COLUMN: An ode to Alabama native ‘Brown Bomber’ Joe Louis

(Editor’s Note: Andalusia native Taylor Barbaree submitted this article in dedication to “my beloved teachers and classmates of Andalusia High School (AHS 1988). Whom both gave my dreams the ability to succeed through their love, support and friendship.”)

An old well aged, clapboard house still stands just yards away from a red, dead end dirt road hardly traveled on the outskirts of the county seat of Chambers County. The four room house with a outside hallway that runs directly through the middle of structure was built around 1894. The present existence of the house is nothing unusual. However, when you consider the history of the once tin roof establishment, it becomes a special place of significance in American history. That’s because this is the house that the greatest heavyweight boxer in the world was born and raised. Joe Louis (Barrow) nicknamed the “Brown Bomber” was born here on May 13, 1914. Most of the property is overgrown now, but at the time of Louis’ birth it was a farming community.

“My grandfather gave Joe’s mother (Lillie Barrow) permission to live here in 1910,” recalled Joe Louis’ relative Arthur Shealey. “At the time she lived here she was separated from her husband and later they divorced soon after Joe was born.”

Shealey, 82, was raised and currently lives in the 130-year old house. “I grew up in this house listening to Joe’s fights on the radio in that room right there,” he said pointing at one of the front rooms that faces what is now known as Shealey Road. “I was about five or six years old then.

“When Joe was two, his mom moved him and his siblings to the Buckalew Mountain Community about two miles from here, Shealey explained. “He worked on a farm picking cotton and milking cows.”

According to Shealey’s grandfather that’s when his family and friends learned he could pack a mean punch.

“He was milking a cow one day and as he was sitting on a bucket, the cow kicked him backwards. Joe was about 11 or 12-years old and it made him so made, he punched the cow in the ribs. When the (veterinarian) was later called, it was discovered that he had broken three of the cows ribs.”

Not long thereafter, Louis and his siblings moved with their mother and stepfather to Detroit in 1926. A few years later, at age 17, Louis made his amateur boxing debut paving the way to becoming a legendary professional boxer known as the “Brown Bomber.” At the time of his retirement from professional boxing, Louis, 6-foot, 2 inches tall with a reach of 76 inches, had a record of 66 wins (52 KO’s) with just 3 losses. His retirement came in 1951 after he was defeated by Rocky Marciano. Louis’ stories which are well documented form a treasure trove of American history. Check that — a spectacular “treasure trove” of not only American history, but Alabama history as well.

In a world now where the word “legend” is short changed, Louis remarkably earned the moniker.

Little stories such as one’s shared with me by his kinfolks (Arthur Shealey) and others well chronicled for all to read illustrate the big man as well as large ones too. For such simple similar stories were usually shared by my elders when I was younger on a front porch shelling peas during a humid summer til my thumbs were tinted with the color of hulls.

On Louis, noted author and member of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (whom I studied in college) described Louis’s effect in these terms:

“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., and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and 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 and cheered and yelled and cried, too.”

Here’s to you, Joe Louis!

Not only was he as a legend, but a boxing patriot who deafened Nazi lovers in an upset win over German Max Schmeling prior to WWII. Surprisingly, the two later became friends, and Schmeling served as a pall bearer at Louis’ funeral in 1981 at Arlington National Cemetery. With an historic history of often racial strife, Joe Louis transcended past racial barriers and made doubters believers of the American Dream. Joe Louis’ “American Dream” began just a footstep or two off an old dirt road. Where will yours begin?

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