Joe Louis (Barrow), born in LaFayette, Alabama in 1914, is remembered for a few things; namely, being the hardest-punching heavyweight to ever step a ring. But, there was so much more to this complex man — the grandson of slaves, born in a shanty, who rose to gain fame, influence, and be widely considered the first black America hero.
Louis spent the first dozen years of his life in rural Alabama. But, his family were intimidated and eventually pushed out of the state by the resurgent and vicious Klan heyday of the 1920s. They would relocate to Detroit in the midst of the Great Migration, a diaspora of America’s southern black population to its northern cities.