3811 North Galvez Street, New Orleans 70117
I remember looking out of the car as we pulled up to the Frantz school. There were barricades and people shouting and policemen everywhere. I thought maybe it was Mardi Gras…. As we walked through the crowd, I didn’t see any faces. I guess that’s because I wasn’t very tall and I was surrounded by marshals. People yelled and threw things. I could see the school building, and it looked bigger and nicer than my old school. When we climbed the high steps to the front door, there were policemen in uniforms at the top. The policemen at the door and the crowd behind us made me think this was an important place.
Ruby Bridges, Through My Eyes, Scholastic, Inc., 1999, p. 16.
On November 14, 1960, four African American first-grade girls were escorted to two previously all-white schools by armed federal marshals. Gail Etienne, Tessie Provost, and Leona Tate entered McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School, while Ruby Bridges arrived at the William Frantz School. Their first day at their new schools was set in motion before any of them were born, with the 1952 case Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, one of several cases leading up to
the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine. Like many other southern cities, New Orleans failed to comply. After years of legal cases, court injunctions, legislative maneuvers, and virulent white resistance, the New Orleans Public School Board conceded to Judge Skelly Wright’s 1956 court order to desegregate first grade on a very limited basis. Of 137 black students who applied, only these four girls met the exacting academic, psychological, and family criteria that the state legislature used to delay and diminish racial integration.
Even this symbolic integration was too much for most white Louisianans who fought at every level to undo it. With the support of local politicians, the media, and the business community, the white supremacist Citizens Council spearheaded a boycott of the two schools that punished anyone who defied it and kept most white students out of the schools. Etienne, Provost, and Tate were the only students left at McDonogh No. 19, and Ruby Bridges stayed in a classroom alone with her teacher, separated from the few remaining white students who attended Frantz. The black and white families who continued at the schools were met with mobs of white women and children, euphemistically called “cheerleaders,” who hurled racist epithets and taunted them with black dolls in coffins on their way to and from school. The state legislature withheld funds earmarked for the two schools, refused to issue paychecks to their employees, and threatened businesses who did business with the New Orleans School Board. Families who continued to send their children to the schools were harassed, threatened, evicted, and targeted with vandalism and violence. Ruby Bridges’ father was fired from his job. The local black community rallied behind the girls and their families. Arthur Chapital, the president of the New Orleans chapter of the NAACP, organized a campaign for letters, gifts, and donations to be sent to the girls and their families.
School desegregation proceeded slowly and painstakingly in New Orleans. Fearing the loss of its NASA contract, the business community finally relented and supported the court order. In the 1961-62 school year, four uptown schools were desegregated and admitted eight more African American students. The following school year, with 104 African American students attending previously all-white public schools and 154 attending previously all-white parochial schools, token integration was accomplished. Some blamed the decision to desegregate schools in a white working-class neighborhood for the tepid and incomplete integration that followed. The historian Adam Fairclough offers another view: “Opposition to integration permeated every social class. The shrieking ‘cheerleaders’ could be dismissed as ignorant white trash; the school board, the businessmen, the mayor, the governor, the legislature, and the Catholic Church could not” (quoted in Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972, 261). William Frantz Elementary School now houses Akili Academy Charter School. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School was added in 2016.
To Learn More
- Ruby Bridges, Through My Eyes, Scholastic, Inc., 1999.
- Donald E. DeVore and Joseph Logsdon, “The Challenge of Growth and the Ordeal of Desegregation,” Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans 1841-1991, 216-250, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991.
- Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972, University of Georgia Press, 2008.
Nearby Sites of Interest
Musicians’ Village and Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, 1901 Bartholomew Street, New Orleans 70117 (504) 940-3400, (https://www.ellismarsaliscenter.org/musicians-village)
This neighborhood was developed by Habitat for Humanity in partnership with musicians Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. to house local musicians displaced after Hurricane Katrina. The music center anchors the community by providing services for youth and programming to preserve New Orleans’s musical culture.