Happy Birthday Joe Louis

Today marks Joe Louis' 100th birthday. Born May 13, 1914, Joe Louis became a symbol of pride for the African American community during the Great Depression. Perhaps Louis' best known fights occurred against the German Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938 respectively. On the surface, Louis' fights with Schmeling pitted American against Germany's expanding war machine. However, even with the apparent clear cut lines of democracy versus tyrannical rule, the Louis-Schmeling fights contained racial overtones in much the same way that Jack Johnson's fight against Jim Jeffries did in 1910.

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

Throughout his writing, Gaines places a huge importance on the presence of Joe Louis in the African American community. In an interview from 2003, Gaines stated, "[Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson] were definitely heroes to African Americans all over the country. There were no Martin Luther Kings at that time or political heroes out there" (Brister 557). Louis and Robinson filled that void. Richard Wright in New Masses even noticed Louis' importance in the African American community after Louis defeated Max Baer in 1935. Wright states, "Yes, unconsciously [African Americans] 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 God Almighty! Yes, by Jesus, it could be done! Didn't Joe do it?" (19)

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.