"Save me, Joe Louis!"

Recalling an execution he read about in Florida, Grant Wiggins thought about the "boy" being dragged to the electric chair. The boys continually screamed, "Please, Joe Louis, help me. Please help me. Help me" (91). Louis never came, and the boy, jolted by the electric current, died. In his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. related the same story, albeit with the gas chamber instead of the electric chair:

More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation.

The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: "Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis..." (129)

Continuing, King states that the boy's helplessness led him to look for someone who cared and he called out to Joe Louis, "[n]ot God, not government, not charitably minded white men, but a Negro who was the world's most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope" (129). This event, however, never actually happened.

In a November 7, 2005 article entiled "Save me, Joe Louis!" for the Los Angeles Times, David Margolick talks about the true story behind this apocryphal anecdote. It turns out that story originated with an article in The Daily Worker that recorded the execution of Allen Foster, a 19 year old North Carolinian charged with the rape of a white woman in 1936.While chained to the chair in the gas chamber, wearing boxing shorts and shivering with cold, Foster did not call out, "Save me, Joe Louis!" Instead, he spoke of sparring with Louis in Birmingham, AL before Louis became famous. Margolick, in Beyond Glory: Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink, mentions that no record indicates that Louis visited Birmingham when Foster claimed that he did and that Foster's mom said her son was "half crazy."    

What does all of this say about the construct of myths and their importance? Obviously Joe Louis held a place in the African American consciousness as I've talked about before. Could that be the reason why The Daily Worker chose to have Foster call out to Louis before his execution? Why does Gaines include a form of this story in A Lesson before Dying? Is it because the community saw Louis as a hero and vicariously defeated oppression when he won? All of these are questions worth thinking about and exploring. As usual, post comments below.



Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson before Dying. New York:Vintage Books, 1993. Print.
King Jr, Martin Luther. Why We Can't Wait. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. Print.

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.