Writers on Fighters: Langston Hughes & Joe Louis
M. Abduh
31 August 2024

Langston Hughes wrote of the trials & triumphs of Black folks in poems such as “I, Too,” “The Weary Blues,” & “Mother to Son.” He penned essays, short stories, children’s books, novels, & plays on almost every aspect of our lives—from Harlem to Scottsboro, Alabama, from the blues to boxing. After witnessing Joe Louis’s loss to German heavyweight Max Schmeling, one of those great trials, Hughes wrote,

“I walked down Seventh Avenue & saw grown men weeping like children, & women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

This was because “The Brown Bomber” was more than just a fighter to those who gathered on stoops, in barbershops, bars, & living rooms to listen to his fights on the radio. He was the pride of his people, as Hughes explained,

“Each time Joe Louis won a fight in those depression years, even before he became champion, thousands of Black Americans on relief or W.P.A., & poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march & cheer & yell & cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions—or on mine. I marched & cheered & yelled & cried, too.”

Louis would avenge this loss two years later, knocking out Schmeling in the opening round of their rematch. After the fight, Louis said, “If I ever do anything to disgrace my race, I hope to die.” Moved by such triumphs & testaments, Hughes wrote of Louis in a poem, “Joe has sense enough to know/He is a god/So many gods don’t know.”