The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred-Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools, by Liva Baker (HC, 1996, 564 pages, $4)
Mostly this is about desegregation of the New Orleans' schools in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Some of this I thought I knew. As usual, I didn't.
After the Civil War ended, integration came to New Orleans' schools, but only for 7 years. After Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow began, segregation was back. A newspaper editor named Paul Trevigne bravely took the fight to the governor, then to Louisiana's Supreme Court, and eventually all the way to the US Supreme Court. He lost.
By the 1930s the NAACP believed that education was the key to equality. They decided to strike at the "region wide inequities in salaries paid to white and black public-school teachers. In 1931-32, black teachers in the South's public schools received approximately half the wages white teachers received... School boards continued to " cast blacks... as 'beings of an inferior order.' According to the school boards' cyclical line of logic, the black schoolteacher could live on less money, blacks taught shorter terms, and deserved less money and since few blacks had advanced degrees they were worth less. If all these failed to convince, white officials could always fall back on the politically convenient fiction, a southern article of faith, that whites, by paying the bulk of the taxes in effect, owned the school system and would not be willing to pay the increases higher salaries for black teachers would require."
Thurgood Marshall, originally from Baltimore, led the fight in 1936 to bring equal pay to Maryland's affluent Montgomery County. Within two years Marshal had convinced the courts there to equalize all school teachers salaries. Then he went to Calvert County, and Prince George's County, and won there too. (Prince George's County a fore-runner in the fight against racism? Considering its reputation today, there may be a bit more work to be done there today.)
As I read this history, I can only imagine what courage it took to wage these battles. As a country, and as individuals we are the better for them. I have gone to school in all white schools of the 1960s, and later to integrated schools. The class lessons may have been similar, but exposure to people different from ourselves leads to learning and knowledge far more important than any book lessons. Look for this book in the African-American section.
