KATHLEEN A. HAUKE
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bandages, rubbing alcohol and such.... Sometimes he'd invite me to
his house for dinner. It was a beautiful house, and he had a goodlooking and gracious wife. I loved it. I never saw black people living
this way, and I was envious and watched everything he did.5
Many of their peers remember a romance between Elsie Roxborough
and Joe Louis. Sometimes Louis accompanied the Roxboroughs to
Idlewild, the American black society resort community near Manistee in northern Michigan. Elsie had spent all the summers of her
childhood there, playing softball, riding horseback, "posing" on the
beach - she did not swim - and dancing in the clubhouse each evening to the jukebox. Neighbors at Idlewild included author Charles
W. Chesnutt, and physicians Daniel Hale Williams, who first performed open-heart surgery, and Charles Drew, who discovered
blood plasma. Nella Larsen referred in her novel Passing (1929) to
Idlewild as "quite the thing" for blacks who had "arrived."6
"Every girl wants love," Elsie Roxborough's friend Julia Duncan
says. "Joe Louis had money, and for Elsie it was a fantasy dating
him. She said she would marry him, but I never paid any attention.
She was seventeen years old!"7 When Louis's eyes wandered, Elsie
broke the windows of his new Packard. Ulysses W. Boykin, who
wrote a column "With the Younger Set" for the Detroit Tribune in
the 1930s, and is now vice president of WGPR Radio and TV 62, the
first black-owned station in the United States, recalls that "Elsie was
in love with Joe Louis; it wasn't just rumor, yet it wasn't a hot love
affair. People here felt the romance would blossom into something,
but Joe was not cultured."8 A member of the Roxane Players, Nimrod Carney, conjectures, "There was a class thing among blacks.
Uncle John would have tried to break it up because John Roxborough was a very proud man. The cultural differences would be too
great."9
In June, 1935, Joe Louis was big news in the black press and
beginning to be noticed in the white. The Chicago Defender got
wind of an impending engagement and asked both parties if it were
true. On 13 July 1935 its front-page banner read, "'NOT
ENGAGED,' SAY JOE LOUIS AND GIRL FRIEND: Co-Ed Denies
Rumor That She Will Wed." It quoted Elsie Roxborough's wire to
the Defender: "Joe and I are merely friends and my career as a
writer is much more important to me than the thought of marriage."
Joe Louis answered, "I think Elsie is a fine girl, but... she has her
books to think about." The Roxborough-Louis romance ended sud
