#desegregation

The Problem We All Live With, 1964

Illustration for Look, January 14, 1964. Oil on canvas. 

Robert F. Kennedy Statement on Law and Order in Alabama and Mississippi. May 24, 1961

Collection JFK-RFK: Robert F. Kennedy PapersSeries: Robert F. Kennedy Papers: Attorney General Files: SpeechesFile Unit: Robert F. Kennedy Papers: Attorney General Files: Speeches 

On November 14, 1960, Six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, becoming the first Black student to attend the previously all-white school. Accompanied by federal marshals and taunted by angry crowds. Ruby became a symbol of the #CivilRights movement #desegregation

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s effort to overturn decades-old school desegregation orders is facing pushback from a federal judge in Louisiana.

After the judge refused to close the books on a desegregation case dating back to the 1960s, the Concordia Parish school system in central Louisiana and the state on Tuesday filed an appeal. The case offers the first major test of the government’s attempt to quickly end some of the long-running cases.

The school system has become a focal point in the administration’s attempt to end legal cases that reach back to the Civil Rights era. Louisiana state officials say the cases are outdated and no longer needed. In a remarkable turn, they’ve recently gained support from the U.S. Justice Department, which spent decades fighting for such cases.

Today we remember the courage of the Little Rock Nine. ✊🏽

On this day in 1957, nine Black students became symbols of the fight to desegregate U.S. public schools after an angry mob prevented them from entering Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. The Little Rock Nine faced threats, violence, and unimaginable adversity, yet they stood firm in the pursuit of equality.  

^^^ This is what presidents used to sound like. They spoke in comprehensible complete sentences without quickly descending into idiocy and pettiness.

That's a short excerpt from a TV and radio address by John F. Kennedy from 11 June 1963. The subject of the speech was civil rights. The speech was prompted by events earlier that day when segregationist Gov. George Wallace of Alabama attempted to block the enrollment of the first black students at University of Alabama. President Kennedy had to federalize the Alabama National Guard to ensure the registration of Vivian Malone and James Hood at the university.

This is the sort of history Donald Trump and his MAGA minions are trying to suppress – and even reverse.

dijoni:

Gail Etienne still remembers her first day at McDonogh 19 elementary school in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. As her family pulled up to the school in the car with the federal marshals, they saw crowds of angry people screaming. Some carried garbage cans and sticks. Others were holding picket signs against school integration.

“I’ll never forget it,” Etienne said. “I saw this one lady was pregnant and had a garbage can top in her hand. I’m wondering, at six years old, what could I have done at six years old to these people to make them act the way they were acting? I really thought that if they could get to me, they’d want to kill me. I didn’t know why. What had I done? I was just going to school.”

Etienne was one of three six-year-old Black girls alongside Leona Tate and Tessie Prevost, who were escorted by federal marshals into McDonogh 19 on 14 November 1960. It was the same day federal marshals escorted Ruby Bridges to William Frantz elementary school in the same city. Bridges’ story became immortalized in several books and a Disney film, but the experiences of Etienne, Prevost and Tate were largely unknown until recently.

In 1954, the US supreme court ruled the Jim Crow segregated system of “separate but equal” in public schools was unconstitutional and violated the 14th amendment. A year later, the court ordered states to begin desegregating schools with “all deliberate speed”.

Leona Tate, front, and Gail Etienne are escorted home from their first day of school at the McDonogh #19 elementary school on 14 November 1960. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Once Gail, Leona and Tessie, were allowed into the classrooms at McDonogh 19, the parents of the other students came into the school and took their children out.

By the end of the day, the entire school was empty, except for the girls and the teachers, who were ordered to stay if they wanted to get paid, Etienne said.

“From that day on, the entire year, the rest of the year, and half of the next year, which was second grade, we were in the school by ourselves,” Etienne said. “We couldn’t go to the bathroom by ourselves. We couldn’t drink water from the water faucets. They were turned off. We couldn’t go outside and play. Everywhere we went, our teacher had to come with us.”

Gail, Leona and Tessie couldn’t eat in the cafeteria and recess was taken underneath a stairwell that led to the second floor of the three-story building. McDonogh 19’s windows were covered in paper so that no one could see exactly where the young girls were located inside the school. Federal marshals escorted them into McDonogh 19 each morning, stayed during the day and took them home in the afternoons.

Despite the circumstances, Etienne said, she, Leona and Tessie enjoyed their first year at McDonogh 19 with the three of them bonding like sisters.

“We had fun. It was just the three of us. We had our teacher. We did what we had to do in the classroom. She taught us what she needed to teach us,” Etienne said. “The three of us played, and that’s how we bonded. That’s why I say we are sisters for life because that’s a bond that we made. We went through what we went through together.”

