Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to go on a newly designed civil rights tour of the South organized by the Nation Magazine. I had been on an earlier civil rights trip in 2023. This trip started in New Orleans and went to Selma, Tuskegee, Montgomery, Savannah and Charleston. The theme of the trip was “From Slavery to Civil Rights.” We had a chance to meet with some older civil rights heroes and some younger activists fighting environmental racism.

New Orleans has a reputation for Mardi Gras, jazz, gumbo and the Saints. Lost is the city’s history and its role in the slave trade. The trade of human beings from Africa to Louisiana began in 1718 with the first slave ships arriving in 1719. The trade continued through French, Spanish and American rule.

After Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, for the next 57 years New Orleans was a center of the slave trade in the United States. The city had more than fifty documented slave trade sites. Enslaved people were sold from slave pens, public squares, government buildings, church properties, city taverns, private residences, auction blocks and ballrooms of luxury hotels.

During the first half of the 19th century, the slave traders trafficked two million men, women and children inside the United States. Most of the enslaved were brought from the Upper South to the Lower South via overland and water routes. Before the trek, the slave traders ruthlessly separated families.

After the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction, segregation ruled in America. Lynchings, the Klan, and voter suppression particularly reinforced white supremacy in the South. From 1896 to 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court blessed racial segregation in the case of Plessy v Ferguson which dictated separate but supposedly equal.

Opponents of racism and segregation faced an almost frozen social order but that did not stop the NAACP and other activists from opposing the status quo. In 1952, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP filed a lawsuit on behalf of some Black parents challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in New Orleans schools.

On our trip, our group met with Leona Tate who had been one of the children who integrated the New Orleans schools in 1960. She and the other two, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne, were first graders then. Six years after the Brown v Board of Education case they entered McDonogh 19 Public School, under a court order issued by Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright. Another little girl, Ruby Bridges, was also integrating a different New Orleans public school at the same time.

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The Louisiana power structure left no stone unturned in their efforts to stop integration and maintain white supremacy. Although Brown ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed,” delaying forever was the game plan.

Because school officials did not want integration, they had designed an approval process that most children couldn’t pass. It included arbitrary and whitewashed standards of intelligence and behavior. The parents of 137 Black first graders had applied to have their children transferred to all-white schools. Only five were selected. Tate, Prevost and Etienne, later dubbed the McDonogh 3, were selected. They had excelled.

Leona Tate described the absolutely toxic environment they faced. On November 14, 1960, the three girls were escorted to the school by federal marshals because of racist mobs that protested outside the school. The federal marshals stayed for the whole school year. For 18 months white parents and younger people came to protest. Within a few days after the three girls entered school, all the white students left McDonogh 19.

The girls didn’t see much of the protest outside the school because classroom windows were covered with brown paper. They had to play inside during recess. They ate lunch under the protection of a stairwell. They were the first Black children to enter previously all-white schools since 1877.

The families of the girls who were selected experienced harassment. They received death threats on the phone. People drove a funeral hearse up and down their street. Gail Etienne’s father received a package containing a dead bird. The local police sat in squad cars at night outside the girls’ homes.

For the entire first-grade year, the three girls were the only students at McDonogh 19. In January 1961, a white family tried to send two sons to McDonogh but they ended up attending for only a few days. The family was harassed so badly that they had to leave the city.

In second grade, the three girls remained the only students at McDonogh. After Christmas that year, things started changing. Twenty-five new students arrived, including two white students. Tensions lessened a bit. The U.S. Marshals left and the windows at school were uncovered.

In third grade, the school district sent the three girls to a different school, Thomas J. Semmes Elementary. Other Black students were also sent to Semmes. There were no U.S. Marshals there and white students did not leave the school. Many of the white students remained hostile to the girls.

Tate now calls her experience at Semmes “a house of horror.” The Black children were punched, shoved, kicked, tripped and spat on. The school authorities, even knowing what was going on, looked the other way and did nothing to protect the children but the three girls made it through.

Notably, two years after the integration of New Orleans schools, Tulane University also de-segregated. It was the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the area and it had been segregated for 129 years. The integration of the public schools paved the way for the integration of universities as well as buses, parks, sporting events and voting rolls.

Judge Wright made many enemies when he authored his desegregation opinion. He was ostracized and isolated from New Orleans society life. He was considered the most hated man in Louisiana and he was referred to as “Judas” Wright and Judge J. Scalawag Wright. He also required full-time protection by U.S. Marshals and New Orleans police. Judge Wright’s order in the New Orleans case was the first post-Brown desegregation order issued by a judge in the Deep South.

Looking back, it is no exaggeration to say Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne opened the door to school equality in the United States. Their heroism has been insufficiently appreciated and acknowledged. After generations of injustice, they stepped up at a pivotal moment.

Tate still lives in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. She acquired what had become the abandoned McDonogh 19 building, had it registered as a National Historic Landmark and she re-opened the school as the Tate Etienne Prevost (TEP) Interpretive Center. The Center’s mission is “to teach, exhibit and engage visitors in New Orleans civil rights history.” She continues to work in efforts to reconstruct and improve the community.