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Joe Dorsey's Big Fight: How An Unknown Boxer Knocked Out Segregation In Louisiana

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Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

In July 1955, inside a small dressing room in the New Orleans Coliseum, Joe Dorsey was sitting by himself, waiting to punch somebody.

New Orleans was a fanatical boxing town. The champions were local stars with style and verve. Heavy-fisted Joe Brown used his winnings to buy himself expensive suits and rounds of drinks for packed jazz clubs on Saturday nights. Ralph Dupas, known as "Native Dancer" for his frantic footwork, was a swarthy 20-year-old who looked like a cross between Elvis Presley and James Brown, topped with a pompadour. Dorsey was routinely described in local papers as "rugged,” and the Louisiana Weekly said he had "fists clenched with TNT." "He was a hell of a puncher," Alcee P. Honoré, who attended Dorsey's fights back then, tells me. "He hit you; that could be it for you."

Dorsey's official boxing credentials

Courtesy of the Dorsey Family

Light-skinned and handsome, with close-cropped hair and pointed eyebrows, Dorsey became a local boxing hero, lavishly covered in both the black and white newspapers. He thumped every fighter who came in from out of town — Milwaukee, Miami, Philadelphia — before Coliseum crowds of more than 1,800 customers, who bought tickets for $1 or $2. But the eighth-ranked light heavyweight boxer in the U.S. couldn't make more than $600 a year. He had to take odd jobs, like cleaning up at nightclubs for $45 a week or working at Cut Rate Liquors on Canal Street. "There were times when I didn't have money to buy food for my family," Dorsey would say. "I'd have to borrow from my manager or my mother."

For a long time, Dorsey, who was good with numbers, couldn't discern what was going wrong. "Maybe because I ain't got much education, maybe that's what's holding me back," speculated Dorsey, who lived with his family in a five-room frame house, using a stove for heat, on St. Anthony Street in the Seventh Ward. "When you got education you ain't afraid to talk to people. You feel like you feel secure. I sure wish I had more education."

Maybe part of his problem was that he wasn't flashy, like the great Joe Brown, lightweight champion of the world numerous times in the '50s and '60s. "He was not a very flamboyant type of guy," Elmo Adolph, the New Orleans-born boxing expert who refereed tens of thousands of worldwide fights, from Larry Holmes to Reggie Johnson, told me before his death in 2012. "He was somebody that you would enjoy seeing, but unfortunately, a lot of his fights you didn't see, because of the fact that he wasn't one of those main main attractions."

Or maybe his problem was something bigger, something beyond his control: Boxing in New Orleans had been segregated since 1892, when a black boxer named George Dixon beat his Irish challenger Jack Skelly before a massive crowd. Within four days, New Orleans’ Olympic Athletic Club banned interracial boxing for good. By 1950, Louisiana’s State Athletic Commission had followed suit. Throughout his career, Dorsey had been confined to fighting exclusively black opponents, which was not only unjust, but uneconomical. Dorsey was entering his boxing prime at a particularly divisive moment: As the civil rights movement was gaining traction, some Southern politicians were determined to hold onto — and even build upon — racist laws.

In his dressing room that night, on July 22, 1955, waiting to fight Andy Mayfield, Dorsey was nervous. He dealt with the butterflies in his stomach the usual way: He fell asleep. When he woke up, according to the black newspaper Louisiana Weekly, he strode into the ring and knocked out Mayfield with a left to the midsection in the sixth round.

Then he prepared for his next fight: Six days after beating Mayfield, Joe Dorsey filed suit. He initially intended merely to provide more money for his family. But not only would he wind up avenging more than six decades of wronged African-American athletes, he would also lay the groundwork to integrate musicians and performers in one of the most culturally vibrant — but racially divided — places in America.

Like every Southern politician, Earl K. Long considered himself a man of the people, and proved it with his eccentric, down-home behavior. On the campaign trail to be reelected governor, "Uncle Earl" walked Louisiana's dirt roads, shaking hands, asking people what they thought about things.

Earl Long was the younger brother of the Kingfish, Gov. Huey P. Long, who had infamously ruled over the state as a benevolent dictator until a crazed assassin shot and killed him in 1935. Whereas the Kingfish formed his policy decrees from his governor's mansion bunker in Baton Rouge, Earl was a populist who mocked the entire idea of being a politician. During election season, according to Michael Kurtz and Morgan Peoples' Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl, he frequently arrived at campaign events an hour late, passing the time during other candidates' speeches by picking his nose, scratching his crotch, catching gnats in the air, and crossing and uncrossing his legs. And this was during speeches by members of his own party.

