Pvt. Joe Louis says is a 1942 Office of War Information poster. A photograph shows the boxer Joe Louis in Army uniform and helmet with a rifle and fixed bayonet, above his quoted words that "we're going to do our part" and will win "because we're on God's side" (NAID 513548).
What the sheet prints
The photograph shows Joe Louis in uniform and a steel helmet, holding a rifle with the bayonet fixed. He is set against a blue panel. Below him, his rank, his name and a sentence in quotation marks. The fine print at the foot is illegible in the archive's copy.
Pvt. Joe Louis says_
"We're going to do our part ... and we'll win because we're on God's side"
Who issued it
The FRAME record credits the Office of War Information. The poster gives no date or occasion for the words, and the record does not trace them to a speech or interview. This page quotes them as the poster prints them and does not add a source.
How to read it
The poster is a testimonial: a famous man's face and words lend his standing to the war. Louis held the world heavyweight title, as a 1943 OWI cartoon panel by Charles Alston in the same archive points out, and here he is shown as a private with a rifle, not as a champion in the ring.
That choice carried a message beyond the quotation. A Black champion in uniform told Black Americans that the war was theirs, and told white Americans the same thing about him. The poster presents his service as uncomplicated. It does not mention the discrimination that Black citizens met at home in hiring and much else, which a War Manpower Commission poster of the same year addressed directly by quoting the President against discrimination "because of race, creed, color, or national origin." A government that used Louis's image was asking Black citizens to defend rights it did not yet secure for them equally, and the sheet is silent on that part of the bargain.
The second half of the quotation is a claim no poster can prove. "God's side" is a confident phrase used by many belligerents in many wars. It asks for faith, not evidence.
Louis's service was real, and admiring it is fair. So is noticing that the poster asks one side of the bargain. For a 1942 sheet that does name discrimination, see Americans All. The Office of War Information index and the OWI domestic branch study cover the issuing office. The essay on the Roosevelt administration sets the Office of War Information beside Executive Order 9066, issued the same year, another place where equal treatment fell short.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Pvt. Joe Louis says: We're going to do our part ... and we'll win because we're on God's side, 1942. Office of War Information. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-87, NAID 513548, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
