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Joe Louis

o the Searcy State Hospital for the Colored Insane. When his father died a few years later, Lillie Barrow married Pat Brooks.
In 1926, Louis' family joined the African-American migration from the rural South to the urban North. They settled in Detroit and that was where he grew up. As a teenager he worked odd jobs and began boxing with neighborhood kids. Louis used the 50 cents a week his mother gave him for violin lessons to rent a locker at the Brewster Recreation Center, where he began a successful amateur boxing career.
John Roxborough, the illegal numbers betting king in Detroit's black ghetto, decided to sponsor Louis's professional career. He enlisted the help of Julian Black, a Chicago speakeasy owner and numbers operator, and they moved Louis to Chicago to train with Jack Blackburn, a former lightweight boxer and skilled trainer who had already taken two white fighters to world championships in lower weight divisions. Blackburn patiently taught Louis a fundamental styl...

Posted by: Andres Cisneros

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