The majority-white school board that controls the school's fate
has had its say.
Complaint details discriminatory impact of school closures in
Louisiana parish
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Esther Schrader Read the full piece here
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Friend,
There are at least six churches within three blocks of Washington
Elementary School in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, a community
institution that has, since its dedication in 1936, started
generations of Black and Brown children on their educational journeys.
But the prayers coming from the predominantly Black and Latinx
congregations to save the school may be in vain.
The majority-white school board that controls the school's fate
has had its say. Washington, along with five other schools, will be
shuttered within months. The children who attend them will be bused to
schools farther from their homes, separated from their friends, their
communities and the support systems on which they rely. The largely
white student body of another high school in the district will move
into one of the high schools, while the school's current diverse
student population will be scattered.
Washington Elementary, founded by six Black fathers who bought the
land to build a school for their children at the height of Jim Crow,
is slated to be demolished. For a school that came to be only after
white authorities refused to build a school in a Black neighborhood
unless the community raised the funds itself, the wrecking ball will
be a painful end.
It will also be another shameful chapter for a school district with a
history of pervasive discrimination against students and families of
color. Jefferson Parish, which straddles the east and west banks of
the Mississippi River outside New Orleans, is the same place that in
1989 elected notorious white supremacist and longtime Ku Klux Klan
leader David Duke
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to the Louisiana Legislature. At that time, it was a white enclave
that grew when white parents left New Orleans after the schools
desegregated in the 1970s.The same politics that elected Duke shaped
the district's school policies. Ordered by a federal judge to
desegregate in 1971 - 17 years after Brown v. Board of Education
- the district did little to comply over subsequent decades. It
remained under the desegregation order until 2014.
In May, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed
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an administrative complaint
with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
that says, in effect, that racism in Jefferson Parish is a thing of
the present, not just the past. The DOJ has since transferred the
SPLC's complaint to the U.S. Department of Education's
Office for Civil Rights.
Read More
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
The SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond,
working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy,
strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of
all people.
Friend, will you make a gift to help the SPLC fight for
justice and equity in courts and combat white supremacy?
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