The Cita Dennis Hubbell Library in Algiers hosted an author night on Tuesday (April 16), where a local historian told the story of how a lesser-known walkout toward the end of the Jim Crow era led to the formation of the New Orleans Saints.
Erin Grayson Sapp, author of “Moving the Chains: The Civil Rights Protest that Saved the Saints and Transformed New Orleans,” spoke at a packed library about how the 1964 American Football League (AFL) All-Star Game walkout in New Orleans forced the city to examine its racial inequities, leading to the formation of the New Orleans Saints the following year.
In July 1964, New Orleans was slated to host the AFL’s all-star game — which pitted the league’s top performers across its western and eastern conferences against each other — at Tulane Stadium. At the time, the city wanted to prove through ticket sales and attendance that it was valuable enough to get a professional football league to start a team in New Orleans.
However, Black AFL players experienced racism as soon as their plane landed in the city for the January 1965 game.
Some Black players were left stranded outside the airport afterwhite cab drivers refused to give them a ride, Sapp said during her presentation.
At the Roosevelt Hotel, where the West team was staying, players were instructed to not use the main elevator by staff and were denied service at the hotel’s restaurant. Louisiana native and AFL Hall of Famer Ernie Ladd, one of the players who organized the walkout, had a gun pulled on him when he tried to enter a nightclub, Earl Faison, one of Ladd’s former teammates, told Andscape.
A short time after arriving in New Orleans, the Black all-star players voted to walk out on the game and AFL executives moved the game to Houston’s present-day Robertson Stadium in response.
The incident became a big story in New Orleans, where The Times-Picayune ran an article about the walkout on its front page. White locals who heard about the walkout disputed the players’ claims of racism, Sapp said.
“The overwhelming reaction from white locals all the way to the mayor, Victor Schiro, was one of denial and defensiveness,” Sapp said. “There were prideful claims that New Orleans was actually a very tolerant and progressive place. So as a result, there was no apologetic response, and certainly no calls for change.”
But things changed the next year, when Atlanta was awarded its own franchise in the National Football League (NFL). The development intensified New Orleans residents’ desire for a pro team of their own, Sapp said.
Without taking blame for the AFL walkout the year prior, city leaders wanted to transform the city’s image and prove to the NFL that New Orleans was progressive and tolerant all along, Sapp said. Advertisements donned slogans such as, “Now is the time to show the real pros they are welcome in this city,” according to Sapp’s book. At the Tuesday evening event, she said that slogans were a mix of thinly-veiled calls for change and attempts to distance the city from AFL boycott months prior.
New Orleans eventually got its famed Saints franchise after NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and other professional football executives toured the city to see if there was progress in race relations, since the walkout.
Then-U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs (D) and Rozelle have often been given credit for the founding of the Saints because of a backroom deal they made that led to the merger of the NFL and AFL. However, that account of the formation of the Saints leaves out the impact of the AFL All-Star game walkout and the change it inspired, Sapp said.
“City leaders and sports promoters in New Orleans had been working behind the scenes, since around the time of the walkout, to make sure that their pro football efforts were an integrated venture,” Sapp said.
Among the group that met Rozelle and his cohort when they arrived in the city, were HBCU administrators Albert Dent and Norman Francis (father of Verite News Executive Director David Francis); C.C. Dejoie and Jim Hall from the Louisiana Weekly, one of the oldest Black newspapers still in circulation; and numerous other Black business leaders and NAACP representatives.
“The team was a citywide win from the beginning,” Sapp said.
Henry Germain-McCarthy, who is a regular at the library’s author nights, said that while he doesn’t follow football, he was interested in the talk because of the civil rights angle.
“I’m not a sports fan, except for the Olympics, I couldn’t care less about anything else,” Germain-McCarthy said. “[But] I’m very interested in civil rights history on a variety of fronts, including disability rights and women’s rights and obviously the Black civil rights movement, which I grew up in.”
Francis and Dejoie later became minority investors in the Saints, the first Black people to hold ownership stakes in a professional football team.
Sapp said that the AFL all-stars who refused to be mistreated should have their story told alongside the Saints’ because their bravery helped transform an entire city.
“While I don’t think they ever got anywhere near the recognition they deserve,” Sapp said, “I do hope they are, or were, proud of what they did.”
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