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  Economic miseries were everywhere. In 1932, millions of Americans were losing jobs by the month. Wages were down 40 percent compared to just three years earlier. Impoverished children were especially vulnerable. Little Walker, who always seemed to be hungry, took free lunches at the local Salvation Army—“hot dogs and beans,” he would sadly remember.

  By the time the family moved uptown, into Harlem, Franklin D. Roosevelt had settled into the White House: His first day on the job was March 6, 1933. The patrician and former New York governor was determined to lift the country from the jaws of misery. “This nation asks for action, and action now,” he proclaimed. First there was an emergency session of Congress and following that, one hundred thrilling days of groundbreaking legislation. The president came to the aid of the banking industry. The rail system was bailed out of financial trouble; stock exchanges were regulated. He put money behind his soothing radio speeches: $500 million flowed into every state to help the downtrodden. The Civilian Conservation Corps was established. Flooding in the Tennessee Valley was brought under control by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Unemployed men were hired for public works projects across the country: Mammoth bridges went up over San Francisco Bay and the Florida Keys.

  Looking around Harlem, little Walker Smith refused to pity himself. As he knew, it would draw no sympathy from his mother. Rather, he kept himself busy. He swiped candy; he snatched fruit from vendor stands, dashing around curbsides, his chest heaving as faceless grocers yelled after him. He sold scrap wood, cans, bottles. He shot dice for nickels—earnings from the odds and ends he sold—with tough-looking kids. More and more he fought back against street foes, the better to elicit smiles from his mother. (The recollections of desperate children like himself leaning into waywardness would play a powerful role in his later years.) Leila Smith saw and heard much that worried her in her new surroundings: constant sirens, the ragged children running about—all part of the unpredictable vibe of urban street life. She feared a years-long descent by her son into that dreaded state that any parent abhorred: juvenile delinquency.

  What Leila Smith also noticed in her new community was the array of churches it featured. Those churches served the highbrow and the less cultured. They fed the hungry, sent masses into the streets for protest rallies, demanded better attention from Manhattan politicos. They calmed the masses during spasms of rioting. Their ministers became notable community figures, quoted in newspapers, on the radio, in national church publications. They were men like Adam Clayton Powell (Senior and Junior) of the Abyssinian Baptist Church; J. W. Brown of Mother A.M.E. Zion; Hutchens C. Bishop of St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal; George Sims of Union Baptist; W. W. Brown of Metropolitan Baptist; William Lloyd Imes of St. James Presbyterian; and Frederick A. Cullen of Salem Methodist Episcopal. From their pulpits these ministers preached against vice and sloth; they abhorred the devil’s presence but hardly denied it. They spoke of their congregation’s young members, and the need for the adults to guide and offer instruction, to lead by example.

  But there existed two Harlems: In one Harlem there were poetry readings and social teas; there were gatherings that featured notable speakers who talked about national affairs and the doings they were privy to in the Roosevelt White House. In this Harlem, the collegiate sons and daughters of prominent families, home on school break, talked of their studies at Fisk, Howard, and Lincoln universities. In this Harlem there was music by the Harlem Symphony; there were NAACP galas and fraternity soirees. Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters stepped about this Harlem, and one might shake the hand of writers Wallace Thurman or Countee Cullen—the latter the adopted son of Frederick A. Cullen of Salem Methodist. One might even see a youthful Langston Hughes standing outside the Harlem Y, a parrot atop his shoulder. This was a sweet place where a Renaissance spirit blossomed like flowers, where Negro couples strolled about in raccoon coats. “A blue haze descended at night and with it strings of fairy lights on the broad avenues,” a cultural critic and resident of that Harlem would remember. That was the bright side of the two-sided coin of Harlem.

  The other side was darker and unforgiving—and it was that side that dominated the lives of little Walker Smith and his sisters and mother. Their Harlem was a rough place, a lower-class enclave of broken families, of flophouses and boardinghouses. Of racketeers and gangsters, of big crime and petty crime. Of handouts and hand-me-down clothing, of little boys often scampering about like lambs being hunted. This Harlem had curt and exacting landlords aplenty: “Send it, and send it damn quick” was one famous landlord’s consistent advice to those who were late with rent money. Little Walker Smith would recall: “Mom really had a time trying to feed us.” The Smiths had no family references, no entrée into a more elevated society. They were invited to no formal events. They blurred into all the other anonymous faces in the community; they were scraping by in the harsh Harlem. But now and then, galloping along with his buddies up and down busy Seventh Avenue, young Walker would get glimpses of that gilded Harlem—a dashing Negro couple in furs; glittering silverware behind a glass window in the hands of diners; a lone dandy leaning against a lamppost; a crowd alighting from the neon-lit Lafayette Theatre, the gleaming Model T’s–like exclamation points announcing certain lifestyles; the gorgeous sepia-tinted photographs in the window of famed photographer James Van Der Zee. (“In Harlem he is called upon to capture the tragedy as well as the happiness in life, turning his camera on death and marriage with the same detachment,” Cecil Beaton would say of the gifted Van Der Zee.) The unfolding scenes—the kaleidoscope of an elegant life beyond his reach—would all give pause to the young Walker Smith. And now that he knew this world existed, he would be unable to unshackle its dynamism from his boyish mind.

