Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight by Max Wallace, Howard Bingham Page A

media—and white America—continued to be lukewarm to the new champion, however, until the fight that proved to be the defining moment of his career. Since the 1936 matchup between Louis and Schmeling, Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and had made clear its intentions to take over Europe. By 1938, its brutal campaign of anti-Semitic violence had galvanized world opinion, and America’s distaste for Hitler was much more intense than it had been two years earlier. In this context, Mike Jacobs arranged for a Louis-Schmeling rematch that, this time, was viewed as a contest between America and the enemy. A month before the scheduled bout, Louis was invited to the White House, where President Roosevelt told him, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.” Both countries recognized the propaganda implications of the bout, and the hype was intense. Newspapers billed the match as Democracy vs. Fascism, Good vs. Evil. For the first time in history, the hopes of America rested on a black man.
    Louis didn’t let his country down. This time he was well-prepared and from the opening bell he unleashed a stunning assault on the surprised Schmeling, knocking the hope of Aryan supremacy unconscious in just 124 seconds. When the referee raised Louis’s arms in victory, it elevated him from a mere boxer to a legend and, more importantly, an American hero.
    Today, Reverend Jesse Jackson calls the fight the incident that freed black people “from the midst of inferiority.” The media were effusive in their praise and it seemed everybody was aware of the fight’s significance. Ring magazine declared that “Schmeling’s defeat symbolized the complete deflation of any and all ‘ism’or claims to natural supremacy of any particular race or group.” It seemed that most Americans agreed, and for the first time ever the majority of the country told pollsters they admired a black man.
    The impact of the second Louis-Schmeling fight would be felt for years to come in sports and in society at large. Jackie Robinson would credit the new acceptance of a black athlete for creating the climate that allowed him to re-break baseball’s color barrier less than a decade later.
    The victory was without a doubt one of the most important events in the history of American race relations, but the reaction of the celebrated sportswriter Paul Gallico underlined the reality that Louis’s popularity was due in no small part to his understanding of the Negro’s role in America: “Louis is what is known definitely as a’good nigger who knows his place,’” the celebrated author wrote in the New York Daily News. “He has been carefully trained in the sly servility that the white man accepts as his due.” If this message wasn’t driven home by Gallico’s assessment, it was made clear in almost every speech by every mayor who invited the champion to receive the keys to his city. The same words emerged at each reception and parade. “He’s a credit to his race,” they chorused—the highest praise they could imagine for the new hero. Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon underscored the liberal condescension of Louis’s new admirers when he wrote, “He’s a credit to his race—the human race.”
    If Louis was admired by white Americans, he had become a genuine icon to blacks. Years later, at the start of the civil rights movement, the generation of black Americans who grew up worshipping Joe Louis and digesting the message that they would be tolerated if they “kept in their place” were uneasy about their sons and daughters engaged in radical activities sure to incur the wrath of whites. It was this attitude of their elders that often posed the first obstacles for the young militants hungry for change.
    Louis’s unprecedented influence on black Americans is recalled by Martin Luther King Jr. in his manifesto Why We Can’t Wait. He tells the story of the black convict on death row in the 1940s who was the first victim of poison gas as a method of