📍Black Bottom, Detroit, Michigan, USA
1926 – 1934“I was born Joseph Louis Barrow in May 1914 in a ramshackle cabin on Bell Chapel Road in rural Chambers County, Alabama, the seventh of eight children of sharecroppers who were the children of former slaves. My father was taken away to a state hospital when I was small, and my mother, Lillie, later married a widower, Pat Brooks. Like so many Black families, we left the South for the North, and in 1926, when I was twelve, we arrived in Detroit, settling in a house on Catherine Street in Black Bottom, the crowded, lively heart of the city's Black community. Black Bottom was full of jazz clubs, churches, shops and families fresh from the South, and the Ford plants were hiring. My stepfather worked at Ford until the Depression took his job. I was a shy boy with a stammer, and I struggled at school; I went to Bronson Vocational School to learn cabinet-making. To keep me away from the street gangs, my mother paid for violin lessons, fifty cents a week. But a friend took me to the Brewster Recreation Center, a few blocks away, and I spent the violin money on boxing lessons instead. Folks say I hid my gloves in my violin case so my mother wouldn't know. I won the Brewster club championship and then a string of amateur titles while working at the Ford River Rouge plant. In 1934 I turned professional, and in 1937 I became heavyweight champion of the world. When I beat Max Schmeling in 1938, Black Bottom celebrated in the streets. The Brewster Recreation Center, where it all began, still stands, and Detroit has never forgotten me.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today