In 1932, after graduating from Northern High School, Elsie Roxborough stayed in Detroit for a year reporting on cultural events and writing gossip for the weekly newspaper her father owned, the Detroit Guardian. During that year, her life became intertwined with Joe Louis’s. Uncle John had discovered Louis at the Brewster Athletic club in 1930, and groomed him, as he would Elsie, to prove the splendor of blackness – its strength, beauty, artistry, and character. Louis, who wrote “I always followed other people,” followed his promoter with blind faith, for John Roxborough was a gentleman who wore tailor-made suits and held power in the black community. Louis later recalled in his autobiography: “He told me to drop by his real estate office…. The office was just a front…. In those days it was hard living…. If you were smart enough to have your own numbers operation and you were kind and giving in the black neighborhoods, you got as much respect as a doctor or lawyer… I’ll never forget the day Mr. Roxborough took me over to Long’s Drugstore and told the owner to give me anything I wanted and charge it to him. First time I ever had so many clean 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.”
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.”
“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!” 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.” 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.”
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 suddenly when Louis became engaged to Marva Trotter, the secretary to his other manager, Julian Black, in Chicago.
The Roxborough her friends describe was too spunky and inner-directed for the placid, outer-directed Louis. Her brother-in-law, Ben Brownley, remembers that “Elsie had the most exciting life of any black girl of her time.” And Peter W. Cassey, Jr., who retired recently as acting director of the Bureau of Taxation for Wayne County, says: “As a young kid, I was fascinated by her. Elsie seemed to have everything she wanted – her own car. We lived on the same street, Chandler. I can still hear my mother say, “There goes ELsie!” People envied her. She always created a stir. Today they would call her flaky, but she was far from flaky. She was an extremist; she thought she was Hollywood.” 10
Class pride was essential to Elsie Roxborough’s self-definition. Her forebears had gained wealth and position through education and native intelligence, and she was not going to forfeit that by stepping into the unrefined class Joe Louis represented. And perhaps a feminist yearning to achieve success by her own talents, not just as the lovely consort of a celebrity, kept her from taking Louis seriously.
Even with Louis out of her personal picture, life for Elsie Roxborough looked bright. The University of Michigan was a white person’s milieu for which she felt an affinity due to her social status and fair color. She had prevailed upon her sister to come to Ann Arbor, in January of 1935, and they were roommates in the beautiful new Mosher-Jordan dormitory on the hill. Until Senator Roxborough had persuaded the state legislature that there was discrimination in housing at the University, by unwritten code black students had lived in private Negro homes or in a Negroes-only league house on East Ann Street. Mary Taliaferro, wife of Senator Roxborough’s law partner, recalls: “Her father opened the doors to her; he made a legal issue of it. It had to be unpleasant for her. Others didn’t want to room with her and yet she was probably superior to most of them. [In Detroit] she lived in a nice home, with good maids, good equipment, the best of whatever was to be had at the time. It must have been hard on her that people wouldn’t want to room with her at the University.”