Once a symbol of desegregation, Ruby Bridges’ school now reflects another battle engulfing public education

  On Nov. 14, 1960, after a long summer and autumn of volleys between the Louisiana Legislature and the federal courts, Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl, was allowed to enroll in an all-white school. Accompanied by federal marshals, Bridges entered William Frantz Public School – a small neighborhood school in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward.

  If that building’s walls could talk, they certainly would tell the well-known story of its desegregation. But those same walls could tell another story, too. That story is about continued racism as well as efforts to dismantle and privatize public education in America over the past six decades.

"The Civil War is over, the Confederacy lost and we are better for it."

  In five Southern states, we’re in the middle of Confederate History Month, a dubious designation that’s at odds with the reckoning the region has engaged in since the Charleston church massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015.

  Roof’s act of terror began to shake the South out of its 150-year reverence for the Confederacy, a glorification cemented, in part, by the widespread installation of monuments that peaked during the period after Jim Crow was established, and again during the civil rights movement. As the nation mourned the victims in Charleston, grassroots organizers like Take ‘Em Down NOLA modeled the kind of work necessary to persuade local governments to remove these monuments to slavery, white supremacy, and oppression from public places.

The state of the Confederacy in 2017

  Before the sun rose on Monday – a day celebrated in Alabama and Mississippi as Confederate Memorial Day – one of the monuments to white supremacy had fallen in the Deep South.

  After more than a century on public property in New Orleans, The Liberty Monument was removed by construction workers clad in body armor and masks. The monument was erected to honor to honor a bloody uprising in which members of the White League – a violent white supremacist militia – attempted to overthrow the Reconstruction-era government.

  Despite the monument’s link to white supremacy, the prospect of its removal had enraged some people in the Crescent City, prompting death threats and requiring workers to don gear that was more suited for working a riot than removing a monument.