Famous Frantz, Failing Frantz: Desegregation Memory, School Accountability, and the William Frantz School

• In Event: Whose Memory Matters? Race and the Making of America's Historical Monuments and Curricula

Abstract

In 1960, the William Frantz School, in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans, was famously desegregated by six-year-old Ruby Bridges. In 2005, that history was honored by the school building’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places at nearly the same moment in which the school was permanently closed due to under-enrollment and poor performance on Louisiana’s accountability ratings. This paper explores how both the National Registry nomination process and the state accountability system worked to interpret Frantz’s history and made claims on its future. In engaging with those narratives, this paper considers what they illuminate and what they elide about the memory of school desegregation, the logic of accountability, and the histories that connect the two.

Author

• Caroline B. Pinkston, Austin Independent School District