President Jimmy Carter, in his autobiography An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of A Rural Childhood (2001), writes that the Louis-Schmeling fights contained racial tensions: "For our community, this fight [the 1938 one] had heavy racial overtones with almost unanimous support at our all-white school for the European over the American" (32). In the early drafts of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Gaines shows these tensions in the interactions that occur between Cajuns and African Americans that take place after each of the Louis-Schmeling fights and the Louis-Farr fight in 1937.
These note cards on Joe Louis
can be found in Box 11-Folder 41
|
Taking a look in the archives, one finds numerous notes on Joe Louis and writings about him and Jackie Robinson. For Gaines, Louis plays an important role in the progress of African American civil rights in the the twentieth century. As he stated in 2003, and throughout his career, Louis and Robinson appeared at a time when America did not have someone like Martin Luther King Jr. With that said, happy birthday, Joe Louis.
Brister, Rose Anne. "The Last Regionalist? An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines." Callaloo 26.3, 2003. 549-564. Print.
Carter, Jimmy. An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of A Rural Childhood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Print.
Wright, Richard. "Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite." New Masses 8 October 1935: 18-19. Print.
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