Today at 9 a.m. -- the exact time that "The McDonogh 3" integrated the school 50 years ago -- three women and the federal marshals who once escorted them will unveil a state historical marker in front of McDonogh No. 19.
Tessie Prevost, left, Leona Tate and Gail Etienne were known as the 'McDonogh 3' in 1960.
The hope of organizers is that the marker will help to pique interest in the now-shuttered building and the women who made history there -- women lesser-known than Ruby Bridges, who at the same time was integrating William Frantz school across the Industrial Canal.
A half-century ago, first-graders Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne had McDonogh 19 to themselves for an entire year, thanks to a white boycott. An unnamed white boy briefly broke the boycott in January 1961, but left once protesters descended upon the Walgreen's that employed his father, John Thompson.
Despite the hostile crowds that gathered outside and the brown paper that covered classroom windows for their safety, the building was a sanctuary, the women told The Times-Picayune in a 2004 interview.
But after two years, the three girls were transferred, for reasons unknown to them, Tate said.
An explanation can be found in the archives at Amistad Research Center. During the girls' second-grade year, in January 1962, the Orleans Parish School Board decided to convert McDonogh 19 to one "for the exclusive use of Negro children," according to a letter written to the board by civil rights attorney A.P. Tureaud, who represented the parents as part of a 1952 lawsuit he had filed to challenge school segregation in New Orleans.
- Letters from pupils' parents, civil rights attorney A.P. Tureaud, from the Amistad Research Center
The parents "were unwilling to submit their children to any proposed plan of resegregation and so respectfully request that their children be assigned to the same school to which their white classmates have been assigned," Tureaud wrote.
So that fall, two years after the three students had made national headlines at McDonogh 19, they helped to integrate the formerly all-white T.J. Semmes, which once stood nearby, on Jourdan Avenue.
But this time, no federal marshals walked with them. And this time, the white students stayed. And fought.
That year, unnoticed by the rest of the city, much less the nation, the girls spent the worst year of their lives, they said. Almost every day, they faced fights or near-fights, they said.
"We were all spit upon," Gail Etienne Stripling said several years ago. "I had my dress ripped almost completely off of me. I was hit in the stomach with a baseball bat."
Stripling's father, Theodile Etienne Jr., wrote the School Board many letters, in an effort to peacefully combat the behavior. Some of those letters written by parents are now in the Amistad archive. Etienne told the board, by letter, that he had witnessed teachers provoking white children to spit upon, hit and verbally bother his daughter. His wife had reported incidents to the principal, who said he could do nothing, Etienne wrote.
Other black students, Elston Allen and Gwendolyn Porea, were also mistreated at Semmes that year, their mothers wrote. And Tate's mother, Louise Tate, wrote that two Semmes teachers called black students "nigger" and held their noses when they passed, saying they smelled. "It is regrettable that teachers who are paid with public funds are doing things by word and action that could develop into serious trouble," she wrote.
Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3396.
