In November 1960, 6-year-old Leona Tate walked up the front steps of the all-white McDonogh 19 Elementary School in the Lower 9th Ward and helped to desegregate New Orleans' public schools, while racist crowds jeered at her from St. Claude Avenue.
Since Hurricane Katrina, however, the building where that historic act happened has been shuttered?— dark and lifeless save for some stray pigeons.
Known as 'The McDonogh Three' for desegregating the former?McDonogh 19 school,?Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost broke ground at the…
But on Monday, almost 60 years after Tate's tiny feet climbed those 18 stairs, she proudly broke ground for the building's redevelopment as its new part-owner —?a reality made possible by friends, civil rights activists and developers who say they’re committed to righting the wrongs of institutional racism.
Wearing a bright pink dress and a big smile, Tate also brought into clearer focus plans for what she and her partners call the “sacred space.”
Her hopes are to revive the building as a $16 million museum, community center and affordable housing anchor to help confront the discrimination that fueled school segregation then and continues to be at the root of other injustices today.
"This is truly a day that God has made," Tate said at a podium Monday, flanked by Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, the two other African-American girls who helped to desegregate McDonogh 19. On the same day, little Ruby Bridges desegregated William Frantz Elementary by herself across the Industrial Canal.
“We welcome you as we mark a significant update to the history of 5909 St. Claude Ave.,” Tate continued, saying that the school’s address “carries a legendary, 60-year distinction as a place of extreme community discord where a desire for retention of a supremacist society openly was confronted by and battled hope and aspiration of equality for all.”
Named the Tate Etienne Prevost Interpretive Center, the first-floor exhibit of photographs and movies designed by Gallagher and Associates will take visitors through the desegregation of schools, movie theaters and department stores, followed by conversations that speak frankly about racism.
Though it’s an uncomfortable topic for many people, Tate said she believes that racism is best confronted through candid conversations within safe spaces — like the planned interpretative center.
The discussions will be facilitated by Tate’s friends from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, who have specialized in anti-racism training for nearly 40 years, and who will also use the building as office space. Tate first took People’s Institute training a few decades ago, when she worked at the St. Thomas Community Health Center.
Finally, plans call for the center, in partnership with Alembic Community Development, to be home to 25 affordable housing units set aside for seniors, especially those who were not able to return to the neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina, said Tremain Knighten-Riley, who works with the nonprofit Leona Tate Foundation.
An audience of several hundred clapped and got misty-eyed Monday as organizers joined members of Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office, the New Orleans City Council and the Orleans Parish School Board in showing their support for the new development.
“We have to continue to organize with the clarity that the systems we fight, when we are effective, can be undone,” said Kimberley Richards, an organizer with the People's Institute. “We have to organize, and to organize with the clarity of what it means to be a human being.”
Tate began her organization in 2009, eight years before she got any funding for the new center, which is slated to open this year. The OPSB had designated the old school as a surplus property in 2015 and put it up for auction, deeming it too expensive to repair.
In 2017, it was appraised at $725,000, but “the McDonogh three” had other ideas. Tate’s first donation was a $500,000 National Park Service grant that year.
In the last two years, the Tate Foundation and Alembic have also gotten funding from the city, the state, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and private donors.
Cantrell’s office and others said they hope the project will spark revitalization of a neighborhood that changed after desegregation, when white residents left the Lower 9th Ward for other parts of New Orleans and for St. Bernard Parish, and after Hurricane Katrina, when swaths of the neighborhood were abandoned.
In an interview, Sybil Morial, now 87, said transformations like Tate’s interpretive center will be imperative for the civil rights movement moving forward. She fought alongside her husband, former Mayor Ernest “Dutch” Morial, for desegregation and equality.
That awful history must also be documented, she said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately,” Morial said. “I think that we have to remind people from whence we’ve come. We don’t want to forget about it — we can’t forget about people who jeered at those innocent girls — because we don’t want it to be like that again.”
