On November 14, 1960, 6-year-old Tessie Prevost woke up and put on one of her prettiest dresses.
Like Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Ruby Bridges, Tessie was a very special little girl. Along with hundreds of other Black children, the New Orleans Four, as they would forever be known, had taken a test. The test was devised by the Louisiana Pupil Placement Board after Brown v. Board of Education had declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional. A federal court was now insisting, eight years later, that Orleans Parish integrate its schools, and testing Black children’s academic skills was part of that process.
I don’t think we know how many children passed that test, one that White children never had to take just to enroll in their neighborhood public school. But we do know how few of these Black children were seen as worthy. We know that Black boys were generally not seen as desirable candidates for what school boards, parents, and politicians in Jim Crow states viewed as an unwelcome social experiment.
Ruby Bridges, the best known of these children, faced a screaming white mob at William Frantz Elementary all by herself, while Tessie, Leona, and Gail were assigned to William McDonogh 19. All were escorted by federal marshals, since New Orleans law enforcement would not guarantee their safety.
This is how Tessie remembered that morning for an oral history project, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement. “I’m going to take care of your baby,” a federal marshal promised Tessie’s mother. It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? The child was going to school. She should have been safe in her school.
But dramatic scenes about brave Black children and violent White mobs conceal a great deal of American history. They conceal the fact that, once she agreed to become a symbol of racial justice, no one could truly take care of Mrs. Prevost’s baby. It conceals the fact that Tessie and the other three went to class in largely empty buildings, taught by a single teacher, at schools White parents abandoned. Those White parents remained committed to segregation, transferring their children to religious and private schools that many states supported with tax credits, initiating the school voucher systems legal in many states today.
Stories about these truly heroic Black girls also obscure a history in which segregation didn’t only happen in the South, and didn’t end. As historian Noliwe Rooks points out in her new book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon, 2025), school integration was not always a traumatic experience—but that doesn’t mean it was a success either. In several states, politicians responded to desegregation orders by closing the public schools: some Black students didn’t go to school for years.
Desegregation also often dismantled well-functioning, sometimes prestigious, Black schools, run by Black teachers and administrators who took care of everybody’s babies, and were ambitious for their students. These institutions were embedded in thriving Black communities where taking care of a mother’s baby was not a job entrusted to adult, armed men, but to skilled professionals committed to high quality academics, athletics, and co-curricular activities.
Here’s another dirty truth: the trickle of Black children permitted to attend formerly all-White schools reinforced the racist notion that most of their peers were inferior and incapable. Integrated tells that story: why our schools are more segregated than they ever have been, even though segregation is not the law, and why the phenomenon of Black “only-lonelies” persists in majority White schools.
Show notes:
- For a full account of what legal school desegregation did not accomplish, see Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford, 2005).
- Civil rights actions related to school segregation in the north included a boycott on February 3, 1964, in which 464,000 New York City students—about half of the young people enrolled—boycotted classes.
- Melba Patillo Beals has written a personal account of the Little Rock Nine, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of Battle to Integrate Little Rock (Atria Books, 1995).
- Claire and Noliwe discuss historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s experience of integrating an elementary school in Texas. That, and the story of her parents’ marginalization when Black schools were closed, is in Gordon-Reed’s memoir, On Juneteenth (Liveright, 2021).
- In discussing the phenomenon of Black strategies for self-protection in White society, Noliwe cites Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” (1895).
- Claire and Noliwe discuss the methods and ethic of pathbreaking educator Marva Collins, winner of the 2004 National Humanities Medal.
- Noliwe also cites the contributions of Black Panther Ericka Huggins, who ran the organization’s education project. You can read more about Huggins in Mary Francis Phillips, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (New York University Press, 2025).
