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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 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 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.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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