  What FDR’s government couldn’t do fast enough—tackling the woes of urban communities—churches and church leaders had to do instead. In Harlem this meant the intervention of the clergy in the children’s play hours. It became their mission, in any congregation where the church had enough muscle, to create activities that might fill an afternoon or evening for wayward souls. It was easy to hear the near singsong lament of mothers whose children were getting into trouble, who were losing focus. Those mothers, more often than not, showed no hesitancy in turning to local churches for help.

  “Harlem in those days didn’t have much in terms of recreational outlets,” recalls Robert Royal, who was a young boy in the community then and who would come to befriend the adult Robinson in later years.

  Given such a reality, the more a minister seemed attuned to the community’s needs, the more renowned he became. The big churches pooled their resources, recruiting adults who possessed some particular expertise in an area of athletics. And before long, many of the churches had basketball teams, softball teams. But one church, Salem Methodist Episcopal, distinguished itself in a rather untraditional arena—its boxing team. “They recognized the influence of Henry Armstrong and Joe Louis,” Royal says of the Salem church officials.

  Rev. Cullen, the influential leader of Salem Methodist—he lived in a lovely fourteen-room manse on Seventh Avenue—had listened raptly when members of his staff brought the idea of the boxing team to him. It was Roy Morse who had originally suggested the idea to those staff members.

  Morse, born in New York City, had been a star sprinter on the track field in the city during his junior-high and high-school years, getting mentions in the press in 1910 for winning major titles. He went on to Buffalo City College in 1911, also excelling in athletics before financial hardships cut his studies short. Back in New York, sitting in the pews at Salem Methodist, Morse conferred with some of his boyhood friends who had taken up boxing and then floated the idea of a boxing club at the church. Congregants quickly approved the plan—anything to get a jump on the lurking machinery of the devil—and it was a done deal with Rev. Cullen’s approving nod.

  Certain churches began to distinguish themselves by their specialties in after-school programs. “St. Philips was known then for
basketball,” recalls Arthur Barnes, who grew up in Harlem. “And Salem Crescent had the fighters. If you were interested in boxing, that’s where you went to train.” Morse recruited onetime boxer and manager George Gainford to the staff. In time, Salem Crescent Athletic Club acquired a certain cachet, and it went beyond the borders of Manhattan. As Robert Royal remembers, “Salem Crescent was one of the top boxing programs in the country. If you came out of Salem Crescent, you were a proven warrior.”

  Leila Smith couldn’t find a Brewster Recreation Center in Harlem, but she was desperate for her son to get involved in some type of after-school activity. Walker seemed completely indifferent to his studies at Cooper Junior High School. The boy walked the halls with a street swagger, rolling his shoulders, lingering in those hallways too long. He was late with homework assignments; school officials warned him about shooting dice. Schoolgirls dismissed him as cocky and even arrogant, his whiffs of charm not enough—not yet—to assuage concerns about his demeanor.

  A neighborhood friend dragged Walker along to Salem Methodist one afternoon to show him its boxing facilities. (Young Walker knew the church because he had shot dice in the alleyway behind its ornate walls.) Walker had bragged to friends about having some boxing skills—and about having met Joe Louis. Louis would not become champion until 1937, and so in 1934 many of his friends knew nothing of the Joe Louis that Walker talked about. Those who had heard of the fighter didn’t believe him.

  Salem Methodist sat at 129th Street and Seventh Avenue. It had shiny pews and lovely windows; Salem officials had paid $258,000 for the chapel in 1923, during a year when Negro congregations were buying properties throughout Harlem to show their business acumen. Thirteen-year-old Walker Jr. descended the stairs to the Salem church basement, where the boxing facilities were set up. Boys his age and older were sparring, skipping rope, grunting, tying on gloves. His lit eyes jumped from scene to scene. That smell of sweat—“a strange perfume to me,” he would call it—was everywhere. Because of his limited introduction to the sport in Detroit—and because he had already overstated his prowess to friends—he had convinced himself that to retreat now was to lose face. In his mind, he was right where he belonged.

  This setting, he quickly concluded, might serve as an extra shield against the mean streets. His modus vivendi within his new surroundings was simple—he would have to hold on, just as he had been doing all his short life. He was a skinny youth who had heard of the terrors that circled his Black Bottom neighborhood in Detroit and survived them. He had been whisked away from his father and did not become morose or depressed. He had committed petty acts of thievery—showing youthful courage, however misplaced—and yet had not been caught and thrown in detention. Survival was all. Now he found himself in a neighborhood rough at the best of times and now battered by the Depression, a place that could gobble him up, but he wouldn’t let it. The two-sided coin of Harlem had now rolled right up to young Walker Smith. That descent into a church basement offered a kind of clarity he had never felt before. The boy—whose independent mind seems to have sprung directly from his strong-willed mother—could not allow a moment’s worth of fear down where the fists were flying. Underground, he realized, for the first time in his life, he could unburden himself of little-boy worries. The officials explained to him what was expected of a member of the Salem Crescent Athletic Club, the name the young pugilists fought under. He listened—not in that unfocused way he listened to teachers at Cooper Junior High—but with genuine raptness.

