`With Joe Louis we had made it from the guttermost to the uttermost; from slaveship to championship. Usually the champion rides on the shoulders of the nation and its people, but in this case, the nation rode on the shoulders of the hero.'
From Jesse Jackson's eulogy

These scrapbooks offer not only an intimate portrait of Louis but also comprehensive evidence of the tensions in race relations in the United States during the '30s and '40s. Easily accessible on microfiche are full-length articles and brief sketches, cartoons, photographs, records and statistics from hundreds of newspapers which were preserved by Joe Louis' manager, Julian Black, in three sets of scrapbooks totalling 109 volumes. The collection is in three series: Black's own set, arranged chronologically by fight, 16 volumes which belonged to Louis, also arranged by fight and a single volume of random clippings from 1941-1944.