Joe Louis

Joseph Louis Barrow was born on the thirteenth of May 1914 at Lafayette, Alabama, the seventh of eight children of Munroe Barrow — a cotton sharecropper — and Lillie Reese Barrow, a homemaker. The Barrow household was severely impoverished; his father was committed to the Searcy Hospital for the Insane when he was two and remained there until his death. Lillie Reese remarried Pat Brooks Sr. in 1917 and the family migrated to Detroit in 1926 in the Great Migration. Joe attended the Bronson Trade School at Detroit through eighth grade. He boxed at the Brewster Recreation Center under the trainer Atler Ellis from 1932.

He compiled an amateur record of fifty wins and four losses across 1932 to 1934 — winning the Amateur Athletic Union light-heavyweight championship in 1934. He turned professional on the fourth of July 1934 at Detroit, knocking out Jack Kracken in the first round.

He ran a string of twenty-three consecutive professional wins across the following twenty months — including the September 1935 knockout of the former champion Primo Carnera and the June 1935 knockout of King Levinsky. The defeat by Max Schmeling at the Yankee Stadium on the nineteenth of June 1936 was his first professional loss. He spent the following two years climbing back to title contention.

He defeated James J. Braddock for the world heavyweight title at Comiskey Park, Chicago, on the twenty-second of June 1937 in eight rounds — becoming the second Black world heavyweight champion after Jack Johnson (placed in this archive). He defended the title twenty-five times across the following twelve years — the longest title reign in heavyweight history. The decisive defense was the June 1938 rematch with Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. He knocked Schmeling out in two minutes and four seconds of the first round.

He enlisted in the United States Army on the tenth of January 1942 — at the height of the Second World War — and served the war as a sergeant in the Special Services Division, conducting exhibition tours that raised an estimated three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for the Army and Navy Relief Funds. He defended the title only once during his service. He resumed defending after the war.

He retired undefeated in 1949 with a record of fifty-eight wins and one loss. His financial circumstances after his retirement — including the substantial back-tax obligations to the IRS arising from the wartime exhibition tours he had given for charity — were severely straitened across the remainder of his life.

He died of a heart attack at the Desert Springs Hospital in Paradise, Nevada, on the twelfth of April 1981, at sixty-six.

He is honored here as the Brown Bomber.