This article examines the relationship between the struggle for African American civil rights and efforts to expand tourism, conventions, and spectator sports in New Orleans, Louisiana, between 1954 and 1969. Drawing on previously neglected archival sources and personal interviews, it considers how the pressure to maintain New Orleans's progressive image as an urbane tourist destination required abandoning Jim Crow customs and embracing the growing national commitment to racial progress. It argues that an unlikely coalition of civil rights activists, tourism interests, municipal officials, and a small segment of New Orleans's old-line social establishment adopted a tourism-related rhetoric to counter the city's dominant discourses of racist resistance to change. By the late 1960s, New Orleans's white leaders agreed that they could no longer countenance overt racial discrimination if New Orleans was to maintain a favorable tourist image.