3. My
race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching,
yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed
and raped. . . . This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost
we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the
accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little
higher than the apes.
In this scene in Chapter 19,
Maya crowds around the Store’s radio with the rest of the community
to listen to Joe Louis defend his world heavyweight boxing title.
As Maya conveys in this passage, the entire black community has
its hopes and psychological salvation bound up in the fists of Louis,
“the Brown Bomber.” This passage describes the precarious nature
of black pride in the face of hostile oppression, highlighting the
staggering and wrenching significance this boxing match held for
the community as the community teeters between salvation and despair.
The rarity of black people achieving public acclaim in both the
black and white communities meant that the few who managed to do
so had to bear the expectations of the black community. The match
becomes an explicit staging of black against white. Louis’s loss
would mean the “fall” of the race and a return to the idea that
whites had a right to denigrate black people. Cynics might say that
Louis’s win does little more than stave off the black community’s
psychological despair. It does not turn the tables on whites because
there is no denying that whites still hold all the power. His public
victory, however, proves to blacks in the Store that they are the
most powerful people in the world and enables them to live another
day with strength and vigor in the face of oppression. Racism plays
many psychological games with blacks and whites, and perhaps Louis’s
public recognition helps to teach both whites and blacks to accept
African-Americans as equals.
