War in the Ring: Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, and the Fight between America and Hitler

By John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro

War in the Ring presents a riveting nonfiction book for kids about a boxing match that represented the growing tensions between the United States and Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War II.

Joe Louis was born on an Alabama cotton patch and raised in a Detroit ghetto. Max Schmeling grew up in poverty in Hamburg, Germany. For both boys, boxing was a path out and a ladder up. Little did they know that they would one day face each other in a pair of matches that would capture the world's attention.

Joe grew into a symbol of inspiration to a nation of Black Americans hoping to carve a slice of the 'American Dream' in a racially fractured country. Max, on the other hand, became a Nazi symbol for the superiority of the Aryan race.

The battles waged between Joe and Max still resonate, and the cultural implications of the international sensation continue to reverberate far past the ring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781250155757

John Florio

John Florio is the author of the historical crime novels Sugar Pop Moon and Blind Moon Alley. With Ouisie Shapiro, he co-authored the nonfiction books One Nation Under Baseball and One Punch from the Promised Land, as well as the young adult books Doomed and War in the Ring. Florio has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, and ESPN. He holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, an MA from New York University, an MBA from St. John’s University, and is pursuing doctoral writing studies at the University of Glasgow. Florio is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine; he and Shapiro are married and live in Brooklyn, NY.    

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War in the Ring by John Florio, Ouisie Shapiro

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PROLOGUE

June 22, 1938

America’s got the jitters. It’s all over the news that German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s army has taken Austria without a fight and is threatening to conquer other countries in Eastern Europe. Hitler is spreading his hatred of Jews; his Nazi party is taking prisoners and herding them to concentration camps. The headlines are scary.

HITLER SEIZES CONTROL OF AUSTRIA

NAZI THREAT ADDS TO JEWS’ FEARS

NAZI PERSECUTION CONTINUES

The United States wants no part of Germany, the Nazis, or a global war.

At ten o’clock, New York time, the eyes of the world turn to a boxing ring in Yankee Stadium. There, the heavyweight champion of the world, a twenty-four-year-old black American named Joe Louis, is about to defend his title against a thirty-two-year-old white German, Max Schmeling.

As the two fighters climb through the ropes, the overhead lights beaming down on them, men and women across the United States lean in to their radios, hanging on the outcome.

In Germany, it’s the middle of the night, but millions of residents have their lights on and their radios tuned to the broadcast coming over the phone lines.

The bell rings.

Louis moves to the center of the ring, his gloves raised. Schmeling does the same. Each carries the weight of his country on his back.

Showdown at Yankee Stadium, June 22, 1938.

Eighty thousand fans in the stadium hold their breath.

Seventy million more press their ears to the radio.

This is it.

This is the war in the ring.

CHAPTER 1

1932: Joe’s Violin

America was in the midst of the Great Depression. The stock market had crashed two years earlier, and the slowdown was so severe that even the banks couldn’t survive. Nearly ten thousand were on their way to shutting down, taking with them the life savings of millions of Americans. Billions of dollars evaporated. Countless businesses collapsed. People waited in long lines for bread or sought out charity kitchens for soup. The poorest of the poor, having lost their homes along with their money, pitched tents in local parks and slept outside.

In Detroit, the home of the nation’s car industry, seventeen-year-old Joe Louis Barrow was on his way to school, his hand-me-down clothes barely fitting his six-foot frame. Like virtually every kid in the neighborhood, Joe had nothing in his pockets. But unlike the others, he had a musical instrument under his arm.

Here I was, Joe later said, big as a light heavyweight, going to Bronson Vocational School, carrying this little bit of a violin. You can imagine the kidding I had to take. I remember one time some guy called me a sissy when he saw me with the violin, and I broke it over his head.

After the stock market crash, Americans line up for free food.

Joe’s friend Thurston McKinney was fighting his way through the amateur ranks as a lightweight boxer. He suggested that Joe ditch the violin and join him in the ring. After all, there was big money to be made in boxing, and not a penny to be had in playing a stringed instrument. Just look at the heavyweight champ, Jack Dempsey, Thurston said. He retired four years ago, and he’s still loaded. Joe wasn’t sold on the idea, mostly because he knew how hard his mother worked to pay for his violin lessons.

A young Joe Louis Barrow practices the violin.

As a small boy growing up in Alabama, Joe had been a quiet kid. While his brothers and sisters were outside playing, or picking cotton on the family patch, he would wander down to the nearby swamp and hunt snakes.

Joe’s parents, Lillie Reese and Munroe Barrow, were the children of former enslaved people and worked as sharecroppers outside the town of LaFayette. Joe was the seventh of eight children, living in a shack with a sagging roof and loose floorboards. It looked like a good wind would have blown it down, he said years later.

The strain of supporting a large family with the backbreaking work of picking cotton day in and day out landed Munroe in a psychiatric hospital when Joe was just two. Lillie was left to raise the children by herself for a few years until she married Pat Brooks, a widower with eight children of his own.

