This is the first story in our series chronicling the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

In November 1960, three 6-year-old Black girls climbed 18 steps into history, forever changing the face of American education and democracy. 

While Ruby Bridges became a household name for integrating William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Gail Etienne, Leona Tate, and Tessie Prevost faced large crowds of angry protesters as they desegregated McDonogh 19 Elementary School just blocks away. 

In fact, the three students technically desegregated New Orleans’ schools first, entering a white classroom before Bridges did. Within minutes, every white student was pulled out of McDonogh by their parents.

For decades, their story remained largely untold, overshadowed by the singular narrative that emerged around Bridges. But their effort, too, laid the groundwork for global change. In September 1960, mass arrests of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., threatened to stop the Civil Rights Movement in its tracks. But when New Orleans parents and a group of children stepped up to make one of the first moves to desegregate schools in the South, it inspired nationwide action that pressured America toward the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

What Etienne couldn’t understand then was that the girls’ small feet were carrying the weight of that history, even if it was buried. Her story, overshadowed for 65 years, reveals uncomfortable truths about how we choose to remember our past and whose voices we allow to shape our understanding of progress.

She said the moment that would define her life began with a cruel deception of childhood innocence. As the federal marshal’s car turned the corner toward McDonogh 19, she heard the roar of the crowd and felt a flutter of excitement. 

“I thought it was a Mardi Gras parade,” she remembers, because that very street hosted parades during Carnival season. 

But when she looked out the window, expecting to see people celebrating and throwing beads, she instead saw faces twisted with rage, people wielding garbage can lids and signs, screaming threats that she said no child should ever hear. The realization hit her with devastating clarity: “If they could get to me, they’d kill me. And, and at 6 years old, I’m wondering what I could have done to make people react this way.”

Today, as Louisiana spearheads a national movement to dismantle the work done by the Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement by leading a national charge to remove desegregation orders from school systems, Etienne’s weathered hands and voice still tremble slightly when she speaks of that November morning. 

State officials now say they believe that desegregation laws are no longer needed because desegregation has been achieved; however, at 71, Etienne’s return to New Orleans after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is guided by a resolve to ensure her story and its lessons aren’t erased from history. Her experience offers a stark reminder of both how far we’ve come and how fragile that growth remains.

For activists, the parallels between 1960 and 2025 are striking. Then, as now, they said the battle over school integration reflected larger wars about racial equity, political power, and who controls the narrative of American progress. 

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans’ school system in 2005 created another inflection point: School activists said it transformed the city’s educational landscape in ways that have disproportionately impacted Black students and families. It washed away decades of hard-won progress, leaving behind a system that many argue has been re-segregated by design rather than disaster. 

It was a post-Katrina experiment that made New Orleans the nation’s first all-charter school district. The transformation began when the state seized control of New Orleans’ bankrupt school system after Katrina, firing 7,500 predominately Black educators and allowing private schools to separate poorer students from wealthier ones, teachers and advocates told Capital B. 

The McDonogh 19 building itself tells this story of resilience and renewal. Closed after Katrina and left to deteriorate, it was saved by Leona Tate’s determination and reopened in 2022 as the Tate Etienne Prevost Interpretive Center. The building now serves as both a memorial to the past and a staging ground for current battles over educational equity.

Gail Etienne’s return to New Orleans, as she puts it, is because the work isn’t finished, and the rights her generation fought for are under threat. Now, as the Justice Department has recently dropped a long-standing desegregation order in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish and state officials push to terminate other remaining desegregation cases, Etienne’s perspective bridges decades of educational justice struggles in a way perhaps few others can.

Capital B spoke with Etienne before the 65th anniversary of her desegregation efforts to talk about what’s at stake today for New Orleans’ and the nation’s Black children. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Capital B: What was your childhood like before desegregation?

Gail Etienne: I had the normal childhood where I could go outside and play with my cousins and my friends in the neighborhood, going to church, just being a playful kid. We didn’t need anybody else, because we had enough of us. My dad’s mom had four kids, and from that, they had like 28 grandchildren.

Across the street from me, two houses over on the other side of the street, was my best friend, and she was this white girl. And I used to go to her house, and she used to come to my house every day, and we would play. It wasn’t no big deal. But after that day, never again. After Nov. 14, 1960, the day that we desegregated McDonogh 19 [Elementary] School, I don’t even remember seeing her again. We didn’t play together. I couldn’t go by her, she couldn’t come by me. It just wasn’t the same.

I wasn’t raised as a 6-year-old Black little girl, you know, I just was a little girl. And so my color didn’t become an issue until I went to McDonogh 19. Before that, I didn’t even realize that I was Black.

How did your family make the decision to participate in desegregation?

My daddy told me that one of his main reasons for making a decision was that he paid his taxes just like everybody else, and that nobody should be able to tell his child where to go to school. We were entitled to go into the good schools, the schools that had books with all the pages in it and buildings that weren’t dilapidated, falling down all around us.

What do you remember about Nov. 14, 1960?

I remember seeing this pregnant lady, she had a garbage can top in her hand. I saw some people had garbage cans in their hands. The people had signs that they were holding up, and they were screaming and howling and jumping and making noises, and it just was total chaos.

I could see the anger. And at 6 years old, I’m wondering what could I have done to make people react this way.

What was it like being the only students in the school after all of the white children left?

