Sweet Thunder Page 9

  “Why not? You on guard duty?” Sugar Ray wondered, Joe waiting for the soldier’s answer.

  “No,” said the soldier, “the Negro troops aren’t allowed to mix with the white on this base. Only the white troops will be at the show.”

  “Isn’t this the United States?” Sugar Ray snapped. “Isn’t this America?”

  “No, man,” another soldier answered, “this is Mississippi.”

  At the base, after the formalities of signing in, Sugar Ray—sporting corporal’s stripes and proud of it—sought out a Special Services officer.

  “Is it true that the Negro troops won’t be allowed to see our show?” Sugar Ray inquired.

  The Army officer seemed annoyed by Sugar Ray’s line of questioning. He simply told him it was a decision that had been made by a general on base.

  “Well, tell the general that unless there’s a Negro section in there tonight, there won’t be a show,” Sugar Ray said.

  The officer, speechless, strode away.

  Sugar Ray retreated to his barracks, bragging to Joe about what he had just told the officer. (Joe had contacts inside the War Department, and he told them of the egregious slights the troupe endured. Like a diplomat, he preferred working through the chain of command. Sugar Ray, far more emotional, meant to put his impatience to use on the ground; he imagined immediate solutions. Joe Louis would himself realize he had no power over young Sugar Ray’s emotional and improvisational streak.)

  A siren hummed in the Mississippi air outside their barracks; Sugar Ray whispered to Joe that it was the base general himself. A door opened and the general marched right over to Sugar Ray. Joe turned ever so slightly to watch.

  “I understand that you are giving orders on my base,” the general said to Sugar Ray. “I want you to know that you are supposed to take orders, not give them.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” Sugar Ray said, but not in the tone of a man who meant to leave it there.

  Joe instantly felt that Sugar Ray had gone too far. “Easy, Ray,” the world champ whispered.

  It was too late.

  With the general’s jeep idling, soldiers hovered outside to get a glimpse of the unfolding drama.

  Sugar Ray told the general that he and Louis and the others were “under orders” from the War Department itself—making it seem as if they were outside the general’s command—and that if Negro troops couldn’t see the show, they would not perform. Joe was stunned. Sugar Ray was surely inching up on some kind of disciplinary action, if not outright court-martial.

  When the general pointed his finger at Sugar Ray, admonishing him, the young fighter blurted out that he’d call the War Department. The general snapped back that if there were any calls to be made to the War Department, he’d make them himself. Then he marched out. Joe half-circled in front of Sugar Ray and called him “crazy” for doing what he had just done.

  They both sat and stewed, joined by Nicholson and Jackie Wilson, anticipating the worst. As word spread, fellow Negro soldiers felt proud of them.

  Not long after, Sugar Ray, who had convinced himself he would not back down, was ordered to the general’s headquarters. The summons drew grunts and wide-eyed stares from nearby soldiers; it elicited under-the-breath predictions of doom.

  The general—his mood surprisingly calmer, his tone more relaxed—told Sugar Ray that he had indeed called Washington and had actually gotten permission for the Negro and white troops to mix. So the show would go on. The general sought to absolve himself personally of the segregation: “When you complained about the situation, it gave me ammunition to have something to call Washington about, so I did,” he offered. A happy Sugar Ray smiled, and saluted.

  That evening the racially integrated group of soldiers whooped loud, watching and gyrating as the quartet of boxers showed their skills. Sugar Ray grinned a lot and nodded at the Negro soldiers particularly—as if to offer affirmation that his course of challenging the general had been nervy but right.

