Two Civil Rights Figures Join the Adult Education Center Reunion
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
—Maya Angelou, excerpted from her poem, “Still, I Rise.”
The civil rights movement has had many chapters, and we were honored to have two people with critical ties to its unfolding story at our recent reunion of the Adult Education Center: Leona Tate and Keith Plessy.
At 6 years old, wearing a white dress and white ribbons in her hair, Leona Tate walked through the doors of McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward in 1960, integrating the school with two other little girls and setting off a battle over segregation. The girls were called “The McDonogh 3,” and they were escorted by federal marshals into the school past a crowd of cursing, screaming white people being held back by police.
Leona Tate at the 2019 Reunion of the Adult Education Center
As soon as they came into McDonogh, white students began to leave. When Leona tried to talk to remaining students, they did not respond. “On my first day of first grade, it was as if I was totally invisible,” Leona wrote. For the rest of the school year and about half of the next, Leona and the two other girls (Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost) were the only students at the school. “The primary focus was never our being able to sit next to white children in a classroom,” wrote Leona, “as much as it was about equality in books, classroom and gymnastic facilities, etc. We wanted current, up-to-date books and quality scholastic materials, just like our white counterparts. It was never about ‘forced integration,’ but was and is still about fairness and equality.”
Leona continues to fight for civil rights, equality, and justice through her foundation: leonatatefoundation.org. One of its initiatives includes an oral history of Leona’s civil rights experiences, located at the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum.
Our other special guest was New Orleans native Keith Plessy, a descendant of Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the 1892 landmark case on segregation: Plessy v. Ferguson. In the case, the U.S. Supreme Court held Louisiana could enforce racial segregation on its railway.
In 1892, Homer Plessy came aboard a New Orleans train and sat in a whites-only car, as an act of civil disobedience. He refused to leave in order to launch a legal case about segregation. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was fair, and was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal protection to all. As a result, Jim Crow proliferated through the South and elsewhere for decades until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Judge John Harlan was the only dissenting justice in the Plessy case, saying, “Our U.S. Constitution is color-blind.”
Keith Plessy is a longtime bellman at New Orleans’ Marriott Hotel and an artist who has painted more than 100 portraits of civil rights leaders on the walls of Valena C. Jones Elementary, which he attended in the 1960s. He’s also president of the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation, which creates programs around social justice and works closely with civil rights leaders, activists, and the community. The foundation is located at: plessyandferguson.org.
Keith Plessy with Jeff and Jeanne Geoffray at the 2019 Reunion of the Adult Education Center
One of the foundation’s ongoing efforts is to erect historic markers around New Orleans, recognizing people, institutions, and social movements that have positively impacted the city. One marker has been erected outside of the location of McDonogh Elementary, which Leona Tate helped integrate. Another stands at the corner of Press and Royal Streets, where Homer Plessy was arrested in 1892 for violating the 1890 Separate Car Law of Louisiana.
We are proud to have had these civil rights warriors at our reunion and stand for their efforts, as they do for us.