“Had you been in Harlem Wednesday night,” the Courier reported afterward, “you might have thought another World War had just ended. Joy was simply unconfined.” “There never was a Harlem like the Harlem of Wednesday night,” Ben Davis, Jr., wrote in the Daily Worker. “Take a dozen Harlem Christmases, a score of New Year’s Eves, a bushel of July 4ths and maybe—yes, maybe—you get a faint glimpse of the idea.” “They wanted to make a noise comparable to the happiness bubbling in their hearts, but they were poor and had nothing,” Richard Wright later explained. “So they went to the garbage pails and got tin cans; they went to their kitchens and got tin pots, pans, washboards, wooden boxes, and took possession of the streets.” Private cars cruised, streaming banners. THE BLACK RACE IS SUPREME TONIGHT, one said.
By one estimate, 500,000 people crowded Harlem’s streets. All traffic on Seventh Avenue between 116th and 145th streets—“their Broadway,” Valentine called it—halted, immobilized by pedestrians, snake-dancers, and stranded cars; the “quick tattoo” of blowouts from tires crushing into broken glass sounded like firecrackers in the night air. People hopped on roofs and running boards until everything that moved “looked like clusters of black ripe grapes.” A dozen sets of boys carried mock stretchers bearing pseudo-Schmelings; whenever an ambulance passed, people wondered whether the real thing was inside. Soapbox speakers and signs nominated Louis for mayor of Harlem, Congress, president of the United States. “The Lord is a good Man to take care of us this way,” one elderly black woman told another. Celebrants had that indescribable feeling of being surrounded by thousands of strangers who felt exactly as they did. “I remember for a while I wasn’t mad at any white person,” one recalled. Harlem’s nightclubs—the Big Apple, Small’s Paradise, Brittwood’s, the Elks, the Rendezvous, the Horseshoe, Dickie Wells’s, the Savoy Ballroom (Dizzy Gillespie was playing there)—were all bulging, fed by rumors that Louis would stop at any or all of them. Stepin Fetchit glided up Seventh Avenue in a long, gleaming Dusenberg.
Everywhere were references to the regime with which Schmeling had been tagged. It was on placards: LOUIS WINS, HITLER WEEPS. It was in a newsboy’s chant: “Read about the big fight! Hitler committed suicide!” And in all the mock Nazi salutes: “Seventh Ave. looked for a while like a weird burlesque of the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin—staggering, yelling, singing, jumping, dancing, hugging men and women, jutting out their hands to one another,” Elliot Arnold wrote in the World-Telegram. To the few whites in Harlem that night, and even to some blacks, there was menace in the air. The police rescued eight hysterical white women from a bus enveloped by merrymakers. The Irish cabdriver who ferried a black reporter from the stadium to Harlem pulled his cap down to hide his face and race, but soon people were crawling all over his car and someone kicked in his windshield. A white reporter from Milwaukee described how sixteen blacks hung from his cab until a policeman took out his nightstick to “clear off the excess baggage.” Other white reporters huddled in the Theresa Hotel. Ralph Matthews of the Afro-American called the frenzy “the type of stuff from which dictatorships are created,” adding: “Going around punching everyone in the nose who happens to be of a different race … is not a legitimate expression of race pride.”
Schmeling was only one of the casualties that night. A South Carolina man who had hitched a ride to the fight went around shouting “Joe Louis! Joe Louis!” Then he dropped dead. A Brooklyn man was hurt when he drove his fist through two windshields. One policeman was knocked off his horse by a flying garbage can cover; a milk bottle hit another, while a third was struck by a large hunk of wood. At 130th Street and Seventh Avenue, police sprayed the crowd with a fire hose. “I bet all of ’em are on relief but Joe Louis,” one officer muttered. Sure, cars were careening around the corner of Seventh Avenue and 135th Street, a black paper conceded, but “Joe Louis doesn’t knock out Max Schmeling in less than a round every night.” A German paper reported “repeated wild shooting like in the jungle,” but there was really nothing of the sort. The Herald Tribune commended Harlem on its civility.