  Unlike in Massachusetts, however, Sugar Ray and Joe would not be welcomed to “review” any contingent of marching female nurses. The mix of Negro eyes upon white females in the South was a losing proposition. The large numbers of missives from Southern politicians that arrived on the desk of Secretary of War Stimson—lashing out at him for allowing some military brass leeway around segregation on bases—happened to be full of vile accusations about black men, all wrapped around rather flowery language praising white womanhood. In Alabama, whites—and especially Negroes—had hardly forgotten the Scottsboro incident: On March 25, 1931, nine young Negroes had been in a boxcar on a Southern Railroad freight train that rolled out of Tennessee into northern Alabama. They were hoboing, looking for work. There was a scuffle with some white hoboes; the Negroes had gotten the better of them in the confrontation. The roughed-up whites reported the incident to Alabama authorities. A posse stopped the train and arrested the nine black youths. At the Scottsboro jailhouse, they were stunned to find out they had been accused of rape by Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, two young white women who had also been hoboing on the train. A mob threatened lynching until the governor summoned the National Guard. There was a trial and the meting out of lengthy prison sentences and death sentences. (A young Langston Hughes was touring the South, giving readings. The trial proceedings so unnerved him that he wrote a poem, “Christ in Alabama.”) The trial had sparked national and international outrage; the white women had recanted the charges, and appeals made all the way to the Supreme Court had ended in victories. Still, the retrials only offered up new indictments. All nine would end up serving long prison sentences. Some of the nine would issue ghostwritten memoirs after their release from prison. The books told of prison beatings, rapes, tear-gassing, escape attempts. The father of Clarence Norris, one of the nine, had been born a slave. Amidst the dogwood trees and Confederate flags of Alabama, the Scottsboro Boys had been dropped into a Southern-spiced version of Dante’s Hell.

  The conundrum of race was not an easy thing for Sugar Ray Robinson to digest. He had come of age in the world of Northern amateur boxing; its participants were a willing mixture of white, black, and Hispanic. Beyond that world he had been surrounded by the church elders of Salem Methodist in Harlem, men and women who did as much as possible to keep their young congregants shielded from the lash of racism. And even beyond that stood his fearsome mother, Leila, who often and boldly engaged in public arguments with white store owners and bill collectors. Sugar Ray mostly took racial disrespect on a case-by-case basis—as if the perpetrator were but another foolish sap in the ring with him—and not as a cause. Louis, however, was a symbol and knew it—because of both his boxing and the color of his skin. Whereas Louis began to feel a kind of hurt for the entire lot of Negroes, Robinson’s hurt went only as far as his individual emotions would take it.

  Whenever they could, Louis and Robinson would get off base and go visit one of the local Negro colleges that dotted the South. They’d strut around in their uniforms, smiling, cadging phone numbers from attractive coeds and female administrators. Robinson particularly liked corralling traveling jazzmen to join him and Louis for meals and soulful bonhomie. They spent money without thinking about it—on soldiers, women, the barhopping strangers who crossed their paths. Sugar Ray would come to estimate that between them, he and Louis had spent around $30,000 during their traveling together on behalf of Uncle Sam: “Picking up tabs, buying presents for chicks, tipping big” is how he put it. They carried hundred-dollar bills in money clips. It was the Army, but inside of themselves they waltzed to the high life. “[W]e knew there was more money where that had come from,” Robinson said later. That money had come from victories, which had made them a kind of royalty, which is why they were on assignment from the White House itself.

  Jimmy Stewart had movie roles and movie money awaiting him when his Army hitch was over. Joe DiMaggio, who was swinging his bat in the California sunshine, playing on an Army team—JOE DIMAGGIO SLAMS FIRST ARMY HOMER, said one headline�
��had the Yankees waiting on him. Robinson and Louis had men awaiting them who wanted to drive gloved fists into their faces and rib cages. And they would have to take on those challenges—because that was where more of the money would be coming from.

  The caravan of the world’s greatest boxing show had a calmer visit to Fort Benning, Georgia. Getting there they had passed turpentine camps and chain gangs; shacks where Negro sharecroppers lived, shacks where white sharecroppers lived. They saw children with slack faces who looked hungry. Joe was yanked back to his past, his childhood; Sugar Ray had no spiritual connection with the landscape. He missed the North, he missed home; he missed the way the jazz music floated into him when he pushed open the door to one of those Harlem jazz spots on 125th and the way the red lipstick on the faces of the pretty women shimmered and how the cool cats offered him their hand for a shake.

