bronzed monarch of the rope-circled kingdoms.”
Another Courier author captured the vicarious glee that so many felt in seeing such a fine example of black manhood—strong but dignified, popular yet never servile—obliterate the personification of white supremacism. “It was as if each [black person] had been in that ring himself, as if every man, woman and child of them had dealt destruction with his fists upon the Nordic face of Schmeling and the whole Nazi system he symbolized,” the author wrote. “It was more than the victory of one athlete over another, it was the triumph of a repressed people against the evil forces of racial oppression and discrimination condensed—by chance—into the shape of Max Schmeling.”
For Robert L. Vann, Bill Nunn, and Chester Washington, there was more to celebrate beyond Joe Louis’s victory. In less than four years, their investment in covering his rise had more than doubled the Courier’s circulation, from under 100,000 in 1934 to almost a quarter of a million in 1938. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the scorekeeper of the publishing industry, all but 20,000 of those weekly buyers lived outside Pittsburgh. Across the country, thousands more read the paper as it was passed around homes, barbershops, and beauty salons. The Courier was now by far the most widely read black publication in the land, well ahead of its longtime rival, The Chicago Defender, whose circulation had plummeted from 200,000 in 1925 to as little as 73,000 a decade later. Having established that lead, the Courier would maintain it for the next two decades, through a world war, the integration of Major League Baseball, and the beginning of the civil rights movement.
From its origins as a four-page pamphlet of poetry and local oddities sold only in Pittsburgh, the Courier had grown into a thriving business. It had seventy-two employees in Pittsburgh, twenty-three more in Harlem and other cities across the country, an $80,000 annual payroll, and enough profit to return a dividend to its shareholders. In a letter to a Pittsburgh steel company executive, Vann proudly cited the paper’s contribution to the city’s economy. “We have an investment here of $170,000 and we pay a federal state and city tax, mind you, of close to $10,000 a year,” Vann wrote.
By championing the champion of their people, the colored men and women of Pittsburgh had also confirmed their place at the vanguard of black America. By the late 1930s, they had helped propel a sea change in the allegiance of Negro voters, fielded the two best teams in black baseball, produced musicians who had started to rewrite the language of jazz, and built nightclubs and watering holes so vibrant that the Hill District had come to be known as “little Harlem.” So many influential black cultural and political figures passed through Pittsburgh that the corner of Wylie Avenue and Fullerton Street in the Hill District would come to be known as “the Crossroads of the World.” And with Hitler’s forces on the march in Europe, black Pittsburgh was about to find itself at the center of a national debate over how Negroes should regard the prospect of war and what it would portend for black soldiers in uniform.
How did it happen? How had a community of fewer than a hundred thousand black
people—half of them living on less than two square miles of steep, dusty streets under the soot-filled skies of northern Appalachia—produced a culture of such drive and accomplishment? It’s a story that traced back almost a century, to Pittsburgh’s first Negro settlers before the Civil War, and to a slave boy born in Maryland who grew up to ride the Ohio River wielding a deckhand’s broom and harboring an improbable dream.
Cumberland “Cap” Posey Sr., his wife, Anna, and their home in Homestead, circa 1900.
THE CITY
2
THE NEGRO CARNEGIES
THE BOY’S NAME WAS Cumberland Willis Posey, and a river called out to him from his earliest days. It was the Port Tobacco River, on the southeastern tip of Maryland, stretching out from the town of the same name to the wide Potomac four miles away. In 1858, Cumberland Posey was born seven miles from there, to two slaves who worked for a white family in Charles County. Their names were Alexander Posey and Elizabeth Willis Posey, and they were literate Negroes, Bible readers who attended gatherings of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Although it is not known for sure, it is also likely that they were house slaves, the sort who would have been sent into the town of Port Tobacco to fetch supplies and who might have brought their young son along, to gaze out onto the river and watch the steamboats chugging into the distance.