The celebrations went on for hours. “There wasn’t no nighttime then,” one participant recalled. Meantime, in midtown, at the Stork Club, Tunney, Hemingway, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Winchell, and Rice sat around discussing what they’d just seen. Suddenly, Tunney boasted of not just visiting Louis in his camp but helping to devise the winning strategy. Nearby, at Jimmy Braddock’s restaurant, Donovan defended the kidney punch. Dempsey would have lasted no longer against Louis than Schmeling had, he later said, and John L. Sullivan not even as long. But Yorkville’s streets, the Post noted, were “a well of weltschmerzen.” “I wonder what they think of Max now in the old country,” someone in Café Mozart remarked glumly. “He better not go home right away.” Around twenty minutes past midnight, Louis reached the apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue where Marva was staying. She played a game of hide-and-seek with him before she appeared. “I made it as quick as possible, honey,” he told her. While many of the others quaffed champagne, Louis contented himself with ginger ale and a quart of ice cream—half vanilla, half chocolate. Then he and Marva went to bed. There, at least, Louis was down for the count.
Outside, things didn’t quiet down until noon the following day, and even then, knots of people still gathered to discuss the fight. Or fights: they talked about the 1936 fight, too, more convinced than ever now that Louis had been doped. The Baltimore Afro-American suggested facetiously that this time, Schmeling might have been, too. Along Lenox Avenue, young bootblacks offered the “Joe Louis shine”: it took only two minutes and four seconds. The next morning Louis slept in, then sent out for the papers. For him it was the dawn of a new day, and a new era. “Joe is on top of the proverbial heap today,” one black columnist wrote. “On top of a heap higher than any one he ever occupied before. It amounts to a throne.”
The fight, the Courier declared, had generated the greatest show of Negro unity America had ever seen. Certainly anyone visiting any black neighborhood in the United States immediately afterward would have seen many of the same things. In Detroit, where black leaders were confident enough to have applied for a parade permit two weeks earlier, twenty thousand people marched thirty blocks into Paradise Valley, chanting, “Joe knocked old Hitler cold.” Louis’s mother had not listened to the fight, learning the outcome from a newsboy selling extras; by the time she’d returned home, a jubilant mob awaited her. She hadn’t been worried, she explained; she knew Joe was going to win because he’d told her so. A reporter turned on her police siren to get through the mob on Chicago’s South Side. “Louder! Louder!” a woman screamed at her. “Don’ yo’all know Joe Louis won?”
In Philadelphia, “police making an attempt to keep the crowd orderly finally gave up, folded their arms and for once acted like human beings,” reported the local black paper. What followed was “an inter-racial sight on South Street that will long be remembered”: Negroes and Jews celebrating together, blasting car horns, snake-dancing on the streets. In Baltimore, Russell Baker watched as newly emboldened blacks marched into the previously forbidden white territory of Lombard Street. In Washington, D.C., crowds on U Street looked on as two men carried a huge placard of Schmeling, topped by a dead cat. “Little children rushed by my house shouting ‘Joe Louis won!’” the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune wrote. “Grandmothers sitting on the doorsteps smiled and praised the Lord.” In Buffalo, even the man whose placard shouted I’M THE SUCKER THAT BET ON SCHMELING had himself a good time. In Indianapolis, “thousands of Negroes and many Jews paraded back and forth along the streets of the Harlem of Indiana.” In Kansas City, more than twenty thousand fans gathered along Eighteenth Street. “On the grass on the Paradeway three children lay on their stomachs, legs kicking in the air, shouting in unison, ‘Joe Louis! Joe Louis!’—a perfect picture of hero worship.” A Milwaukee man was fined a dollar for blowing his horn for two blocks. In Cincinnati, “the mellow voice of a Negro Paul Revere” spread word that Louis had won. In Los Angeles,
celebrants along Central Avenue used “plain old cheap” toilet paper instead of more expensive confetti; times, after all, were tough. “Boy, am I glad Joe Louis doesn’t fight every night in the week,” said a Newark policeman monitoring the wild celebrations there.
