New Orleans school desegregation crisis
1960 unrest following racial desegregation
The New Orleans school desegregation crisis was a period of intense public resistance in New Orleans that followed the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The conflict peaked when U.S. Circuit Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered desegregation in New Orleans to begin on November 14, 1960.
On the morning of November 14, 1960, two New Orleans elementary schools began desegregation. Leona Tate, Tessie Provost, and Gail Etienne, enrolled at McDonogh 19 Elementary School, while Ruby Bridges enrolled at William Frantz Elementary School. They became known as The New Orleans Four. All four 6-year-old girls were met with death threats, racial slurs, and taunts. Widespread boycotts began immediately, and by the end of the day, few white children remained at either school.
On November 16, a race riot broke out in front of a meeting of the Orleans Parish School Board. Following the riot, United States marshals began accompanying the four girls to their respective schools, while death threats against them continued.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22907272. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1954 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Orleans school desegregation crisis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.