A boxing ring on the infield of Yankee Stadium. A muggy June night. Cigarette smoke clutches the air. In one corner, Joe Louis, the American and heavyweight champion of the world, dances and jabs the air in anticipation. Sweat glistens his brown face. He wears a flat expression, but his eyes flash anxious and knowing of the weight upon him.
In the opposite corner, Max Schmeling, the German challenger, stares hard at the American champion. Underneath his bushy, black eyebrows, Schmeling’s gaze betrays fear. His arms hang at his sides. The past shifts under his feet.
80,000 ticket holders have paid as much as $30 to watch this heavyweight bout on June 22, 1938. They include Hollywood dignitaries such as Clark Gable and Gregory Peck, political emissaries from the American President’s sons to the German ambassador. From ringside, broadcaster Clem McCarthy tells the NBC radio audience of over 70 million, “This is the greatest fight of our generation.”
There is more than a heavyweight title at stake. That night, in that ring, the free world squares off against tyranny. Equality rages against racism. They wait for the bell. . . .
Joe Louis Barrow, the son of a poor Alabama cotton-picker, knew Black America hailed him as its Messiah. In a biography entitled “Joe Louis, Man and Super-Fighter” and published in 1936, New York Sun writer Ed Van Every hailed Louis as the “Black Moses.” “It is, and not extravagant to set down, as though the finger of God had singled this youth out for purposes of His own.”
If he won, every black won. But “If Joe lost, we were back in slavery and beyond help,” Maya Angelou writers in her memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” “It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings.”
The first time Louis and Schmeling fought, two years earlier on June 19, 1936, Louis was 22 years old and undefeated in 27 fights. He had knocked out an astounding 23 opponents. No one had knocked him down. Sportswriters gushed about his strength, speed and potential. Louis had not yet fought for the heavyweight title, but they considered it his for the taking. They didn’t think anyone could beat him, least of all Max Schmeling.
Schmeling had been the heavyweight champion from 1930-32, but many considered the 30-year-old German past his prime in 1936. He fought Louis to establish himself as a worthy contender. Louis stood an 8-1 favorite on the night of the first fight. No one figured Schmeling would last past the fifth round.
Yet, in his methodical review of film from Louis’s previous fights, Schmeling had detected an Achilles’ heel. When Louis threw his short, dangerous left hooks, often in jackrabbit succession, he dropped his left hand, exposing that side of his face–if only for an instant–to a straight right, which happened to be Schmeling’s best punch.
After losing the first two rounds, Schmeling saw the opening he’d been waiting for and connected with a hard right to the chin. In the fourth, Schmeling caught Louis with another right, and, for the first time in his boxing career, Louis fell to the canvas. Schmeling pummeled Louis for eight more rounds. Louis, dazed and confused, refused to quit. His mother could not endure the beating. “Don’t let him kill my boy, Dear Lord,” she cried out.
In the twelfth round of the scheduled 15-round fight, Schmeling landed Louis on the ropes with a series of rights. Louis’s arms drooped. Schmeling crushed another right. Louis reeled, sank to his knees and clutched the rope for an instant before collapsing to the canvas. Schmeling had done what no mortal had been able to do; he had defeated the undefeatable Louis. Schmeling raised his arms and leapt into the air.
Louis slumped afterward in his dressing room, the left side of his face swollen the size of a softball. He telephoned his mother to tell her he was all right, but he felt he had let down his family and his race. He later wrote in his autobiography, “I was sitting on the dressing table and crying like I don’t think I ever did before. It seemed at that moment that I would just die.”
Louis vowed he would win the heavyweight title–which he did the following year–but said he would never consider himself the true champion until he beat Schmeling.
Meanwhile, Germany rejoiced. German dictator Adolf Hitler had not wanted Schmeling to fight Louis. He feared that the black man would whip the white German and render the dictator’s racial theories foolish. After Schmeling’s surprise victory, Hitler telegraphed the boxer: “Most cordial felicitations on your splendid victory.”
The Nazi weekly journal Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) proclaimed: “Schmeling’s victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race.”
Hitler welcomed Schmeling home along with his family and friends in a reception at the Reich Chancellory, where they watched the film of the fight. Hitler slapped his thigh whenever Schmeling landed a punch. He had the film released as a feature –“Max Schmeling’s Victory–A German Victory”–that ran for weeks throughout Germany.
Back in America, the German fighter was branded a Nazi by association. By 1938, Hitler was at the height of his popularity. He had annexed Austria and, even though the outbreak of World War II was still a year away, the world watched uneasily. American Jewish groups had opposed the first Louis-Schmeling fight; they protested more adamantly the rematch two years later.
Even though Schmeling did not support Hitler’s theories on a master race, he came to represent Hitler’s ideals. ”Max had gotten a hero’s sendoff in Germany, which included a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Therefore, Max Schmeling was Nazi Germany, the looming threat of death and fascism,” the New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte observed in his Louis biography.
In the rematch, America looked to Louis to score a symbolic victory for the free world. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned the American boxer to the White House, squeezed his arm and said, “Joe, we’re depending on those muscles for America.”
America wanted to embrace Louis as its champion of democracy, but whites squirmed in the arms of a black man. This was, after all, an age when whites still guarded their prejudices behind legislated segregation. They would not let Louis vote. They would not let him share the drinking fountains, sleep in the same hotels, ride in the front of the bus or sit at the same lunch counter. They would not let his children attend the same schools as theirs.
The press frequently relied on stereotypes to define Louis, referring to him as a “savage animal,” a “sleepy-eyed southern darkie,” even “the Pet Pickaninny”; comparing him to a “one-celled beastie of the mire-and-steaming-ooze period”; and depicting him in cartoons with oversized lips and broken dialect. Whites couldn’t get past the fact Louis was black.