Until the police dispersed them, two hundred people paraded through the streets of Chattanooga, proclaiming Louis’s victory. In Memphis, a young black man on Beale Street cried out, “To de ring, to de ropes, to de flo!” and crowds took up the chant. Two days later, with neither fanfare nor opposition this time from the local censorship board, fight films opened at local theaters. Blacks in Mobile snake-danced up and down Davis Avenue to the tune of nickel pianos and the beat of wooden paddles pounding fifty-pound cans of lard. In Louis’s birthplace, the auditorium of the local black high school hosted a “Joe Louis ball.” While his fellow patients were disappointed over the quick finish, Monroe Barrow was pleased. “That’s my little Joe,” he said as the fight ended. He then asked his doctor how much his son had just earned. At least $300,000, he was told. “That boy must be worth a million dollars now, isn’t he?” Barrow asked. “Probably more,” the doctor replied. “That’s fine,” Barrow declared. “If Joe would come for me I’d be glad to go home with him.”
In Panama, blacks “began to scream in all directions” once the outcome became clear. The Defender’s man in Paris arrived in Montmartre an hour after the fight and found “joy-mad Race members kissing everyone who came within their reach.” When a group of German-Jewish refugees arrived, they “automatically became part of the wild rejoicing.” Some gold miners in British Guiana made plans to send Louis a gold medal studded with diamonds. In Kingston, Jamaica, word of the sensational outcome threatened to disrupt the speech that Alexander Busta-mante, a future prime minister, was giving to workers, until he told them their battle was as great as Joe Louis’s. “The gathering thereupon cheered him anew and he completed his address enjoying undivided attention,” the local paper reported.
Some celebrations got out of hand. With all the debris scattered about, it was as if a cyclone had hit black St. Louis. “Throwing garbage, tin containers, obstructing traffic, jamming the pathways, throwing at cars containing passengers of der Maxie’s hue, and even wrecking an officer of the law on his motorcycle. They called it a Joe Louis celebration,” said the Atlanta Daily World about events there. In Cleveland, two hundred policemen with tear gas tangled with crowds; a fifteen-year-old boy was shot dead, fourteen streetcars were taken out of service, and looting was reported. Newark witnessed “hugging and street fighting, kissing and knifings.” Police clubbed demonstrators in Augusta, Georgia. In Durham, North Carolina, blacks attacked whites driving through their neighborhoods. And in Charlotte, a black man driving on the wrong side of the street, his head stuck out of the window as he shouted “Where is Max Schmeling?” struck a white woman. But some of the worst violence occurred in Gary, Indiana, where a white woman was killed, and a black man was subsequently convicted of murdering her.* Police in Roanoke attacked black celebrants on Henry Street with tear-gas bombs and guns, seriously injuring several. “Henry Street is the only place where the black people can go to congregate,” a black lawyer complained, and “whenever Joe Louis has a fight, the negroes are going to celebrate.” Rioting broke out in black Richmond when a white motorist forced his way through the “teeming mass of joyful humanity” on Second Street. In the Arizona State Penitentiary in Florence, a racial free-for-all followed the fight, with white inmates stabbing one black prisoner to death and severely beating another.
Black papers were both defiant and embarrassed by the outbursts, sometimes on the same page. “When colored people are filling streets and having their own celebration in their own community, it is no time for Nazi-minded sympathizers to interfere,” the Afro-American editorialized. “Anybody who doesn’t like to see us have a little innocent fun can stay at home.” But an Afro columnist blamed more primitive southern blacks, along with West Indians and followers of Marcus Garvey, for the lawlessness. Another black paper sounded a single sad note. “The tragic aspect of the whole affair is that all the people who have died since that fateful night two years ago when Max put Joe to sleep went to their graves believing that maybe Max really was the champion after all,” it said.
Early in the afternoon of the day after the fight, 350 schoolchildren, most of them black, crowded outside the building where Louis was staying. “We want Joe!” they chanted. “We want Joe!” Louis was mobbed as he left for the Hippodrome, where he collected his paycheck of $349,288.40. It was his share of a gate which, with $75,000 thrown in for radio and movie rights, eked past the magic million-dollar mark. Schmeling’s take was $174,644. Louis reenacted for reporters the now-famous kidney punch, and took another round of questions. Later, at Braddock’s restaurant, he said he had knocked Schmeling out so quickly because he was scared—“I remembered my first fight with him”—and gently second-guessed the referee for pulling him off Schmeling when the German was on the ropes. Murray Lewin of the Mirror, who had grabbed the towel Machon had thrown into the ring, now cut it into squares and had Louis scribble his name on each piece.*
Louis was not present when the fight film was screened that afternoon. For the writers, the footage promised to clarify a host of issues lost in the blur of events, like the number of knockdowns, the order of the punches, and the points at which Donovan began counts. Given the film’s brevity—one trade publication said it would be better sold as a slide—the entire fight would be shown in slow motion, and shown repeatedly from several angles, simply to stretch things out. The twelfth round of the first fight was tacked on for additional padding, as was an interview with Donovan. Still, the film lasted only seventeen minutes. Close inspection confirmed that the shots to the head had crushed Schmeling before the kidney blow was delivered. Tunney felt that for the sake of his soul and his self-respect, Schmeling shouldn’t see it at all.
