McDonogh Three

The McDonogh Three is a nickname for the three African-American girls, who, at the age of six, were the first black students to integrate an all-white school in New Orleans. Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne lived in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, a neighborhood where the black and white people lived separately by block. Even though segregated schools had been illegal since the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, no states in the American South had taken action to integrate their schools. Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost had all attended the negro-only schools in their neighborhood, until November 16, 1960, when they arrived at a previously all-white segregated school called McDonogh No. 19. On that same day, another six-year-old African-American girl named Ruby Bridges integrated a second New Orleans’ public school called William Frantz Elementary.

During the 20th century, there were a series of political advancements that contributed to the integration of public schools in the United States. In 1950, in the McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, public schools in America were forbidden from discriminating against students because of their race. In 1952, Tureaud, a member of the New Orleans Attorney, with help from Marshall and Carter from the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP, acted on behalf of black parents to end segregation of New Orleans’ schools. They charged New Orleans that the state’s public school system was unconstitutional and violated the 14th amendment.

In 1954 the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, became the most impactful decision concerning the integration of public schools in America, and ironically happened in the birth year of the McDonogh Three and Ruby Bridges. The syllabus from this case said: “Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.” This case outlined that the doctrines that had previously been established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) were unconstitutional and must be eliminated from public education.

Finally, in February 1956, Judge J. Skelly Wright formally issued an order for the Orleans Parish School Board to desegregate its schools, and in 1960 he approved a plan to do this. He ordered integration to start on the third Monday in November 1960.

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