Long had to support segregation in order to win elections in the South. But he undercut these views by standing up for black people as human beings — a radical position at that time. In the late 1940s, he pushed for an equal pay structure for black and white schoolteachers. He made sure black people remained on the state's voter rolls and campaigned at black churches.

Earl's opposite number in Louisiana was Willie Rainach, a slick-haired, thin-lipped segregationist in his forties who had run the White Citizens' Council in rural Claiborne Parish and proudly displayed a Confederate flag on his tie. Earl once was giving an impromptu political speech when he spotted Sen. Rainach in the audience and, in his impenetrable drawl, said, "He’ll probably go up there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at the moon, and get close to God." Turning to face Rainach directly, Long added, as A.J. Liebling would recall in his fantastic 1970 new-journalism biography The Earl of Louisiana: “And when you do, you got to recognize that niggers is human beings!” (This prediction never came true: Rainach, a staunch segregationist to the end, committed suicide with a .38-caliber pistol in 1978.)

Yet in the summer of 1956, months into his second term, Uncle Earl signed several segregation bills that Rainach and Louisiana's Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation pushed across his desk. The governor had no choice. He planned to run, again, down the road, and Earl Long always thought in political terms. "The trend is toward more segregation," Rainach told reporters, and briefly he was right. Rainach's dozen segregationist bills were part of the South's massive resistance to civil rights.

So in late June, Gov. Long picked up his pen. Separate black and white waiting rooms at bus stations and airports? Signed! Give state police the power to enforce segregation in parks? Yes! Undercut the national court order integrating schools for white and black students? That too! Long may have been conflicted, but he handled these signings with typical folksy humor. Referring to Rep. John Garrett, vice chairman of Rainach's committee, the governor breezily told reporters, "I don't know how much good these bills will do, but I don't want Garrett to think I'm courting the colored people."

Eventually there was one segregation bill left for Long to sign. And this time, he paused. It had passed the Louisiana Senate by a margin of 33-0, and the House followed within a week. The law was to take effect in October, banning "dancing, social functions, entertainments, athletic training, games, sports or contests and other such activities involving personal and social contacts in which the participants or contestants are members of the white and Negro races."

On July 16, 1956, Earl Long, man of the people, friend to the black voter, sworn enemy of Willie Rainach, signed the law. It would probably wind up in court, he admitted, but what could he do? He was merely bowing to the will of his constituents, who, the governor reported, favored the bill 4 to 1.

Courtesy of the Dorsey Family

Joseph Dorsey Jr. was born on July 16, 1935, son of a carpenter, Joseph Sr., and a homemaker, Virgin. He grew up in a shotgun house in the Seventh Ward, northeast of the French Quarter, a Creole "city within a city" for working families, as Beverly Jacques Anderson put it in her book Cherished Memories. Dorsey attended the Seventh Ward’s two public elementary schools. He dropped out after his sixth year. "My mother used to say it was 'cause he was bad," his daughter, Dorinda Dorsey, 51, recalls.

Thicker and more muscular than other kids, Dorsey realized his talents were more suited for the gym than the classroom. "I never thought I'd be a fighter," he would tell Jet, the only publication, nationally or locally, to interview Dorsey at length. "I was always the scary type." By the time he was 11, he was hanging around boxing gyms near the French Quarter, where the assembled fight men noticed he had some talent. They started giving him real fights, which he won. In his wedding photo, Joe Dorsey stands a foot taller than his new wife, Evelyn Dorsey, née Watson. He's wearing a light sport coat, wide tie, and slacks sagging an inch too long over his dress shoes. Evelyn is smiling radiantly, in an immaculately white blouse-and-skirt combo, with a dainty purse, gloves, hat, and carnation, clutching her husband's arm. At 16, they look like they're playing dress-up. Everything in the photo seems a few sizes too big, with one exception — Joe Dorsey's hands are fully grown.

