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Louis, Joe
6 articles on Louis, Joe
Louis, Joe
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
(b. 13 May 1914; d. 12 April 1981), the longest-reigning heavyweight boxing champion in history. Born Joseph Louis Barrow on 13 May 1914 near the rural town of Lafayette, Alabama, in the Buckalew Mountains, Louis was the seventh of eight children born to Munrow and Lillie Reese Barrow. Munrow Barrow, a cotton sharecropper, left the family when Joe was two years old and was never seen by them again, leaving Lillie to work the land and raise the children alone until she married Patrick Brooks, who also sharecropped.Tiring of scratching a meager living out of the land and enthralled by stories of prosperity and freedom in the North, Brooks moved the family to Detroit in 1926, settling in a black neighborhood on the east side. Things were not much better there, however, as the Great Depression began to slow ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1329 Includes: Bibliography1914–1981
One of the greatest boxers in modern history, viewed as both a symbol of racial harmony and as a symbol of black triumph in a racist society. Joseph Louis Barrow was born on a sharecropper's farm near Lafayette, Alabama, the seventh of eight children. His father, Munroe Barrow, was committed to a psychiatric hospital soon after Louis's birth. The family was told that Munroe had died, but in fact he lived for two more decades. Lillie Barrow remarried another farmer, and when Louis was ten the family followed the Great Migration north to Detroit, Michigan, where Louis's stepfather found work. Because of Louis's poor schooling in the South, he attended school in Detroit with students much younger than himself. Louis was reportedly humiliated by the experience and developed a stammer. Later he attended a trade school to study carpentry, but his ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1887 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(13 May 1914–12 Apr. 1981), world champion boxer, was born Joseph Louis Barrow, the seventh of eight children of Munroe Barrow and Lillie Reese, sharecroppers, in a shack in Chambers County, Alabama. In 1916 his father was committed to the Searcy State Hospital for the Colored Insane, where he would live for the next twenty years. Believing that her husband had died, Lillie later married Pat Brooks and moved with their children in 1926 to Detroit, Michigan, where Brooks found a job at the Ford Motor Plant.Like many rural southerners during the Great Migration, Joe Barrowstruggled in the new urban environment. Although Alabama had been no racial paradise, Michigan seemed little better. “Nobody ever called me a nigger until I got to Detroit,” he later recalled (Ashe, 11). A rural Jim Crow education did not prepare him for the ...
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Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 2685 Includes: Bibliographyboxer, was born Joseph Louis Barrow near Lafayette, in Chambers County, Alabama, the son of Munroe Barrow, a farmer, and Lillie Reese. His father was committed to a mental institution in 1916, and his mother later married again to Pat Brooks. The family, which included eight children, moved to Detroit, Michigan, when Louis was ten years old, and he attended school there until dropping out at age seventeen. As a boy he worked in a food market and delivered ice and coal. A friend, Thurston McKinney, introduced him to boxing, and he had his first amateur fight in 1932. Discouraged after a bad beating, he worked briefly at the Ford ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 372(1914–1983), boxer and heavyweight champion. Born near LaFayette, Alabama, Joe Louis moved to Detroit with his mother at the age of ten. He became an amateur boxer in 1932 and two years later turned professional. Under the guidance of his trainer and confidant Jack “Chappie” Blackburn and managers John Roxborough and Julian Black, Louis quickly established a reputation as a devastating puncher and skilled fighter. He captured the heavyweight championship from James Braddock in 1937 and went on to defend his title a record twenty-five times. Among his many legendary fights was a first-round knockout of the German fighter Max Schmeling in a return match in 1938, a final-round knockout of Billy Conn in 1941, and a highly controversial defeat of Jersey Joe Walcott in 1947. His defeat of Schmeling ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 613(1914–1981), professional boxer. “We gon do our part, and we will win, because we are on God's side,” Joe Louis intoned on 10 March 1942 at a dinner/show sponsored by the Navy Relief Society. In seven years, Louis had transformed himself in the eyes of white America from a sullen, unlettered, somewhat threatening black boy from the ghetto of Detroit to a transcendent symbol of patriotism and democratic nationalism, something more than a mere sports hero or champion boxer, although this transformation would not have been possible had he not become a champion athlete who dwarfed the competitors of his era. Born in Alabama on 13 May 1914, Joseph Louis Barrow migrated with his family to Detroit in 1926. He took to boxing as a teenager, had a successful amateur career, and turned professional in ...
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