After the Supreme Court deemed segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many school districts around the country found creative strategies to avoid complying with the ruling, engaging in years of court battles, slow-walking, and attempts to find legislative loopholes. New Orleans was among these battlegrounds; many white families there fundamentally rejected the idea that their children should be part of what they saw as a misguided social experiment. In 1960, the city became the center of national controversy when Ruby Bridges, Tessie Prevost, Gail Etienne, and Leona Tate—who came to be known as the New Orleans Four—desegregated two different public schools; Prevost, Etienne, and Tate together at McDonough 19, and Bridges alone at Frantz Elementary. Bridges’s journey into the school was immortalized in a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled The Problem We All Live With, in which a young Bridges walks, in a white dress with books and ruler in hand, between two pairs of federal agents. NIGGER is spelled behind her on the wall, and the guttural red residue from a tomato that has just been thrown drips beneath the word. A print of this painting sits in the hallway of my grandfather’s home. Looking at it, I am struck by the fact that federal agents today are being deployed in American cities as aggressors rather than protectors.
So many white parents took their children out of McDonough 19 that before long, it became an all-Black school. With the help of a local NAACP lawyer, Tate’s, Prevost’s, and Etienne’s parents petitioned the school district to send their children to a new school. Soon, the girls were reassigned to T. J. Semmes, where they, along with six other children, became the school’s first Black students. At Semmes, they were left to fend for themselves, without the protection of federal marshals.
In a 2019 interview with Pacific Standard, Leona Tate shared her experience that first year: “At Semmes, the students hated us. And there were teachers that hated us.” The reporter continued, “The small group of black students were spit upon and punched. Two teachers held their noses each time black students passed, implying that they smelled. The girls faced constant insults and physical aggression from white students, who were often egged on by adults within the school.”
Somehow, I had never fully realized before my recent visit how close my mother had been to the history of local and national school-desegregation efforts when she was a student at Semmes, beginning just three years later, in 1965. New Orleans schools integrated on a grade-by-grade basis. She was stepping into a school still in the midst of a harrowing transition.
