With so many players, coaches, and teams speaking out about police violence in the wake of Kenosha, Wisconsin police shooting Jacob Blake, a Black man, several times in the back on Sunday — and with the Milwaukee Bucks choosing to boycott Game 5 of their NBA playoff series against the Orlando Magic (followed by the announcement that all of Wednesday’s games would be cancelled due to boycott), it leads one to wonder if the increased public civil rights awareness of seemingly everyone in the NFL might lead to pro football boycotts once the regular season actually gets rolling on September 10.
There’s no word of that possibility at this time, but there has been a professional football boycott before — and for racial reasons. Which means it could happen again.
FED UP. Ain’t enough money in world to keep overlooking true issues that effect the mind body & soul of what we do. We cannot be happy for self when our communities are suffering & innocent folk are dying.. since George Floyd, there have been at least 20 other police shootings. https://t.co/UmzuuWP7us
— Tyrann Mathieu (@Mathieu_Era) August 26, 2020
Six months after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the American Football League was set to play its All-Star game on January 16, 1965 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. This was 10 days after the stadium hosted the first completely integrated Sugar Bowl game without incident. But as the AFL players were to find out, incidents abounded upon their arrival.
“They told us, bring your wife and kids,” Raiders running back Clem Daniels recalled. “There will also be a golf tournament. It sounded like a big picnic.”
It really wasn’t. Black players found it nearly impossible to find public transportation, and restaurants were problematic at best.
“In the restaurants, the patriots didn’t want us to sit anywhere near them,” said Bills tight end Ernie Warlick in the NFL Films documentary, “Full Color Football.” “We’d hang up our coats, and they’d say, ‘Hey—don’t put your coats next to mine!’”
“I checked in, and I heard in the background, somebody asked a question: ‘Was that [defensive lineman] Ernie Ladd?’ And another guy in the background said, ‘No, Ernie Ladd’s a bigger [n-word] than that. That Ladd is a big [n-word],” recalled Chargers defensive lineman Earl Faison.
Chiefs running back Abner Haynes: “I get on the elevator to go to my room, and the elevator operator says, ‘You monkeys get in the back, so everybody can get in!’ I said, ‘You’re an elevator operator, and I’m a monkey?’
Warlick: “We went out to get a taxi. Taxis were lined up out in front of the hotel. [Bills running back] Cookie Gilchrist, one of our players, said, ‘Hey—we want a taxi.’ And the guy says ‘We gotta call y’all a colored cab.’ And Cookie says, ‘I don’t care what color the cab is; I just want a taxi! Why can’t we ride in one of these?’”
Eventually, several players decided to go to the French Quarter, where things escalated further.
“There’s a greeter standing outside saying, ‘Come in here, come in here.’ We get to another door, we get ready to go in, this little guy standing there pulls out a gun. ‘You are not coming in here. You [n-words] are not coming in here.’”
The look of hurt on Faison’s face, four decades later, tells the story even more graphically than his words do. Faison said that Ladd lunged at the man holding the gun, and the man aimed the gun at Ladd’s nose, saying, “I will pull the trigger.”
Ladd told Faison that he wasn’t going to play a game in New Orleans under any conditions, and the Black players on both the East and West teams got together to discuss a boycott. When the players were set to board the bus for practice that morning, Hall of Fame offensive tackle recalls the difference in attendance.
“The bus was like a third empty. And the coach said, ‘Where is everybody?’ Somebody said, ‘None of the Black players are here. They’re all in a meeting.’”
Per Neil Graves of The Undefeated, Mix tried to talk to the black players and convince them to reverse their decision, but they would not be moved.
“Look, we know we aren’t going to change these people,” Raiders receiver Art Powell told Mix. “But neither are they going to change us. We must act as our conscience dictates.” And to Mix’s contention that this boycott would leave the players as bad examples for black people everywhere who couldn’t just leave a situation when things got tough… well, Powell had an answer for that, too.
“I suppose it would be better to stay here and by doing so imply that we accept such treatment for ourselves and our people?” Powell said. “Do you want us to condone it?”
The AFL had several options. They could play the game without their black players. They could try to force the black players to play. They could move the game to a more hospitable environment. Or, they could cancel the game altogether. To the league’s credit, and very much against the prevailing sentiment of the time, which gave players (especially black players) very little voice in anything important in any sport, the league moved the game to Houston’s Jeppesen Stadium and out of New Orleans altogether.
After the game was moved, New Orleans mayor Victor Schiro told the Associated Press that AFL Commissioner Joe Foss “acted hastily,” and that the players who walked out did “themselves and their race a disservice by precipitous action.”
“If these men would play football only in cities where everybody loved them, they’d all be out of a job today. Their reaction will only aggravate the very condition they are seeking, in time, to eliminate.”
Dixon questioned “the wisdom of the peremptory action with they took to redress these alleged grievances.”
The city tried to appease the players by sending Ernest Morial, the NAACP field secretary for New Orleans, to try and negotiate a peace.
“I met with the players and asked them not to leave immediately, but to give us 24 hours to see if the matter could be worked out to the satisfaction of the entire community,” Morial, who eventually became New Orleans’ first black mayor, told The Undefeated. “[But] in the final analysis, it was their decision.”
According to Dixon, Morial told them that “militant action such as they were contemplating would not only damage this city, but would greatly retard efforts by man of goodwill, of both races, to achieve harmony in the most difficult problem of our times.”
“Our experience thus far with integrated football, basketball and even track meets had been exceptionally good,” Dixon continued in that AP article. “We are a very cosmopolitan and tolerant city, but we are also a Southern city, and there are times when personal reaction is unpredictable.
“It seems to me that the players who walked out on us should have rolled with the punch. Almost all of them are educated college men, who must be aware than you cannot change human beings overnight.”
Which is why sometimes, you need to force the thought of change with decisive action.
“It didn’t get the publicity I think it should have,” Patriots defensive lineman Houston Antwine said of the boycott in the book, Going Long. “We didn’t feel it was properly addressed. Back in Boston, there was one little blip in the paper showing me with my bag leaving the hotel. That was basically it. The hostility and the treatment we received was never really publicized.”
Antwine had a point. The 1965 AFL boycott wasn’t talked about as much as it should have been, and it certainly hasn’t been discussed as much as future examples of resistance were. But for the times, and in a relatively new league, it was a very gutsy decision to make for players who had been treated like equals for two reasons—enlightened men like Sid Gillman, Al Davis, and Hank Stram, and the league’s realization that were it to succeed, it would have to do away with old quotas and biases and accept all players based on pure talent. Given half a decade of such progress, it’s easy to see why the environment presented to those players seemed impossible to take under any circumstances.
Sadly, the need for this kind of action hasn’t changed in the decades since.