The great race
Mike Marqusee on Donald McRae’s evocation of the hurdles faced by Joe Louis and Jesse Owens
The Guardian, 16 November, 2002
Review of In Black and White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens by Donald McRae, Scribner.
In 1936, under the irritated gaze of Hitler and the Nazi high command, the sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. Two years later, at Yankee stadium in New York, the heavyweight boxer Joe Louis demolished the powerful German champion, Max Schmeling, in a single tumultuous round.
Both were stunning performances, displays of competitive prowess that would delight any sports fan anywhere. But they were much more than that. In the context of the rise of European fascism and America’s own long-entrenched colour-coded caste system, the achievements of these African-Americans resounded with social and political implications. In the controlled environment of the sporting arena, their successes offered a laboratory-like refutation of theories of white supremacy. They were hailed at the time not only as victories over fascism and racism, but also as vindications of a despised race and of America itself.
Louis and Owens were the sons of sharecroppers and the grandsons of slaves. Born in rural Alabama, they both left the deep south at an early age when their families joined the great migration to the cities of the north (Owens to Cleveland and Louis to Detroit). There, they found outlets for their extraordinary talents – but only at a price.
In an America rigidly divided by colour, black champions like Owens and Louis served multiple and often painfully contradictory purposes. Their victories challenged racist assumptions about black inferiority – a challenge more important in the end for blacks than for whites, who quickly found ways to assimilate black excellence in sport within a racist world view. Their successes were also claimed as proof that blacks could make it in a white-dominated world, that the US was a land of unfettered opportunity – a message reassuring for whites but double-edged for blacks. And their eminence provided a rallying point for African-American identity and solidarity.
Both Louis and Owens took great care to avoid giving offence to white people, while at the same time struggling to maintain their dignity and autonomy as black males. They spurned no opportunity to reinforce their credentials as American patriots. As a result, both were routinely praised as credits to their race. And both were abysmally ill-rewarded for their service and circumspection.
Within a fortnight of winning his fourth gold medal at Berlin, Owens was expelled from the track for life by the US athletics authorities. His crime was refusing to complete a tour of pointless exhibition races, a tour arranged without his permission and from which he was to derive zero financial benefit. Louis spent a number of his prime championship years in the army, boxing exhibition matches for which all proceeds were donated to soldiers’ and sailors’ relief funds. But after he retired, the government hounded him relentlessly for back taxes.
At times, both Owens and Louis had to descend to vaudeville to survive – Owens running races against horses, Louis hamming it up as a professional wrestler. No wonder, looking back at their careers, a later and more militant generation of African-Americans scoffed at their futile attempts to placate the white man. Joe and Jesse did everything that was asked of them, and more, and they still ended up short-changed and demeaned.
But three decades on, it is possible to see Louis and Owens for what they were – supreme sporting geniuses who were asked to assume impossible social burdens. Donald McRae’s account of their intertwined destinies does justice to two complex (and very different) individuals who sought to master their fates in a world that simply would not permit them that freedom. His book is clearly a labour of love. The volume and detail of research is impressive – and he makes particularly strong use of a thorough reading of the African-American press of the day.
However, McRae is led by his understandable admiration for Louis and Owens to overestimate their impact as catalysts for social change. (He exaggerates Louis’s interventions against discrimination in the military.) More worryingly, he segues without warning from carefully documented history to novel-like speculation, supplying detailed dialogue for scenes at which no living person was present, and assigning private thoughts and feelings to his protagonists in specific times and places for which there can be no sources. The reader begins to wonder what is established fact, what is hearsay and what is simply invented. It’s a pity. The practice undermines a book noteworthy both for its compassion and for its vivid recreations of some of the most dramatic sporting encounters of modern times.
