Prometheus 6

No matter how you spin your justification, the actual actions that took place are no embarassment to Black folk.

Quote of note:

Such stories are rarely recounted. To whites, they are largely alien, while to blacks, they are almost too commonplace for comment. But they help explain and illustrate the American racial divide as surely as Hurricane Katrina. They help explain the otherwise inexplicable, like those black crowds cheering O.J. Simpson a decade ago.

'Save me, Joe Louis!'
An oft-told tale of a condemned black man's final words is a myth. The real story illustrates America's painful racial divide.
By David Margolick
DAVID MARGOLICK, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink" (Knopf, 2005).
November 7, 2005

SOMETIME IN the 1930s, a black inmate on death row in a Southern state is asphyxiated in its gas chamber. As he breathes in the fatal fumes — and as observers watch from behind a thick pane of glass — he cries out: "Save me, Joe Louis! Save me, Joe Louis!"

The story has been told ever since, usually to illustrate Louis' near-messianic status in a black America that had little else going for it in the years before World War II. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was among those telling it. "Not God, not government, not charitably minded white men, but a Negro who was the world's most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope," he wrote in 1963.

Too bad it never happened.

But the real story about that black inmate, 19-year-old Allen Foster, and how he died on Jan. 24, 1936, is a parable of a different sort. Instead of exalting a prizefighter, it illustrates one of the countless forgotten but horrific racial wounds that lie just beneath this nation's veneer of civility and ooze and bleed from even the most superficial incision into our past.