New book recalls civil rights history of New Orleans sports leagues
29th April 2024 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
The glaring spotlight of truth is that the New Orleans in part rejected the Negro football stars. The players found on the street that someone had told a false statement [about racism in New Orleans] that they were not welcomed. So, the Negro football stars simply agreed to pack up their bags and leave, rather than to submit to discrimination and insulting conditions.
In January 1965, Jim Hall, the legendary and pugnacious sports editor of The Louisiana Weekly, wrote a column that predicted a death knell for any possibility that New Orleans might become a sports city.
After seeing the 21 African-American participants in the 1965 American Football League All-Star game decide to boycott the star-studded contest, which had been scheduled for that week at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, Hall knew he had to say something. He couldn’t sit on his hands.
The Black players walked away from the all-star game after being subjected to virulent racism when they had attempted to enjoy the restaurants, bars and clubs for which the city’s French Quarter was known around the world. That included slammed doors, nasty, vicious comments and overall hostility from the city’s white residents and businesspeople.
For Hall, it proved an ominous, tragic sign for the future of New Orleans.
“After the story concerning the Negro gridders’ protest and the game being called off, hit the wirer services, New Orleans as a sports center for the professionals hit the bottom, harder than the 1929 stock market. The French Quarter nightclubs and the cab drivers, who stood to gain lots of money from Saturday’s big game and other attractions here, hurt the city, as well as those striving to improve the over-all [sic] picture of New Orleans, which has been out of focus for some-time [sic]
“Frankly, there is no way to erase the shame which has covered New Orleans, by Saturday’s racial downpour. Because of the ‘hate’ shower, which has been continuous in certain quarters, New Orleans [sic] chances of being a sports center, have drowned.”
But Hall was fortunately wrong. Not only did the embarrassment on a national stage of lingering segregation not destroy New Orleans’ sports future, it had the opposite effect. It was a remarkable turnaround that helped the city bring its eventual pride and joy, the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints, one of the singular entities that, in the ensuing, has united all New Orleanians, regardless of race, class or gender.
That tale – how a civil rights boycott by professional athletes allowed, in the long run, for New Orleans to have its own pro football team, as well as major events like Super Bowls – is now told in “Moving the Chains: The Civil Rights Protest That Saved the Saints and Transformed New Orleans,” a recent book by Historic New Orleans Collection scholar-in-residence Erin Grayson Sapp that details the highs and lows of New Orleans’ struggle to live up to the ideals of fairness, equality and integration, and how that struggle benefitted the city, its economy and its people in the long run.
On April 16, Grayson Sapp presented her book and discussed with members of the public how the book came about, the process of researching and writing it, and how the challenge impacted her. The public forum was held at the Cita Dennis Hubbell branch of the New Orleans Public Library in Algiers point.
At the event, Grayson Sapp, who holds a doctorate in English and American Studies from Tulane University, said that in her research for other topics, when she came across references to the 1965 AFL All-Star game. She lived, studied and followed sports in New Orleans for a long time, but had never known about the 1965 football boycott.
It prompted her to dig deeper and, eventually, write “Moving the Chains.”
“I’d never heard about it,” she told the audience. “It seemingly had been forgotten. I thought it was a story that needed to be told, and I was the one to do it.”
In a follow-up interview with The Louisiana Weekly, Grayson Sapp said that after the jolt of public criticism and self-reflection by a city that had thought itself progressive and cosmopolitan, a delusion that cut to the core of the city’s soul and forced its white residents and business owners to take a long, hard look at the themselves.
She said that the AFL All-Star game came roughly six months after the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, a factor with which New Orleans and its people had yet to fully grapple.
“In January 1965, the knee jerk reaction of white locals was overwhelmingly one of denial and defensiveness,” she said. Just six months before the walkout, the city met the Civil Rights Act with little pushback but also with limited compliance, leading to a false impression of complete integration.
“Many white locals were naïve to the degree of Civil Rights progress that still needed to take place in the city,” she added. “Largely, they weren’t defending racism or segregation but rather their idea of their city as progressive and tolerant. A common response from the local Black community was that a city doesn’t become cosmopolitan by simply claiming to be.”
The athletes who staged the boycott deserve much credit and respect for taking a bold, risky stance and action; many media members, football fans and average folks heavily criticized them, shining a searing spotlight on them.
“The Black players felt obligated to take a stand, in defense of their own rights and those of the Black New Orleanians who were subject to such treatment on a daily basis,” she said. “But they were taking a huge risk in walking out on the game. It was unprecedented, and the consequences were unknowable.”
Grayson Sapp thus called the AFL walkout “a very early example of activism in American sports. And its long-term impact on New Orleans’s race relations has never been adequately acknowledged. However, the boycott was immediately seen as a success at its most basic level: the players’ ability to take a stand and force the league to move a game was seen as proof of athletes’ power and influence.”
Also significant in the story of the all-star game is how, in the wake of the African-American players’ boycotts, the white members of the all-star game joined with their Black peers and walked out from the game as well, Grayson Sapp said.
The contest was quickly rescheduled for Jeppesen Stadium in Houston on Jan. 16, when the game went off without a hitch and resulted in a 38-14 West team victory in front of roughly 15,400 fans.
Meanwhile, the once-endangered chances of New Orleans landing a professional football team – a prospect that took a significant blow because of the all-star game firestorm – were starting to turn around following the city’s united response to the negative publicity.
The positive turn led to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announcing on Nov. 1, 1966, that the city of New Orleans had been granted a franchise in the league, and on Sept. 17, 1967, the Saints played their first game as members of the NFL.
After concluding her April 16 talk at the Hubbell Library, Grayson Sapp took questions, signed copies of her book, and chatted with members of the audience.
Grayson Sapp said the AFL All-Star boycott was perhaps even a necessary occurrence in the city’s evolution as an integrated, diverse, welcoming place – one that now is a beehive of sports activity, including the Saints – by forcing New Orleans to do what they needed to do legally, economically and morally. It’s a legacy of togetherness and passion that has helped the city survive challenge after challenge, including a devastating hurricane.
“The walkout forced the city to come together, to prove its unity to the NFL in order to earn a pro club,” she said, “and that shaped what the Saints became (and still are) to New Orleans in a way that expansion didn’t necessarily affect other applicant cities, whose major criteria might have been adequate stadia or season ticket quotas. The team was a unifying, citywide win from the beginning and sparked a rebirth in the city’s spirit, something I believe we witnessed again when the Superdome reopened after Hurricane Katrina.”
This article originally published in the April 29, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
