Joseph Dorsey Jr.

Last updated
Joseph Dorsey Jr.
Born
Joseph Dorsey Jr.

(1935-07-16)July 16, 1935
DiedOctober 20, 2004(2004-10-20) (aged 69)
Nationality American
Other namesJoe
Statistics
Weight(s) Light heavyweight
Boxing record
Total fights35
Wins29
Wins by KO20
Losses6

Joseph "Joe" Dorsey Jr. (July 16, 1935-October 20, 2004) was an American professional boxer, ending with a 29-6 record, who won a court case in the 1950s against Louisiana's law banning interracial boxing matches. [1] The New Orleans-born Dorsey began boxing at 16 and retired from the sport at age 31. [2]

Career

Boxing in New Orleans, a hotbed of enthusiasm for the sport, was segregated as early as 1892 when a black boxer named George Dixon beat his Irish challenger, Jack Skelly. By contrast, Louisiana state boxing officials didn't officially segregate the sport until 1950. In 1950, Governor Earl Long entrenched and widened the segregation policy, signing a law 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."

Dorsey, a 7th Ward resident who was a light-skinned black man but would not pass for white, sued the state and its Louisiana State Athletic Commission for the right to box with white fighters on July 28, 1955. The New Orleans' major newspaper, The Times-Picayune, buried the story. In November 1958, a three-judge federal court in New Orleans found both the Louisiana law and the athletic commission's own rule against interracial bouts unconstitutional. Writing the opinion, Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the Louisiana law was "unconstitutional on its face in that separation of Negroes and whites based solely on their being Negroes and whites is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," and that segregated boxing matches were no exception. [3] Louisiana appealed the ruling but the ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in May 1959. The decision officially ended segregated athletic competition in the state, although it did not extend to the seating at sporting events, which remained segregated after the decision. [4]

Dorsey retired from boxing not long after filing the lawsuit, partly because it was difficult for him to be allowed in boxing matches because he had been blacklisted, thanks to his part in boxing's desegregation. Dorsey worked nearly four decades as a longshoreman, retiring in 1997, after leaving boxing. Dorsey died October 20, 2004, from cancer. Dorsey's family survivors as of 2004 include his wife, Evelyn, and five sons and a daughter.

Related Research Articles

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown, and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the south lasted into the 1960s.

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case involved Mildred Loving, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man. In 1958, they were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

<i>Gebhart v. Belton</i> United States Supreme Court case

Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862, aff'd, 91 A.2d 137, was a case decided by the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1952 and affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court in the same year. Gebhart was one of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court which found unconstitutional racial segregation in United States public schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citizens' Councils</span> American segregationist organizations

The Citizens' Councils were an associated network of white supremacist, segregationist organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South and created as part of a white backlash against the US Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The first was formed on July 11, 1954. The name was changed to the Citizens' Councils of America in 1956. With about 60,000 members across the Southern United States, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of public schools: the logical conclusion of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund</span> Organization in New York, United States

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.

This is a timeline of African-American history, the part of history that deals with African Americans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leander Perez</span> American judge

Leander Henry Perez Sr. was an American Democratic Party political boss of Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes in southeastern Louisiana during the middle third of the 20th century. Officially, he served as a district judge, later as district attorney, and as president of the Plaquemines Parish Commission Council. He was known for leading efforts to enforce and preserve segregation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McDonogh Three</span> Students who desegregated a New Orleans public school in 1960

The McDonogh Three is a nickname for three African American students who desegregated McDonogh 19 Elementary School, in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Even though school segregation had been illegal since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, no states in the American Deep South had taken action to integrate their schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Racial segregation in the United States</span>

Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation have been systematically separated in the United States on racial categorizations. Segregation was the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, as well as the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority and mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, and the separation of roles within an institution. The U.S. Armed Forces were formally segregated until 1948, as black units were typically separated from white units but were still led by white officers.

Joseph Francis Rummel was a German-born American Catholic prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as bishop of the Diocese of Omaha in Nebraska from 1928 to 1935 and as archbishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans from 1935 to 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. P. Tureaud</span> American lawyer (1899–1972)

Alexander Pierre "A. P." Tureaud Sr. was an African-American attorney who headed the legal team for the New Orleans chapter of the NAACP during the Civil Rights Movement. With the assistance of Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, A. P. Tureaud filed the lawsuit that successfully ended the system of Jim Crow segregation in New Orleans. That case paved the way for integrating the first two elementary schools in the Deep South.

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. Such laws remained in force until 1965. Formal and informal segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-White Movement.

Public schools in New Orleans, Louisiana, were desegregated to a significant degree for a period of almost seven years during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War of the United States. Desegregation of this scale was not seen again in the Southern United States until after the 1954 federal court ruling Brown v. Board of Education established that segregated facilities were unconstitutional.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States</span> Laws against interracial marriage

In the United States, many U.S. states historically had anti-miscegenation laws which prohibited interracial marriage and, in some states, interracial sexual relations. Some of these laws predated the establishment of the United States, and some dated to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted anti-miscegenation laws, and 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School segregation in the United States</span> Racial separation in schools

School segregation in the United States was the segregation of students based on their ethnicity. While not prohibited from having schools, various minorities were barred from most schools, schools for whites. Segregation laws were dismantled in the late 1960s by the U.S. Supreme Court. Segregation continued longstanding exclusionary policies in much of the Southern United States after the Civil War. School integration in the United States took place at different times in different areas and often met resistance. Jim Crow laws codified segregation. These laws were influenced by the history of slavery and discrimination in the US. Secondary schools for African Americans in the South were called training schools instead of high schools in order to appease racist whites and focused on vocational education. After the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregated school laws, school segregation took de facto form. School segregation declined rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s as the government became strict on schools' plans to combat segregation more effectively as a result of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. Voluntary segregation by income appears to have increased since 1990. Racial segregation has either increased or stayed constant since 1990, depending on which definition of segregation is used. In general, definitions based on the amount of interaction between black and white students show increased racial segregation, while definitions based on the proportion of black and white students in different schools show racial segregation remaining approximately constant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Orleans school desegregation crisis</span> 1960 unrest following racial desegregation

The New Orleans school desegregation crisis was the period of intense public resistance in New Orleans that followed the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The conflict peaked in 1960, when U.S. Circuit Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered that desegregation in New Orleans begin on November 14 of that year.

This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.

Oretha Castle Haley was an American civil rights activist in New Orleans where she challenged the segregation of facilities and promoted voter registration. She came from a working-class background, yet was able to enroll in the Southern University of New Orleans, SUNO, then a center of student activism. She joined the protest marches and went on to become a prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement.

References

  1. "Joe Dorsey's Big Fight: How An Unknown Boxer Knocked Out Segregation In Louisiana". Buzzfeed. 20 June 2014.
  2. "How boxing great Joe Dorsey desegregated sports and entertainment in New Orleans (Buzzfeed)". 22 June 2014.
  3. "Dorsey v. State Athletic Commission, 168 F. Supp. 149 (E.D. La. 1958)". Justia Law. Retrieved 7 August 2017.
  4. "Joseph Dorsey Jr., 69; Won Case Against Ban on Interracial Boxing". 24 October 2004 via LA Times.