The TEP Center in New Orleans teaches students a lesser-known story from the city's Civil Rights era and why the fight for equitable schools isn't over.
KAREN HENDERSON, HOST:
You’ve probably heard of Ruby Bridges, the first grader who helped desegregate New Orleans’ public schools in 1960.
But have you heard of the three other girls who desegregated another local elementary school that same morning? Aubri Juhasz takes us to that school — now a museum — where students are learning why the fight for equitable education isn’t over.
AUBRI JUHASZ, BYLINE: Inside the old McDonogh 19 school building, a tour guide’s voice echoes off the walls.
SARAH BRUZZI: You are standing in a space that was diminished for years and years because the only name that we hear about from desegregation is?
STUDENTS: Ruby Bridges.
BRUZZI: Ruby Bridges.
JUHASZ: Sarah Bruzzi is leading a group of students from Benjamin Franklin High School on a tour of the TEP Center. It’s named for the three girls who desegregated the former school when they enrolled as first-graders in 1960: Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost. They were part of the same legal challenge as Bridges, made history earlier the same day, but as Tate says, their story isn’t as widely known.
LEONA TATE: Our history here, it wasn't being told, you know, and. You know, when I found out that it wasn't gonna be a school again, I knew it was very much so important for me to try to push for it to be something educational.
JUHASZ: Tate fought for years to purchase and restore the school after it flooded during Hurricane Katrina. She finally opened it as a museum in 2022. Tate spent most of her childhood and adolescence desegregating schools. Her safety was always at risk. From white mobs outside, and later, classmates. The mascot at her high school was the Rebels, and they flew the Confederate flag. When students visit the center, Tate — who is in her early 70s — always meets with them.
TATE: They see me and understand that this history is still here.
JUHASZ: At the TEP Center, guides situate Tate’s story in the larger civil rights struggle in the U-S, one they say is still unfolding.
BRUZZI: On the left, you have, starting in the 1800s, really the founding of the neighborhood…
JUHASZ: Bruzzi, the tour guide, tells students about resistance to school desegregation — including white flight — here in the Lower Ninth Ward and across the country.
BRUZZI: It’s why our private schools, if you look at the date of their founding, why they often have dates that are right around desegregation.
JUHASZ: Many formerly all-white schools, like the ones Tate desegregated, eventually became all-Black. And today, schools in the U-S overall are more segregated than they were in the 1980s.
TREMAINE KNIGHTEN-RILEY: The ask was for resources. The compromise was the desegregation.
JUHASZ: Tremaine Knighten-Riley is the TEP Center’s program director.
KNIGHTEN-RILEY: I’m not exactly sure the desegregation process did what it was supposed to do. Because now we still have some students who still don’t have the resources they actually need to be successful learners.
JUHASZ: Those students are more likely to be Black. Research shows majority-white school districts and schools continue to have access to more money, in part because of how district boundaries are drawn and schools are funded. Students aren’t blind to this, says Matison Williams, an eleventh grader on the tour.
MATISON WILLIAMS: I’m trying to grapple with the fact that some of my peers may not have the same opportunities as me simply because of where they school.
JUHASZ: William’s school, Benjamin Franklin, is among the highest-rated schools in the state. And students have to test to get in. It’s 40 percent white — in a public school system that enrolls mostly low-income students of color. Her classmate, Malia Lambert, says she can tell her brother’s high school doesn’t have the same resources.
MALIA LAMBERT: I can tell that going to Franklin is a privilege because Franklin is going to prep you for that higher learning. But some other schools, they’re not going to give you all those options.
Williams and Lambert, who are both Black, say they hate feeling like they have to choose between attending schools like Franklin and schools that are majority-Black. Tate told me she understands how they feel.
TATE: It’s hard, but that’s the way it is right now. And it’s hard to even, how do, how do we change it? I’m still trying to figure that one out. I really am.
JUHASZ: The students are asking for the same thing Tate’s parents and others like them were fighting for when they signed on to desegregation cases almost 70 years ago: more resources for Black schools. Knighten-Riley, TEP’s education director, says sparking these conversations is why the center exists.
KNIGHTEN-RILEY: We tell a history, but also we take a moment to listen to the stories that happen in the room.
JUHASZ: She says those stories are just as important for continuing the fight.
In New Orleans, I’m Aubri Juhasz.