  He told his mother about Salem Crescent and its vaunted boxing program. He wanted to join, and his enthusiasm filled Leila Smith with joy. He would fight, just as she had long told him to, just as she herself did whenever she had to.

  “Sugar Ray had a nickname for my grandmother. It was ‘Punch.’ That’s how tough she was,” says Ken Bristow, Robinson’s nephew.

  Leila Smith delighted in knowing that her son would have authority figures watching over him and teaching him, a mission his own father had abandoned. The Smiths were not a churchgoing clan, but Leila thought that a place that might welcome and protect her son was a divine blessing indeed.

  George Gainford had been shifting around the world of amateur boxing for years. He had tried boxing in his own youth, but had been an undistinguished prospect. Upon realizing his own career had no future, he turned to managing. The few fighters he managed, however, proved unremarkable. The world of managing excited him more than anything, but opportunities for Negro managers were limited. Unlike the Negro managers behind Joe Louis’s rising career, he did not have access to the ready money it took to manage one fighter, let alone several. So he went about picking up points of wisdom about training fighters. He quizzed other high-profile trainers, such as New York City’s Ray Arcel. “You’re only as good as the fighter you work with,” Arcel once said, full of simple but potent insight. “I don’t care how much you know, if your fighter can’t fight, you’re another bum in the park.” Gainford visited other gyms, particularly Stillman’s in midtown Manhattan, and watched trainers putting their fighters through workouts. He made mental notes of all that he saw. He pulled out rolled-up copies of Ring magazine from his back pocket and sat down to read and reread stories about trainers and fighters and why certain fighters won titles while others vanished. In his early years at Salem Crescent, he was the trainer as dreamer: In his garrulous moments he spoke of his dream that one of his little warriors might rise up and become a king, a champion; he hoped that as he turned toward yet another set of footsteps coming down the stairs there might be another champ-in-the-making like Jack Johnson, another titleholder like Henry Armstrong, gliding into view. The fight game relied on a mixture of hunger and timing—and a trainer’s ability to pick talent.

  George Gainford stood at ring’s edge and watched Walker Smith’s maiden workout. He had seen neophytes work out hundreds of times. He was always looking for something that might hold his interest: the way an inexperienced fighter moved his feet, the quickness of a jab, a naturalness and comfort in the ring. A trainer had to make snap judgments as he imagined into the future on behalf of a young novice fighter. It was not a sport to be taken on as a hobby; a young fighter must want something, must desire to take a certain road to a certain place. Gainford looked at the boy, and as the minutes passed, a look of comfort crossed his face: “You got good moves,” he confided to young Walker. The other young fighters looking on—always hungry for any praise from Gainford—knew it was a high compliment he had given to this newcomer. Walker beamed. It was enough of a compliment to get him a spot on the Salem Crescent team. He would start low; he would have to work his way up; he would have to show dedication and discipline. In the days and weeks that followed, Gainford warned him—brushing off the boy’s incessant questions about opportunities to fight—that it was the road trips that so often told the tale. Those AAU and Golden Gloves bouts were the ones that drew the attention of the press, and where the Salem boys had first cemented their reputation.

  Gainford liked the adulation heaped upon him by Salem church members, elderly women and deacons patting him on the back on his strolls about the church premises, praising the accomplishments of his young charges. His girth was widened by the delicacies laid out by churchwomen—dinners of chicken dumplings and collard greens, black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes. Gainford and his boys would often wrap leftover food in napkins for a post-workout snack.

  The trainer drove a 1931 Model T, and there were few things that delighted him as much as loading his young fighters into his car—young Walker always sat in the back, on the so-called rumble seat, unable to muscle his way past the bigger team members—and taking off up or down the East Coast, into New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut. (Gainford had spent a great deal of time on the church phone, talking to amateur promoters, lining up bouts.) On the day they took off, church members would often gather to bid them farewell, one of the deacons offering a prayer, the chorus of onlookers nodding and shaking the fighters’ hands. Then they vanis
hed through the gritty streets of Manhattan.

  They stopped in towns large and small, a Depression-era caravan with a big Pied Piper instructing them, upon reaching their destination, to grab their bags from the car (careful with the satin robes!), to be respectful to elders they came across while making their way to the locker room, to remember they were representing a highly respected Manhattan church. When his fighters had stacked up wins that he thought were particularly impressive, Gainford would make his way to the nearest phone booth and get in touch with the reporters he knew in New York—especially at the Amsterdam News, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Daily Mirror—and try to get their accomplishments written up. The young fighters loved seeing their names in print.

  But Walker Smith was not seeing his name written anywhere. He grew petulant because Gainford would not allow him to fight yet. Gainford, like most trainers, was truly interested in bringing along a promising heavyweight, and the fighter on his team who fit that bill was Buddy Moore, upon whom he lavished attention. Gainford urged young Walker to be patient. “Smitty, you gonna get killed, you can’t beat nobody,” he once chided him, trying to temper the boy’s impatience. The words would sting, just as the challenges made to him by his very own mother—to get back outside and fight!—had stung.