New Orleans schools still separate and unequal 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education

First graders led the desegregation of New Orleans’ public schools in November 1960. Bettmann via Getty by Connie L. Schaffer, University of Nebraska Omaha; Martha Graham Viator, Rowan University, and Meg White, Stockton University Sixty-four years ago this November, public schools in New Orleans began to desegregate. School buildings once designated as “white” opened their doors to Black students. The integration process, which deeply divided the city, was led by four first-grade girls. Tessie Prevost, Leona Tate and Gail Etienne were the first Black students to attend the McDonogh 19 School. Ruby Bridges was assigned to the previously all-white William Frantz Public School. Newspapers worldwide ran photographs of the girls walking past protesters and entering the schools accompanied by federal marshals. When Prevost died in July 2024, she was lauded as a Civil Rights hero. Oprah Winfrey paid tribute to her at the Democratic National Convention. Prevost herself did not realize her role in history until high school, when a teacher assigned the class a project on Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that desegregated American schools. As she researched, she discovered her own name and story. She took this discovery to her parents, and...