Trouble in Harlem

To the Negro press, all things black are good. Racial papers studiously ignore Negro failings, shout their indignation over real and fancied injustice, assail color discrimination so hard that they help to keep it alive.

When LIFE'S editors, last February, decided to publish a close-up of Negro Champion Joe Louis, they looked about for a Negro journalist to write it. The man they picked was dimple-cheeked Earl Brown, 38-year-old, Virginia-born managing editor of Harlem's weekly Amsterdam News.

Earl Brown belonged to a new school of Negro newsmen. A Harvard graduate (1924) who won his letter pitching on the varsity baseball team, onetime instructor of economics at Louisville Municipal College in Kentucky, Editor Brown believed in honest news reporting, telling the truth about Negroes for their own benefit.

To Detroit, where Negro Idol Joe Louis got his start, went Earl Brown, on leave from the Amsterdam News. There he talked with Manager John Roxborough and his wife, with some two dozen Louis friends and hangers-on. In Chicago he spent an evening with Marva Louis, Joe's wife, while she told her troubles. Back in Harlem, he saw Al Monroe, onetime Louis pal, Negro staffwriter for the Chicago Defender. Then Editor Brown wrote his story.

Consensus of the opinions of these Louis intimates: "Joe is a big, likable kid, but not too bright," spendthrift, sleepy, easygoing as an Alabama field hand. Marva Louis told how nonsmoking, nondrinking Joe frittered away fabulous sums of money on cab fares and cabaret checks for his friends. Trainer Jack Blackburn admitted that Joe didn't care much, one way or the other, about fighting. From newspapers and court files Earl Brown traced Manager Roxborough's connections with the numbers racket, Manager Julian Black's impressive police record. Some of the more lurid facts about the Louis entourage were generously omitted from the story.

When LIFE'S close-up first appeared, one week last month, reactions among Negroes were generally friendly. Out of 16 letters in Earl Brown's mail, 13 (from Negro readers like President Rufus E. Clement of Atlanta University, North Carolina's Sportswriter Dave Hawkins) praised Author Brown for a good job. Said Joe Louis, according to a friend in Detroit: "I ain't read it yet. If he makes something out of it, let him make it. I make mine fighting."

Then hell popped loose in the Negro press. Publisher Robert L. Vann led off with a thundering attack on Editor Brown in his Pittsburgh Courier. Manager Roxborough told an interviewer: "Earl Brown has proved himself just another Uncle Tom who . . . would sell the Negroes of America down the river. ..."

One afternoon Amsterdam News's Publisher C. B. Powell called Editor Brown into his office, told him that Roxborough did not like the story, feared it might hurt Joe Louis' status as an idol. Said Powell : "Do you want to resign or be fired?" Earl Brown chose to be fired.

Not overly worried about his future was Earl Brown last week. A political influence in Harlem, he has friends in New York's Democratic administration. Recently he served on a special committee, appointed by Governor Lehman to study ways and means of reducing noncompetitive civil service jobs, with such bigwigs as Lieutenant Governor Charles Poletti (a classmate at Harvard), onetime New York State Commissioner of Correction Edward Mulrooney, and Mrs. Douglas Moffat, former president of the New York State League of Women Voters.

Ex-Editor Brown has long covered Negro politics for the New York Herald Tribune, was one of the 1,000-odd newsmen at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia last fortnight. Last week, still hoping to be cleared by the Negro press, Earl Brown knew he could make a living (as he did before he joined the Amsterdam News in 1936) writing for white men's publications.

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