"The Bones of That School": History Lessons From the William Frantz Building

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Interrupting Settler Colonial Erasures in Curricular Spaces: Statues, Pipelines, and Charter Schooling Spaces

Abstract

This paper reads the William Frantz Building in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans as a curricular space. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges famously desegregated Frantz in 1960, but the school was permanently closed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and reopened as a charter school. This paper explores what lessons about history, social justice, and power in post-Katrina New Orleans are revealed through a close reading of the building itself and the overlapping histories it contains. Frantz’s civil rights history is explicitly framed as empowering and triumphal. But the Frantz building - its very existence, its current occupants, and even its earnest promotion of its own history -- raises questions about how civil rights history is mobilized and for whom.

Author

• Caroline B. Pinkston, The University of Texas - Austin