ABSTRACT
When four Negro first-graders entered two previously all-white schools in New Orleans on November 14, 1960, the reaction of extremists was so intense and went unchecked for so long that the city suffered a near catastrophe. Mobs of whites numbering in the thousands rampaged through the downtown business district hurling bricks and bottles. White children boycotted the two schools for a whole year, and for months an unruly crowd stood before the national network television cameras and cursed, shoved, stoned, and spat upon the few white children who continued to attend one of the schools. The school board members who had desegregated the schools under federal court orders were ostracized by their friends, harassed and threatened, and addressed out of office by the state legislature. Many teachers and other school personnel went unpaid for months at a time, while the legislature held up the school funds and local banks refused to cash paychecks drawn on school funds held on deposit. Hotels and department stores reported their worst business slump since the Depression. It was one of the nation’s most chaotic and violent school desegregations. All this, not in some landlocked Bible-belt country town, but in the nation’s second largest port, home of liberal French Catholicism, and one of America’s most cosmopolitan cities, thronged with tourists and businessmen from all over the world—cultured, civilized, heterogeneous New Orleans.
