New Orleans empties two schools rather than share them
14 November 1960 - May 1961McDonogh 19 and William Frantz elementary schools, the Ninth Ward, Orleans Parish, LA
Four Black six-year-olds entered two white elementary schools in the Ninth Ward in November 1960. White families withdrew nearly every other child, and a crowd gathered daily to scream at them.
A federal court ordered New Orleans to begin desegregating its schools in November 1960, six years after Brown. The school board complied in the narrowest way available to it. Of the Black first-graders who applied, four were selected by screening test and sent to two white elementary schools in the Ninth Ward - a white working-class part of the city, a long way from the wealthy neighbourhoods uptown whose children were not asked to take part.
On 14 November 1960 Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne walked into McDonogh 19, and Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz, each escorted by federal marshals. The crowd outside was largely women, and the city's press called them the cheerleaders. They came every school day to scream at the children and their parents, spat at them, slashed tyres and made threats that were not idle.
White families answered by taking their children out. At William Frantz, Ruby Bridges spent from January to May 1961 as the only pupil in the school, taught by Barbara Henry, a teacher who had come from Boston, in an otherwise empty classroom. At McDonogh 19 the three girls were taught together in a single room. The Louisiana legislature went into special session to try to take the schools out of the board's hands, and the few white parents who kept sending their children lost jobs, credit at local shops and in some cases their homes.
Nothing burned and nobody was killed, which is part of why New Orleans is less remembered than Little Rock. The effect was lasting all the same. White enrolment in the city's public schools fell away and never came back, and the two Ninth Ward schools at the centre of it were left to serve the Black children the city had tried to keep out. McDonogh 19 is now the Tate Etienne Prevost Center, named for the three girls who walked in.
Four children desegregated two schools; almost every white family withdrew its own. The shape covers the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward, the neighbourhoods the two schools served, drawn indicatively - William Frantz stood on North Galvez Street, McDonogh 19 on St. Claude Avenue.
Sources
- New Orleans School Crisis64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities64parishes.orgBacks the screening of applicants, the four children named, the 14 November 1960 date, the Ninth Ward placement and the cheerleaders.
- Ruby Bridges64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities64parishes.orgBacks Ruby Bridges being the only pupil at William Frantz between January and May 1961, taught by Barbara Henry.
- The Second Battle of New Orleans: A Hundred-Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools of the SouthHarperCollins (1996)Liva Baker's account of the litigation, the legislature's special sessions and the reprisals against white parents who complied.