  Edward Peeks—who would go on to a career as a respected journalist—was one of the black soldiers in Georgia who witnessed the Louis-Robinson visit: “We’d congregate,” he says. “Sugar Ray was quite the joke teller. They were the Hollywood soldiers, him and Joe.”

  If the white soldiers’ reaction was sometimes more muted toward Joe and Sugar Ray than the reaction of Negro soldiers, it could be understood. There had been no pictures of Jack Johnson in the homes of the white soldiers who sat looking at Robinson and Louis in these jerry-built outdoor boxing rings. To have a quartet of Negro boxers standing before them in the Southern sunshine—and walking by them afterwards with stripes on their uniforms—was a startling and unexpected scene.

  Reception was coolish when, after a brief respite, they arrived in Alabama.

  Camp Siebert was an Air Force base near Gadsden. The base itself had been so crowded that Army officials found residential housing for Louis and Robinson and the others in Gadsden. Neither Louis nor Robinson had any complaints about the rather liberal setup.

  The white bus drivers who ferried soldiers in Alabama and many other parts of the South had been deputized during the war. The distinction meant they could carry pistols, and they had been instructed they had the right to draw those pistols on Negro troops who refused to move to the back of their buses.

  Alabama may have been the Deep South, but Tuskegee, Alabama—not far from Gadsden—held historic joys for the American Negro: Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute had trained many of the nation’s black educators. The school, opened in 1881, would achieve widespread attention under Washington.

  Born a slave, educated at Hampton Institute in Virginia—he had arrived at Hampton with fifty cents in his pockets and a powerful plea that he be allowed to stay—Washington had been given the opportunity to head Tuskegee from its beginnings. He oversaw construction, kept Alabama politicians and educational officials pacified, and cashed the checks sent to him by steel magnates and philanthropists from up North to keep the Negro school going. He rode about the campus on horseback, his hazel eyes scanning the premises. At times haunted-looking figures—aging men and women—appeared at the school grounds. Some had come to see their children who were enrolled; others, Negroes in droopy attire, had simply ambled onto the premises, lost, figures still gripped by slavery’s vicious imprint, carrying a look that Washington himself had once known: bewilderment and wonder at the sight of so many of their own brethren carrying books. Washington, in time, became famous, courted by national figures and U.S. presidents alike. In life, Booker Taliaferro Washington was a man who smiled when there was reason, and rarely otherwise. (His reputation was that of a stern and conservative leader, but he was amiable enough to allow students to have a telegraph line installed in 1910 so they could follow the Jack Johnson–Jim Jeffries battle as it unfolded. The students had had to chip in to a campus kitty, however, to help defray the costs of setting the line up.) By the time of Washington’s death in 1915, Tuskegee had become an important and nearly hallowed landmark of black achievement and aspiration.

  It was at an airfield in Tuskegee, in the early stages of the war effort, that the U.S. military agreed to train black pilots to fly bombing missions over Hitler’s Germany. The soldiers, who had gone through a battery of tests, who were screened and then screened again, were seen by some as a pet project of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and sometimes were referred to as ENs—“Eleanor’s Niggers.” (The Tuskegee Airmen were hardly anyone’s pets; they distinguished themselves during World War II, earning an array of medals and honors.)

  Albert Murray, a Tuskegee graduate, had joined the Tuskegee English faculty in 1941. On visits after college he had gotten out of the South, going all the way to exotic Harlem, visiting bookstores, finding clubs where he could listen to jazz. He had met Sugar Ray at the Hotel Theresa and came to a quick conclusion about him: “Sugar had the same effect on people that movie stars had on people.” Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916, a year after Booker T. Washington’s death. His mother, Sudie, had attended Tuskegee. Murray himself got a scholarship in 1935 to attend the institution. He was an erudite individual and carried himself both seriously and whimsically. He had befriended writer Ralph Ellison, who also attended Tuskegee—though the great novelist never got around to graduating. Murray considered himself and Ellison “the heirs and continuators of the most indigenous mythic prefiguration of the most fundamental existential assumption underlying the human proposition as stated in the Declaration of Independence, which led to the social contract known as the Constitution and as specified by the Emancipation Proclamation and encapsulated in the Gettysburg Address and further particularized in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments.”

  Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis, Jackie Wilson and George Nicholson—all four inside the social contract known as wartime, a period echoed so hauntingly in the Gettysburg Address—were staring out onto the new year of 1944 now.

  As days and weeks passed, news came in of mounting Allied victories against Hitler, and there was hope in the air. Army officials had also begun hinting that the boxing troupe would likely be ordered to take their show overseas, into the European theatre. Both Louis and Robinson—especially Robinson—grumbled about their boxing careers being put on hold. But there was no way to maneuver around orders. (Boxing rankings did remain intact, an acknowledgment of the fighters who were at war and unable to defend titles.)

  On the base at Camp Siebert, the troupe resumed their duties, a pattern set by habit now: chatting with military officials, then breaking away to joke and bond with the enlisted GIs. They joined the GIs for chow. They looked at pictures of girlfriends back home and complimented them. They told stories of New York City, of Detroit and Chicago. They made predictions about who they might fight after the war. Louis thought of Billy Conn; Sugar Ray of Jake LaMotta. (It was boxing promoter Mike Jacobs, in New York City, who had planted such possibilities in their minds.)

  Tuskegee officials invited Robinson and Louis to a campus football game. Students tried to get glimpses of the group.

  No matter how optimistic the Louis-and Robinson-led group became while on Southern military bases, there was an undeniable reality outside the gates.

  First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had touched upon something profound in one of her newspaper columns six months earlier when she fretted about the prospects for racial harmony during wartime. “The domestic scene is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.”

  Alabama had been seething for months, and a lot of that anger had settled in Mobile. Mobile was the site of the huge Addsco shipyard. A shipyard during wartime meant jobs. In 1940 the city’s population had been 79,000; three years later it had exploded to 125,000, thanks to the lure of employment. Selden Menefee was a journalist who set off on a reporting tour in early 1943. The journey took him to Mobile. “Here is an historic town that slept for 230 years, then woke up in two,” he would report, referring to the wartime population explosion.

  It didn’t take Menefee long at a
ll to sense a combustible rivalry in the making between desperate whites and blacks who had either gotten jobs or were still vying for them at the Mobile shipyard. “If these ‘poor whites’ are full of anti-Negro prejudices, as they are, it is because the whiteness of their skins is the one thing that gives them a degree of social status,” Menefee observed.

  In one of those well-intentioned moves on the part of management, Negro welders were upgraded. The upgrade put them side by side with white workers. There was a war on; machinery needed to be produced, and the quicker the better. But the new work assignment for Negroes flouted the time-honored pact of segregation. White workers rebelled. One white worker fired off a letter to the local newspaper: “We realize the fact that they are human beings,” the letter offered; however, “we don’t any more want to work or want our women to work alongside a Negro than you would want to take one into your dining room and sit him down between your wife and mother to eat dinner, or for your wife to invite the cook in for a game of bridge, or take her to the movies.”

  One morning whites armed with bricks and metal bars charged a group of Negro welders. Their voices rose with the raising of their weapons: “No nigger is goin’ to join iron in these yards,” one shouted. There was blood, fear, confusion, and anguished cries. When the melee finally ended, eleven blacks would need hospital care. Several days of important productivity were lost. Company leaders had to regroup. They decided to separate the workers, giving the segregationists a victory.

  The Army boxers’ existence in Alabama had seesawed between the city of Gadsden and the base itself. Off base, there were the rules of segregation and four Negroes holding their tongues. It was on base that their freedom existed, bolstered by the Army stripes they wore with such pride. (Robinson had recently been promoted to sergeant). But even on base, there were stark reminders of the twilight world of separation. Soldiers lined up to take buses into Gadsden for social outings. There were two buses for white soldiers, but only a single bus for Negro soldiers. The disparity forced the Negro soldiers to wait until their crowded bus made its trip into town and then circled back for another. While waiting one afternoon, fidgeting, scanning the road for the Negro bus, Joe Louis grew impatient. Ever since fame had found him as a fighter, he had been used to being catered to. Sugar Ray was comfortable, quite easy, refusing to become agitated.