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That was why dozens of songs celebrated his achievements why novelist Richard Wright wrote that he was “the concentrated essence of black triumph over white” why singer Lena Horne affirmed that he “carried so many of our hopes, maybe even dreams of vengeance” why poet Maya Angelou recalled with pride that he was “a Black boy … some Black mother’s son.”

He inspired and uplifted the aspirations for equality by Black Americans. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis (left) and promoter Mike Jacobs (right) in Louis’ dressing room at the Polo Grounds after Louis had retained his title in the fight with Billy Conn in June 1941.Īnd it wasn’t just his victories in the ring that accounted for Louis’ fame. Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey, two of the greatest champions of an earlier era, had fought eight and five successful defenses, respectively. Since winning the title in June 1937, he had successfully defended it a remarkable 19 times. There had never been a heavyweight champion quite like Louis. So many Black Americans struggled to understand why, in the month after Pearl Harbor, Joe Louis, the most popular Black man in America and probably the world, would defend his boxing crown and donate his entire purse to the Navy Relief Society fund. It did not take Sigmund Freud to interpret the implied emasculation of the lyrics. You know I ain’t going to let you shoot my big Navy gun’ ” “The same thing for the Navy when ships go to sea “Men live in such intimacy aboard ship,” he argued, “that we simply can’t enlist Negroes above the rank of messman.”īlues guitarist Josh White criticized the hypocrisy of battling Nazi racial ideology with Jim Crow armed services in his 1941 song “ Uncle Sam Says.” After noting that Uncle Sam wanted no Black pilots, he continued: Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox told President Franklin Roosevelt and a gathering of civil rights leaders in June 1941 that he would resign his office before giving an order to end segregation. By 1940, Black sailors comprised a mere 2.3% of the force, most of them as kitchen workers. Navy liked things white - from Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet to their white dress uniforms and white gloves. In the years before Pearl Harbor, the U.S.

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