Joe fed the chickens and the hogs, and when he was old enough, joined the rest of his family under the blazing sun in the fields, bent over at the waist, dragging a seventy-pound sack of cotton behind him. At night he went to bed complaining about having to sleep in the same bed with two of his brothers.

The Barrow-Brooks clan was no different from hundreds of thousands of other struggling black families in the South. Joe’s family was accustomed to the hard life in Alabama, but they heard that better-paying jobs could be found in the bustling cities up north. And when word got out that the Ford Motor Company in Detroit was paying as much as $7 a day to work in its factories—more than twice what sharecropping paid—Pat figured it was worth a shot. How could things be any worse in Detroit than they were in Alabama? At least there would be electricity and indoor plumbing, two luxuries they’d never had in the South. And so by 1926, Joe and his family were settled in Detroit and Pat was working at Ford.

The Barrow-Brooks family was part of the Great Migration that saw more than a million-and-a-half African Americans leave the South and move north and west in search of jobs and safety from violent threats, most of them coming from white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. A second wave would follow twenty years later, taking more than five million African Americans with it.

Even in booming Detroit, however, all was not rosy for black residents. As African Americans poured into the city, its color line grew more restrictive, forcing blacks to live in certain neighborhoods. Joe’s family found housing in Black Bottom, the east side neighborhood named by 18th-century French explorers for the rich, black soil that had once been farmland. Block after block was lined with shops, schools, churches, bars, and pool halls, and the area offered a thriving nightlife of musicians and entertainers. Many of the homes were tenements that had been built quickly to accommodate the mass influx of Southern blacks.

A few years after moving to Detroit, Pat was out of work, having lost his job at the Ford plant when the stock market crashed in October 1929. It was all he and Lillie could do to hold on to their tenement.

Joe’s friend Thurston kept pushing the fight game. You’re a big, strong guy, he told Joe. If you stick with it, you’re sure to rake in more money than any fiddler would dream of earning. Besides, he said, You got to have education to be a good one on the violin. You got to read notes. Thurston had a point: Joe had no interest in learning music, and it would take years before he could develop his skills. Joe figured that he could learn how to box now and, if he was good at it, earn some money to help his family buy groceries.

Joe went with Thurston to the Brewster recreation center. The minute he walked in and heard the pitter-patter of speed bags and smelled the liniment oil, he was hooked.

I looked at the ring, the punching bag, pulleys, the exercise mat, and it was love at first sight, he said.

Boxing suited Joe’s temperament. He’d never been much of a talker; he had a stutter and preferred to keep to himself. And that’s how the boxers worked out. Alone. Plus, Joe was strong from all his odd jobs after school. He would haul fifty pounds of ice up two flights of stairs while his friend Freddie would stay downstairs watching the delivery horse and carriage. The work had made his shoulders, back, and thighs even more muscular.

Thurston suggested that Joe join the gym with the fifty cents his mother had given him for violin lessons. Joe didn’t like the idea. To him, spending that money on anything other than the violin would be the same as lying. But the allure of boxing was too strong.

Joe wound up spending the money on boxing lessons—and he used the twenty-five cents he made scrubbing floors for his sister, Emmarell, to cover his dues at the rec center. Then he told his mother what she didn’t want to hear: He was quitting school and taking a job at Briggs Manufacturing, the factory that made truck bodies for Ford. Within days, he was hard at work pushing two-hundred-pound truck bodies onto a conveyor belt. The metal shells were so heavy that Joe felt as if someone was knifing him in the back every time he loaded one—but the job paid $25 a week. Every week, he gave his paycheck to his mother to replace the money he’d misspent and help her run the house. And every day, after finishing work at five o’clock, he’d have a quick dinner at home before rushing out to the rec center.

One night, Joe got home from the gym around eleven, and Pat stopped him before he got to his bedroom.

Joe at the boxing gym.

Where you been, Joe? his stepfather asked.

Over at the gym, working out.

I thought so. Well, I’m warnin’ you, Joe, if you keep on wasting your time down at that gym, and foolin’ around with boxing, you’re never gonna amount to nothing!

Joe had a lot of respect for Pat—the man was taking any job he could find to raise his brood. But another friend at the gym, a more experienced boxer named Holman Williams, who’d been training Joe, gave his student a talking to.

Joe, he said, pointing at his friend’s large, powerful fists, I think you’ve got what it takes.

Joe chose to listen to Holman over his stepfather, mostly because he liked what Holman said. Determined to prove Pat wrong, Joe quit

Reviews for War in the Ring

[salsabrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of America’s greatest boxers, Joe Louis, takes on Max Schmeling for the heavyweight title, in a bout that comes to symbolize the opposing forces during World War 2, fascism versus democracy. We get the back story of both boxers and how their paths led to their bout. Telling the stories of Louis, Max Baer, Jack Johnson, Max Schmeling in a way that makes them interesting to young readers, creating empathy to who they are, a depth to the stories. Compelling sports reading, even for those who may not be into boxing.