America faced a dilemma. “The fight represented a time when America had to try to maintain its long-standing tradition of being God’s city set on a hill, but at the same time maintain its other long-standing tradition that black people should have no right in this holy empire,” says Paul Griffin, Ph.D, professor of religion and director of African American Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.
Joe Louis shadowboxed for 30 minutes in his dressing room–three times the length of his usual routine. Louis had vowed he would win the heavyweight title–which he did the following year–but said he would never consider himself the true champion until he beat Schmeling. Not one to talk trash, Louis told the New York Daily Mirror, “I’m out for revenge. . . . I’ll give him (Schmeling) enough to remember me for life and make him hang up his gloves for all time.”
Louis was the 2-1 favorite, but many who’d witnessed the first fight expected Schmeling to fulfill his long-awaited goal of recapturing the heavyweight title. “There are certain gifts that the Negro race, as a race, and Louis, as an individual, have as a heritage,” Bill Corum wrote in the New York Journal and American. “The ability carefully to work out a methodical plan and adhere to it, is not among them. That’s for Schmeling.”
In fact, Louis had studied films of their first meeting and noted that Schmeling needed to set himself before throwing his devastating right. He planned to pressure Schmeling, back him up and take away that opportunity. Louis draped a blue silk robe over his flannel robe and, surrounded by a police escort, made his way through the Yankee Stadium throng to the ring. He was ready.
Schmeling heard the cheers for Louis from his dressing room. He mistakenly figured Louis would start cautiously against the only man to have knocked him out. But he felt the jitters worse than before other fights. “I noticed for the first time that the tension of the last weeks had taken its toll,” he writes in his memoirs. A squadron of 25 police officers ushered him to the ring. The crowd cheered. Others jeered and pelted the German with banana peels, cigarette packs and wadded paper cups. He pulled a towel over his head for protection.
The referee gave instructions. The crowd tensed. Clem McCarthy anointed the rematch the “greatest fight of our generation.” The world awaited the bell.
Louis answered quickly and purposefully. He snapped three hard lefts to Schmeling’s face. Schmeling retreated. Louis closed and showered him with head and body shots. Max Machon, Schmeling’s trainer, shouted, “Move, Max, move!”
Louis moved Schmeling against the ropes with a steady fusillade that the challenger could only answer weakly. The champion struck perhaps the decisive blow of the night with an overhand right that staggered Schmeling. With Schmeling on the ropes, Louis threw a roundhouse right that landed on the back under Schmeling’s left arm and broke two vertebrae. He pounded Schmeling on the ropes. The referee separated them and gave Schmeling a standing count.
Louis rushed back and squeezed off a left-right combination that toppled Schmeling. He got up, and Louis put him down again. The challenger gained his feet once more, as though by instinct. The New York Times described the action thus: “Rubber-legged and glassy-eyed, the gallant German sought to hold off his tormentor, but Louis shot both hands to the body with crushing force, drove a sharp left hook to the jaw, then fired a right to the chin that felled Schmeling once more.”
Less than two minutes had elapsed since the opening bell. Machon threw a towel into the ring, which signaled surrender in Europe but was not recognized under American boxing rules. The referee tossed aside the towel and counted over Schmeling. Louis waited in a neutral corner, his body quivering with adrenaline.
The crowd roared deafeningly. Machon jumped into the ring. The referee waved his arms over the prone fighter. He raised Louis’s arm and declared the heavyweight champion the winner by a technical knockout at 2:04 of the first round.
An ambulance carried Schmeling to the hospital through Harlem, where nightclub bands played on the sidewalks and people danced in the streets. The German ambassador visited, urging Schmeling to protest the blow that broke his back. Schmeling refused, saying the punch was legal under American rules. This time, when Schmeling finally returned to Germany after 10 days in the hospital, Hitler did not welcome him home.
Black America celebrated Louis’s victory, which inspired the likes of Hank Aaron and countless others, but white America had a harder time swallowing black greatness, especially in the South. “The average of white intelligence is above the average of black intelligence probably because the white race is several thousand years further away from jungle savagery,” O.B. Keeler wrote in the Atlanta Journal after Louis’s title defense. “These black boys are Americans–a whole lot more distinctly so than more recently arrived citizens of, say, the Schmeling type. There should be just as much pride in their progress and prowess under our system as in the triumph of any other American. For all their misfortunes and shortcomings, they are our people–Negroes, yes, but our Negroes.”
Only the odd exceptional writer seemed able to magnanimously laud Louis as the famous sportswriter Jimmy Cannon did: “Joe Louis is a credit to his race–the human race.” That’s the way the Reverend Jesse Jackson thought the great champion should be remembered. After Louis’s death on April 12, 1981, Rev. Jackson eulogized, “God sent Joe Louis from the Black race to represent the human race.” Apparently, President Ronald Reagan agreed. He granted Louis his final resting place in Arlington Cemetery, immortalizing the boxer as America’s first hero of World War II.
Yet, for all the accolades, the attitudes linger–even 65 years later. “If America could have gotten its mind straightened out, it (Louis’s victory) should have brought an end to America’s idea of black Americans being strangers in this holy city,” Griffin says. “We just can’t get rid of that (mindset) regardless of what we do or how great the individual might be.”
Those Americans who saw Schmeling as the enemy, embodying Nazi Germany, were not only mistaken about his politics, they missed the true tyrant at home: racism. As Joe Louis proved in Yankee Stadium June 22, 1938, no man, no matter how strong, was big enough to knock out that ugly, pervasive foe.
© John Rosengren