Being the only students in the school didn’t bother me because our teacher Ms. Myers, if she didn’t want us there, we couldn’t tell because she treated us fairly. She was like a grandmother figure to us. And I got the chance to go to school and made some new friends. At times, I guess, I felt kind of special because it was just the three of us.

But, we couldn’t go to the water faucet. We couldn’t go to the bathroom by ourselves. We couldn’t go outside and play. We couldn’t go by the window to sharpen your pencil, because Tessie got up one day to go do that and Ms. Myers reacted suddenly and startled, and Tessie had to come back. They had brown paper on the window so that nobody could see inside. And I guess maybe they thought snipers were going to try to shoot us.

Instead of going outside, there was the stairwell leading to the second floor, which was right outside our classroom. And underneath that stairwell was where we did everything. That was our safe space. That’s where we played, that’s where we would eat our lunch.

How did the experience change when you moved to desegregate other schools?

We didn’t have no marshals. We didn’t have no protections. The teachers didn’t want us there, the parents didn’t want us there, the students didn’t want us there. And not even the principal.

Going to T.J. Semmes Elementary School was a completely different story. Every day, you had these parents lining up in two lines, and we had to go walk through that every day. And they were hollering at us, spitting at us, calling us names.

One day, I got hit in the stomach with a baseball bat. And the guy that did it, I’m not going to say his name, but he was 16 years old in sixth grade. And it was just like a normal day. The principal did nothing, the teachers did nothing. It was no big deal.

At lunchtime, they spit in our food, or they hit us or kick us to make us drop our food, or whatever. It was a wonder that we learned anything because we were so stressed. One day a girl took and ripped my dress almost completely off me. 

We had this one teacher — that woman was so mean. She was a true racist. She used to bake cookies, brownies, whatever, and bring them to the kids to her classroom and she’d come in the classroom walk right by us, so we could get a whiff of it and then she gave them to the white students, and we didn’t get none.

Us three, we’d all get together and we run outside, and we’d all just get underneath a tree and not play. Just huddle up. That was our safe space. 

Eventually, we start fighting back. Tessie always tells this story: She said that one day she looked and she saw me just swinging my arms. She said I was just “swinging and fighting back.” I was tired of the foolishness.

How did this trauma affect you as an adult?

I have gotten better with telling my story, because I used to cry all through it. I was on nerve medicine for a while because I was so nervous. Even today, I don’t like crowds.

Some of the things that happen during that time, I will never, ever forget.

I have developed the sense to realize that it’s not all white people. It wasn’t all white people. I didn’t realize what we had done — I’m trying to keep from getting emotional — it rocked the world. Those four little soldier girls, we did rock the world. America saw how they were treating us, and it wasn’t right.

How do you feel about not receiving the same recognition as Ruby Bridges?

I was angry, I was bitter. People wouldn’t believe me and they’d come up to me and ask me, why I don’t have no movie or why I don’t have a book and why are they always talking about Ruby. “Why don’t they ever say your name?” And that every time Black History Month comes up or something related to that, she’d be on TV, being interviewed alone. What I wanted to say: If Ruby was the only one, and if she did all this, why was my picture on a cover of Life magazine as one member of the New Orleans Four? 

But Tessie, Leona, and I talked about this [for] a while and we came to understand that our story wasn’t a pretty story. The white students didn’t leave her school like they did with us. They didn’t beat her up like they did us. So her story was a much prettier story. And the white people, they don’t want a ugly, bad story with the way they treated us 6-year-old little girls. They don’t want that to be broadcasted. And it upsets me, but I can’t say Ruby lied. But the truth is that we were omitted.

What do you think about current efforts to remove desegregation orders?

It’s a disgrace. That’s what they want to do, and especially Louisiana, the place where it happened. Don’t they realize what we did, it didn’t just affect New Orleans and Louisiana? What we did not just in the United States, what we did impacted the whole world. So if you start changing things with where it started, don’t you know it’s going to be a rippling effect, where it’s going to just keep on going over and over to other places and ending desegregation everywhere. Who knows what else they’re going to want to do.

People have fought and died for these rights that we have, and they don’t have the right to take them back just because they want to. For them to think that we as a people who struggle to get this far, we’re gonna sit back and just, just let it happen? No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m not going back. You’re not going back.

Why are you returning to New Orleans now?

I’m coming back to finish this work — I’m coming back so that we can tell our whole story. My sister Tessie has gone on to glory, and she’s not here, so I have to do what I can with her mother, the last living parent [of the New Orleans Four]. We are going to tell the whole story. We are going to fight. We are not going to let it go back without a fight. We don’t want that. We went through too much as kids.

What would you tell Black parents who are considering whether to stay in New Orleans and fight for better schools or leave?

If we want it better, we have to fight for it. We really do. They’re not going to give us anything. And we, as Black people, have always fought. If New Orleans is home and where you want to be, you need to come back home and do what you need to do to make it better. If not for you, for your grandkids or your great grandkids, that’s what you have to do. That’s what our ancestors did. They fought for what we got.

What do you want people to understand about your story?

I think my dad made the right decision. I think it was something that needed to be done, and I’m really proud to be a part of it. You know, it’s taken me a while to get to that part, that point because it was as though. Tessie, Leona, and I didn’t have anything to do with it and that was hard. But I’m really excited now, and I’m really proud of what we were a part of.