Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis compare notes, and the tools of their respective trades, on June 14, 1946 during Mr. Robinson’s visit to Mr. Louis’s training camp in Pompton Lake, New Jersey. It was 66 years ago today, on April 15, 1947, that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Photo: Bettman/Corbis.
Boxing legend Joe Louis, photographed in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten at Greenwood Lake, NJ. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Josephine Baker urging Joe Louis to sing with her during her opening performance at the Club Des Champs Elysees in Paris in the early 1950s. Photo: Rene Henry/Bettman Corbis.
Haile Selassie and Joe Louis, 1935, by the phenomenal Mexican painter, caricaturist and illustrator Miguel Covarrubias (more here). Photo: Library of Congress via Art Knowledge News.
Marva Louis, a stenographer turned model and singer and the first wife of boxing legend Joe Louis (they married twice) stepping into a Duesenberg roadster in Harlem’s Sugar Hill on June 18, 1936. Hours later, her husband would lose to Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in one of the most famous bouts in boxing history. Langston Hughes described the reaction he witnessed after Louis suffered the only knockout during the prime of his career:
I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and 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.
Louis would go on to defeat Schmeling in a rematch on June 22, 1938. Photo via Bettman/Corbis
Pioneering beauty entrepreneur Rose Morgan in a 1961 advertisement for Gleem toothpaste. Ms. Morgan owned Rose Morgan’s House of Beauty, a salon she opened in Harlem in the 1940s that she eventually expanded to include a dressmaking department, a charm school and a wig salon. In 1965, she was a co-founder of the black-owned Freedom National Bank in New York. A former wife of boxing legend Joe Louis, her celebrity clientele (long before her marriage) included Lena Horne, Ethel Waters and my aunt, opera singer Margaret Tynes.
Josephine Baker urging Joe Louis to sing with her during her opening performance at the Club Des Champs Elysees in Paris. Photo by Rene Henry, Bettman/Corbis.
Boxing legend Joe Louis and pioneering beauty entrepreneur Rose Morgan on their wedding day, December 25, 1955.