‘The story was in the building’

It’s that bond and that experience with her classmates that Leona Tate remembered when the McDonogh 19 building was in danger of being destroyed. The building suffered significant damage following Hurricane Katrina, as water surging from the broken levees caused major flooding in New Orleans, especially in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, where McDonogh 19 was located.

Tate bought the McDonogh 19 building in January 2020. It is now the TEP Center, a space that honors the history and work of the city’s civil rights and social justice leaders and activists.

But acquiring the building wasn’t an easy path.

Tate says her initial goal was not to buy the building, but to reopen McDonogh 19 as a school. But there is a city requirement that schools be on three acres of land and McDonogh 19 was only on 1.8 acres, Tate noted.

The school board at the time thought about auctioning off the building or even tearing it down, Tate remembered. Once the building was put on the National Historic Registry, it opened the door for Tate’s foundation – the Leona Tate Foundation for Change (LTFC) – to purchase it. Then came the hard part. The foundation had to find money to acquire the building and set about fundraising.

Initially, Tate said, “I just couldn’t see any way of getting it.” Then, “I just reached out and reached out. People kept saying, ‘Call this person, call that person.’ I was finally introduced to the right developer.”

Dorothy Prevost speaks alongside Leona Tate, center, and Gail Etienne on the 65th anniversary of the desegregation of public schools in New Orleans on 5 August. Photograph: Peter G Forest/Sipa USA via Alamy

“It was a dream come true. It was really a vision come true because for a long time, I never thought this would happen,” Tate said. “I guess the story was in the building, and it sold the building.”

The McDonogh 19 building was renamed the TEP Center, with TEP standing for Tate, Etienne and Prevost, the last names of Leona (Tate), Gail (Etienne) and Tessie (Prevost), and it opened to the public on 4 May 2022. Tate said she wanted the TEP Center to be “something educational to tell our story, because our story wasn’t being told. The McDonogh Three was never heard of.”

Today, the TEP Center offers tours, space for community meetings, and teacher workshops. It also provides affordable housing for seniors who had been evacuated after Hurricane Katrina, but lost their homes in the flood. So in addition to the exhibits and museum space, the TEP Center has 25 apartments for people 55 and older with limited income.

“It was important that I got the story told through what we had done in this building. My vision was to promote racial equality through education and through all aspects of academics,” Tate said.

“I felt like this is a place where those that fought the change, we could have that conversation to see why it was such a hard thing to swallow. The TEP Center is where we should have that dialogue to educate people on what it took, the struggle it took for us to get a quality education for others, not just for ourselves, for others.”

‘I didn’t tell my children’

For decades, the story of the McDonogh Three had been overlooked, Etienne and Tate said.

“Until a couple of years ago, I felt like I hadn’t contributed to history, that I didn’t play an important part of it, because the story was just about one person,” said Etienne. “It wasn’t about the New Orleans Four as we were. We were New Orleans Four, and it was four little girls. It was two schools, same time, but that’s not the way the story was told, so I didn’t feel like what we did was important.”

They didn’t even talk about their experience themselves.

“I was just overwhelmed with it. I didn’t tell my children. They didn’t know,” Tate said. “I felt like when President Obama got elected, it was time. I never thought I would see that in my lifetime.”

Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost are presented to the crowd on the steps of McDonogh 19 elementary school on 14 November 2021. Photograph: Ted Jackson/AP

And last year, the media mogul Oprah Winfrey paid tribute to Tessie Prevost-Williams, who died 6 July 2024, and the New Orleans Four during a speech at the 2024 Democratic national convention. Representatives from the National Park Service spoke during Prevost-Williams’s funeral and US Marshals escorted her casket. The homegoing celebration included a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral march and second line that started at the TEP Center, the place where she made history as one of the nation’s civil rights pioneers in school desegregation.

In 2022, Gail and Tessie co-founded New Orleans Four LLC to “correct the historical negation and restore the whole story, the whole true story of the New Orleans Four, Gail Etienne, Ruby Bridges, Leona Tate and Tessie Prevost,” said Etienne.

Etienne remembers someone asking her father if he would have still enrolled her at McDonogh 19 if he knew the hate they would face and “my daddy said, ‘Yes, I would,’ because it was something that needed to be done.’

“We were going to schools with old, torn-down buildings, dilapidated buildings. In the classrooms, we had books with no pages, pages torn and missing,” Etienne said. “[My daddy] said he paid his taxes just like everybody else, and his daughter should be able to go to whatever school that she wanted to go to. Nobody should be able to tell him that your child can’t go to this school because of the color of their skin.”

But there were consequences for changing the status quo. Etienne and Tate remember not being able to play outside in their yards like all the other children because they didn’t know what was going to happen. The sacrifices were made so that future generations could have a better life, a better education, Etienne noted.