Joe Louis’ Ties To Chatham-Kent | Black History Month

Joe Louis remains one of the history’s greatest boxers.

Louis also had ties to Chatham-Kent.

Louis’ parents were born of freed slaves. When he came to challenge for the World heavyweight title, Louis was the first Black boxer to do so in decades since Jack Johnson held the title. Adding to this, Louis was fighting Germany’s Max Schmeling. Schmeling, a former heavyweight champion of the world himself, was a Nazi sympathizer, and their fights, occurring in 1936 and 1938 came in the years leading up to World War II.

In a 1936 Emancipation Day celebration in Windsor, Joe Louis, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, and a group of North Buxton men all took to the field at Jackson Park. The North Buxton Stars squared off against Louis’ Brown Bombers in a softball game, which was followed by the Chatham Coloured All-Stars playing another baseball team, the V8s.

That same year, Louis fought Max Schmeling for the first time, with Schmeling shocking the world and Louis, handing Louis the first knockout of his otherwise undefeated career. After the fight, Louis gifted his gloves to his friend and employee Earle Cuzzens whose wife Beulah hailed from North Buxton. Beulah Cuzzens was born Buelah Harding, sister to Chatham Coloured All-Stars athletes, and local residents Wilfred ‘Boomer’ Harding, Andy Harding, and Len Harding. The gloves now reside in Washington’s Smithsonian Institute, where they were donated by Beulah and Earle’s nephew, Ken Milburn.

While working with Cuzzens, Joe and Buelah would often share tea at her kitchen table.

By the time Louis and Schmeling fought again in 1938, things were different. As American-German animosity intensified, Louis had transformed from a Black boxer to an American hope. 

“White Americans, even while some of them were lynching Black people in the South, were depending on me to KO a German,” said Louis in a June 19, 1988 article in The New York Times. “The whole damned country was depending on me.”

This time, Louis was victorious.

While Louis was changing the world of boxing, he was tied to Chatham-Kent during those formidable years.