Community Backlash

While Ben Franklin was primarily a school for academic excellence, it also had a newly established sports program which, by 1963, was competing in basketball, baseball, and football. The freshly integrated student body put the legitimacy of the school's athletic teams at risk. Several teams refused to play Franklin. Yearbook pictures from the early years of integration suggest that the boys' sports teams remained all-white for some period, though this remains to be corroborated.

Image Courtesy of The Times-Picayune, Sept. 19, 1963, p. 2-D.