The boy had faith and ambition in his veins. Cumberland’s mother, who died when he was seven years old, barely experienced Emancipation, but as soon as he had his freedom, his father was ordained as a minister of the AME Church. Four years later, Alexander Posey took his children to Winchester, Virginia, where he became one of the first Negroes to head a congregation of the larger Methodist Episcopal Church. A half century earlier, a Philadelphia Methodist, Bishop Richard Allen, had led the AME schism in protest over the church’s treatment of Negroes, who suffered such indignities as being forced to sit in separate balconies and told they were not good enough to kneel in prayer. But as the Civil War loomed, blacks who had remained in “full connection” with the white Methodists formed their own conference and sought permission to build a church in Winchester. They named it the John Mann Street Chapel, and in 1869 Alexander Posey was appointed its chaplain.
According to church records, Alexander Posey lived for only five more years, riding the circuit of black Methodist congregations up and down the western edge of Virginia. Before he died, however, he must have concluded that his children would face a better future in Ohio, a state that had been on the side of the Union and long a refuge for free Negroes. As Cumberland Posey was entering his teenage years, his father moved him and his two younger siblings to the town of Belpre, on a nook of the Ohio River that had once served as a crossing point for the Underground Railroad. It lay directly across the river from Parkersburg, West Virginia, which was connected to a town south of Winchester by the only passable toll road running across the Allegheny Mountains. There is no record of whom Cumberland lived with in Belpre after his father died, but there is of the job he had secured by the age of nineteen: working for a steamboat operator named Payton sweeping the decks of a riverboat called the Magnolia.
For the young Posey, the boat became a classroom as well as a workplace. When he was finished with his rounds, he would study the two men who presided over the engine room. One was the “assistant engineer,” who fed cords of wood and shovelsful of coal into the furnace, carefully prodding the fuel to maintain an even burn. Occasionally, this man would also climb onto the deck to observe the color and quantity of the cloudy exhaust belching from the smokestack that thrust up from the center of the boat. The other man was the “chief engineer,” who monitored a cluster of round gauges that measured the pressure of the steam in the water tanks heated by the furnace. Behind the gauges, pistons powered by that steam pushed and pulled the axle of a paddle wheel. Alongside the hull, the wheel’s wide buckets gulped and spit out large quaffs of the river, propelling the boat forward.
As Posey observed and asked questions, he came to understand the function of each part of the miraculous mechanism. Like any good boatman, he also began to read the vessel with his other senses. Closing his eyes, he could listen to the symphony of crackling, hissing, thrusting, and lapping, and know what mood the boat was in at any moment, when she was demanding attention and when she was communicating that all was well and that she could be left alone.
Posey set his sights on running the engine room of a steamboat. It was something that no Negro had ever done before, and that many a white man in the trade would have said could never happen. But Posey found a believer in his employer, and with his help he began working toward the goal. First Mr. Payton helped Posey secure a position as an assistant engineer, minding the furnaces on a steamboat called the Striker. A year later, Posey became the first black man ever to receive a chief engineer’s license. A riverboat owner named Stewart Hayes took a chance on him, and he was soon won over by Posey’s fierce work ethic and taciturn, no-nonsense manner.
For the next fourteen years, Posey oversaw the operation of several of Hayes’s vessels. He earned a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year and continued to study the steamboat business, learning everything he could about shipbuilding as well as engine maintenance. As word of his standing spread, he acquired a nickname of respect among Negroes up and down the Ohio River: Captain Posey, or “Cap” for short.
Sometime in his early twenties, Cap Posey had occasion to travel west along the narrow Hocking River to the town of Athens, Ohio, where he fell in love. The object of his affection was Angeline Stevens, a schoolteacher with pale skin, delicate cheekbones, and wise eyes. Her father, Aquilla Stevens, was an illiterate railroad worker and stonecutter. Her mother, Eliza Brackston Stevens, had stayed at home raising eleven children in the community of farmers and laborers where they lived outside of town. But from an early age, “Anna,” as the family called her, showed an appetite for learning. There is evidence that she was the first Negro to graduate from high school in Athens, and that during the graduation ceremony she impressed an overflow crowd at City Hall with a speech entitled “The Visible and the Invisible,” expounding on what she called “the invisible influences by which we are surrounded in life.”