Dorsey racked up 12 victories in a row from 1953 to 1955, spending his spare time training at Curly's Gym. This fixture, on Poydras and St. Charles, just outside the French Quarter, drew important boxing figures from all over the city, from cigar-smoking promoters and managers to Willie Pastrano, the future light heavyweight champion.

Dorsey with manager William Kron

Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

William "Brother" Kron, the veteran New Orleans boxing manager, took an interest in the 167-pound Dorsey, setting him up with bigger and bigger fights. In public, he drove his fighters intensely. In private, he spoke softly, building their confidence (and loyalty) by saying things like, "Come on, now, let's fight like you know how" when he was alone with them in their corners. As he became more successful, and popular, Dorsey would fight mostly at the Coliseum, a wooden 1922 building at the corner of Conti and Roman, near the Quarter, where the stands were built at a sharp angle, so every seat was a good one. In summers, when the oppressive heat seeped in, Coliseum officials hauled in large blocks of ice, covered them with canvas, and allowed fans to take turns sitting on them.

Although he was light-skinned and lived in the Seventh Ward, where some Creoles "passed" as whites, Dorsey was not a Creole. Once the law was passed, which happened to follow his bout against Andy Mayfield in 1955, he was more inclined to fight than hide.

AP Photo

The law that Gov. Earl Long signed was on the books for about three years. Its immediate impact was on sports.

The long-awaited 1958 prizefight between New Orleans' hometown light heavyweights, Joe Brown (black) and Ralph Dupas (white), had to be moved to Houston. (Dorsey, who fought in a lower weight class that didn’t attract the huge publicity and the big-time boxing promoters, couldn’t afford to take all his bouts out of state.) That year was the second year LSU's football team was scheduled to play the University of Wisconsin during the regular season in Louisiana. They were two of the top college teams in the country, and the game might have determined who played in the national championship. However, Earl Hill and Sidney Williams, the Badgers' star wide receiver and quarterback, were black. Due to the law, LSU officials had to contact Wisconsin and tell its coaches to leave Hill and Williams at home.

"Of course, we wanted to beat them — to show the people that set the policy up that we could play football as well as they could," Williams tells me by phone from Kalamazoo, Mich., where he is a retired patent lawyer. "We wanted to kick their ass." The Badgers never got the chance. Wisconsin officials courageously refused LSU's request, as they had the year before, so the scheduled game never took place. "Canceled due to racism," read the headline of the Wisconsin Magazine of History five decades later.

An article on the Dupas case from Ebony.

Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company

In New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, pompadoured boxer Ralph Dupas, the "Native Dancer," attended white Francis T. Nicholls High School, named for a Confederate brigadier general and post-Civil War governor. (In the early '60s, in response to school desegregation in New Orleans, Nicholls students would hang Confederate flags and a KKK banner and sing a song they invented called "Glory, Glory Segregation.") But Dupas had a dark complexion. In 1957, as he was rising in the boxing ranks, a retired, white birth registrar, Lucretia Gravolet, emerged from Pointe à la Hache to insist he was not a Dupas but a Duplessis. Gravolet claimed herself to have registered Dupas — as a black man. Given the new law, Dupas had to hire lawyers and sued the city to prove that he was white. The boxer won, but the case took its toll on his family. "It really hurt us, you know," Peter Dupas, the late Ralph's brother, tells me, still reluctant to be interviewed after all these years. "We got that straightened out so Ralph could start fighting here. It was terrible."

The law's repercussions would stretch far beyond New Orleans, affecting even the great Louis Armstrong, the hometown hero who had long since graduated to international stardom. "I just wonder what them politicians got on their mind," responded Satchmo, who was barnstorming the world with a band of white and black jazz musicians in the '50s. "They got the nerve to have my picture hanging on the wall of some of the finest clubs in New Orleans, but still I can't play there. I recorded with the Dukes of Dixieland in Chicago the same record they're playing on New Orleans jukeboxes, but we couldn't play there in person. Don't forget to quote me as saying, 'I don't care if I never go to New Orleans again.'"

Some of the great musicians from that time barely remember any kind of segregation law, since the indignities of Jim Crow were merely part of their routines back then. "When you live with segregation 24/7, there are things that occur consistently that you don't like. You'd be in a state of outrage all the time," veteran New Orleans jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton and Branford, says. "A lot of what happens is, kind of, you anticipate, and you become numb to some of it."

Dorsey with his attorney Israel M. Augustine.

Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.


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