CHAPTER ONE
Democracy in Action: Sports
and the American Dream
At the close of World War II, Joe Louis, heavyweight champion of the
world, a man born in the Jim Crow South, and raised in a Detroit ghetto,
stood as the symbol of American democracy. During the war, Louis
donated more than a million dollars to Uncle Sam’s military, donned the
khaki uniforms, and famously said, “We’re going to win, because we’re on
God’s side.” His willingness to sacrifice his career and earnings and spout
the rhetoric of freedom and democracy in a nation that legally sanctioned
racism made Louis a symbol of racial hope for America. As one black
writer claimed in 1942, “Joe Louis hasn’t only proven to be the greatest
fighting champion to ever don the abbreviated fight trunks, but he has
done more to promote inter-racial good will than any other Negro indi-
vidual in history.”1 Or as Margery Miller reflected in her 1946 book aptly
titled Joe Louis: American, “Joe’s accomplishments in causing good feeling
between the white and Negro races are established facts.”2 How could one
black man cause such feelings?
After the war, Americans looking to push a narrative of democracy and
equality in a Jim Crow society looked to the black athlete to bring that
story to fruition. On this belief, a black writer from New York opined,
“The careers of Joe Louis and other great Negro athletes teach us that,
given an equal opportunity to show their merit, there is no question
whatever that the Negro people in all other areas of our national life will
demonstrate their essential equality with all white men.”3 Similarly, in
1947, the year Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, black writer A. S.