By the age of seventeen, Anna Stevens passed the tests in grammar, arithmetic, and geography required for certification as a teacher in Athens County. She went to work in the county school system, which consisted almost entirely of one-room structures where students from the first to the eighth grade were taught together. Athens didn’t have a large enough Negro population for a separate school, so in many classrooms black children mixed with white students. They sat at the same desks and recitation tables, warmed themselves by the same potbellied stoves, and relieved themselves in the same outhouses. (The Negro students were required to use separate hooks, however, to hang their coats by the schoolhouse doors.) With her upswept hair and calm voice, Anna exuded maturity beyond her years, and she swiftly mastered the art of making her students sit still as she drilled them in lessons from McGuffey’s Readers, Harvey’s Grammar, and Ray’s New Arithmetic.
By twenty, Anna had such a favorable reputation as a teacher that the local newspaper, the Athens Messenger, singled her out for praise as a model of racial achievement. “Progress in the march of events is, in one direction, chronicled in the fact that Miss Anna Stevens, of African lineage, is teaching in the public white school west of Mr. Joseph Herrold’s suburban residence,” the paper reported in 1880. “Miss Stevens has previously taught in York Township and at other points where she has uniformly been highly personally esteemed. As a teacher she possesses rare tact and efficiency and her services in this line have been in wide demand.”
Yet a year later, an event occurred in Athens that showed the limits of that progress. In the wee hours of a November morning, thirty armed white men stormed into the town on horseback. Some moved to surround the church, so no one could sound an alarm from the bell tower. Others forced their way into the home of the sheriff. They o
verpowered him and seized the keys to the town jail, where a mulatto farm hand named Christopher C. Davis was imprisoned. A month earlier, Davis had been arrested for attacking Lucinda Luckey, a fifty-two-year-old white widow. She said that Davis had broken into her house, sexually assaulted her, and struck her on the head with an ax. Now he was awaiting trial, but the men had come to take justice into their own hands. Throwing a noose around the mulatto’s neck, they led him to the South Bridge, where they gave him three minutes to pray before they hung him to death over the river.
After the lynching, many in the small community of Negroes in Athens chose to move elsewhere. Anna was well regarded enough that she likely had little to fear, and she was earning a respectable living, as teachers in that part of Ohio were paid an average of $22 a month and as much as $48 if they had a permanent position. But Anna must have sensed the prospect of a better future when she met the dark, broad-shouldered man who didn’t talk much but had possessed the drive to become a steamboat engineer. When Cap Posey proposed, Anna accepted, and on May 9, 1883, an Athens magistrate joined them in marriage. Soon afterward, she left Athens and followed her husband to a new life in the town of Homestead, just south of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania.
For an ambitious young man in the boating trade, there were many sensible reasons to put down stakes in the Pittsburgh area. The first was geography. For well over a century, the city’s perch at the nexus of three great rivers had made it a logistical prize. During the Seven Years War, the British governor of Virginia had dispatched men to build a fortress at the head of the Ohio River. French forces promptly seized it and renamed it Fort Duquesne. General Edward Braddock, the commander of the British colonial army, led a raid to reclaim the fortress. It ended in a humiliating defeat; Braddock and more than five hundred of his men were killed before his young aide-de-camp, George Washington, organized a hasty retreat. Later another British general, John Forbes, returned with Washington and an army of six thousand and chased away the French. “I have used the freedom of giving your name to Ft. Duquesne,” Forbes wrote to William Pitt the Elder, the leader of Britain’s government, to inform him that he had renamed the stronghold Fort Pitt. A native Scot who had studied in Edinburgh, Forbes took to calling the surrounding area “Pitts-burgh.”