The films were shown widely everywhere in the United States except the South. And while they drew well on opening day, they were a bust after that. The kidney punch didn’t look as dramatic as it had actually been, complained Variety, nor was Schmeling’s injury the hoped-for lure; the film’s “feminine draw is nil,” it said. Even in black theaters, it did badly. “The one round isn’t giving the fans enough action for their money,” the Philadelphia Tribune reported. But to other blacks, it was something to savor. Vernon Jarrett of the Chicago Tribune recalled how his schoolteacher father, whom Jack Johnson had seemingly forever soured on prizefighting, put down his money at a segregated theater in his Tennessee town and then, fighting off his rheumatism, climbed the stairs to the buzzard’s roost to bask in the glory. For Patsy Booker, a seventy-eight-year-old black woman in Los Angeles, the film made more of an impression: it was the first motion picture she’d ever seen.
Roughly twenty-four hours after the fight, Louis boarded a Chicago-bound train at Grand Central. A huge crowd saw him and Marva off. “The champ hasn’t got a scratch on his perfect body!” the Amsterdam News marveled. He was still en route when the boxing writers gathered at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant. “I think Louis’ll be the champion for at least ten more years and maybe until 1950,” Dempsey said. “The guy who’ll beat Louis is still playing marbles somewhere.” The bout with Schmeling, Roxborough pointed out, was Louis’s first as “a full-fledged man.” “Great as you may think Joe is, you have not seen him at his peak,” he said. “A year, or even two years, from now, and he’ll be the best fighter of all time—if only we can find opposition for him.” And that was a real problem. There was something almost poignant about Louis’s situation. As a matter of money, drama, and sheer artistry, how could he ever top what he had just done? A rematch with Max Baer was on tap, but no one could get very excited about that. Some blacks worried that the competitive vacuum in the heavyweight division left it ripe for manipulation, and urged Louis to retire while he was still pristine. Eleanor Roosevelt, meanwhile, worried about Louis’s finances. “We congrat
ulate him,” she wrote a few days after the fight, “and hope that he has some wise member of his family who takes his money and puts it away, so that when he no longer has any opponents he will be able to do something else to make life interesting and pleasant.”
The Louises were received rapturously in Chicago. Louis met with Mayor Kelly and took over the city for a few minutes. He watched a Negro League doubleheader between the Chicago American Giants and the Birmingham Black Barons, and between games he and Jesse Owens competed in a sixty-yard race. (Owens conveniently tripped and fell down at the start and Louis beat him to the tape.) But plans to take the Queen Mary to Europe with the John Roxboroughs and the Julian Blacks were scrubbed, ostensibly for reasons of safety. “The Nazis stacked their political all on the outcome of the fight, and it is now feared that if Joe had gone … his life might have been endangered by some Nazi secret agent,” the Amsterdam News reported.
The day after the fight, John Kieran of the Times wrote that when all was said and done, it had signified absolutely nothing. Of course, black commentators saw things very differently. For Frank Marshall Davis of the Associated Negro Press, it was a victory for fourteen million black Americans. “It was as if each had been in that ring himself, as if every man, woman and child of them had dealt destruction with his fists upon the Nordic race of Schmeling and the whole Nazi system he symbolized,” he wrote. “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 many, it hadn’t mattered how long the fight lasted, only how decisively, incontrovertibly, and even how brutally it ended. That was why, Lem Graves, Jr., wrote in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, few complained afterward of being cheated. The Philadelphia Independent claimed that Louis had created more goodwill for American blacks than anything since the Civil War.
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