A Tale of One City--Two Eras

"WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO . . . ?"

This Sunday, August 29, will be the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and a large area of the Gulf coast. And, as noted in several previous blogs, this fall is the 50th anniversary of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck's journey of personal re-discovery of America, as told in his book TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY. The Katrina anniversary is an opportunity to link both in a half-century-later tale of "Whatever happened to . . .?" in New Orleans.

The blog on racism (July 17), related the story of Steinbeck's visit to New Orleans in l960, where he witnessed ugly demonstrations against the integration of the William Frantz Elementary School by Ruby Bridges, a six-year old African-American who became the first of her race to integrate an all-white southern elementary school. Steinbeck was appalled by the racism he found not only at the school, but also in some of the people he met just before and after the experience. The very volatile issue of public school integration in l960 has long since disappeared. To the extent that it remains an issue, it is now a muted national one within the context of re-segregation resulting from housing patterns combined with the virtual end of school bussing to achieve and maintain racial integration.

A 50-year later look at the Frantz school represents a snapshot view of such changes, punctuated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

The neighborhood surrounding the Frantz school went through two significant changes since Steinbeck's visit. (It was the neighborhood where Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin, was born in l939.) What had been a lower income white neighborhood in l960 is now a low income African-American neighborhood. And what had been a neighborhood of small viable businesses and homes has been hollowed out by the devastation of Katrina. In visiting the neighborhood about two years ago, it appeared that most of the physical structures were still there, but the area had been severely flooded and was pock marked by damaged, empty buildings. The Frantz school was one of those empty buildings.

Because of flood damage from Katrina, Frantz was boarded up and surrounded by a chain link fence. The city has the problem of repairing this and other closed schools, while also having to decide which ones will be permanently closed because of declining student population. The Frantz school has a brighter future than some of the other hurricane-damaged schools. In a master plan for renovating and reopening schools, Frantz Elementary has been spared and is scheduled to undergo major rehabilitation. At one time it was proposed that it be renamed Ruby Bridges Elementary School, but apparently it is not possible to name a school after a living person. The name has fared better in Alameda, California, where a new elementary school was dedicated to her in 2006.

Ruby Bridges herself, now Ruby Bridges Hall and mother of four sons, still lives in New Orleans where she worked for 15 years as a travel agent and now chairs the Ruby Bridges Foundation to promote racial understanding. In 2001, she was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Clinton and was honored by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in 2006. In THROUGH MY EYES, Bridges tells what it was like going to a previously all white school and realizing at age six that "everything had happened because I was black." Her story was also presented in a made-for-television movie.

While Steinbeck might find a return visit to New Orleans to be laced with unpleasant memories of the demonstrations, those thoughts might now be leavened by the historic changes in racial attitudes in that city since l960. While racial issues have not disappeared from the city and resurfaced with Katrina, they are found within a context radically altered by a half century of civil rights laws accompanied by changes in the political, economic, and social culture of the city.