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Friend,
The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 may have paved the way for the desegregation of schools in the United States, but in the Jim Crow South it was no more than a gravel path at best.
It wasn’t until six years later, on Nov. 14, 1960, that three little girls dared to challenge the segregation of public schools in New Orleans. On that day, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost presented themselves at McDonogh 19 Elementary School in the city’s 9th Ward after a federal judge ordered the nation’s first public school integration plan in Orleans Parish.
“I was excited because I was coming to a new school,” Tate said, recalling that day. “I was a little upset because just seeing that crowd out there, seeing the police on horseback holding the crowd back, I thought a Mardi Gras parade was coming. I knew a parade usually passed there and didn’t know why I had to go to school when everyone else was at the parade.”
That throng, though, did not have merriment on its collective mind. Although Tate said that she did not feel any hostility then, the 6-year-old Tate was struck by how loud it was on St. Claude Avenue that morning. She rode to school in the back of a United States Marshals Service sedan on the same day that Ruby Bridges entered the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, where she, too, defied a white mob.
“I didn't pick up on the anger,” Tate said of her ordeal at McDonogh 19, climbing the 18 steps at the front door to taunts and jeering chants from the crowd. “I’m kind of thinking I saw it and then I didn’t see it. My mom had already told me to sit in the back of the seat of the car and don’t put my face in the window.”
As the trio finished their registration at the school, the exodus of white students began. Collectively known as the “McDonogh Three,” the girls spent the school year with the campus to themselves after every white student was withdrawn. After 18 months, the Orleans Parish School Board sent 25 students to join the three girls at McDonogh 19. Only two of those students were white.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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