📍Harlem, Manhattan, New York, NY 10027, USA
1932 – 1940“I was born Walker Smith Jr. in May 1921, the youngest of three children of a farming family; my birth certificate says Ailey, Georgia, though I always said I was born in Detroit. My father worked the cotton, peanut and corn fields in Georgia before moving us north to Detroit, where he found work in construction. In Detroit I carried the bags of a young boxer six years older than me who lived nearby, Joe Louis, and I watched him train at the Brewster Recreation Center. When I was about eleven, my parents separated, and my mother, Leila, took my two sisters and me to New York, where we settled in Harlem in the depths of the Depression. Our part of Harlem was full of flophouses, gangs and hustlers, and money was so short that I danced for coins on the pavements of Times Square and Broadway to help my mother save for an apartment. My mother, a seamstress who worked in a laundry, feared I would be pulled into the streets, so she took me to the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, where a man named George Gainford had just started a boxing club. At the Salem Crescent gym I found my calling. For my first amateur fight, in 1936, I borrowed the Amateur Athletic Union card of another boxer, Ray Robinson, and the name stuck; someone said I was sweet as sugar. I won Golden Gloves titles and turned professional in 1940. I became welterweight and then five-time middleweight champion, and many still call me the greatest boxer, pound for pound, who ever lived. Harlem was always my home.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today