Remembering Ruby: Akili Academy, Civil Rights Memory, and the Remaking of New Orleans Public Education

• In Event: Remembering the 1960s

Abstract

Since 2005, the New Orleans public education system has undergone a dramatic transformation. In the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, school reformers from around the country saw an opportunity to replace the city’s storm-damaged schools with something new: a decentralized network of independently operated charter schools. Over ten years later, New Orleans is the nation’s first majority-charter system, and the blueprint for cities around the country, from Newark to Chicago, implementing similar models. These controversial changes point to much larger debates about the future of public institutions: the charter-school revolution in New Orleans aligns with the broader advance of privatization, deregulation, and corporate logic as organizing principles in American society. What happens in New Orleans thus reverberates around the country, with implications that stretch beyond the landscape of public education.

This paper focuses on one historic school building caught up in these transformations -- the William Frantz Elementary School Building, located in the 9th Ward of New Orleans -- and the complicated histories that emerge from this space. Frantz garnered national attention in 1960, when six-year-old Ruby Bridges embarked on a struggle to integrate the school. Escorted by federal marshals, Bridges walked daily through angry protestors to a classroom where a boycott by white families made her the only pupil. Her ordeal captured the hearts of the nation, and Bridges remains an icon of the civil rights movement today. At the Frantz building, where a statue of Bridges sits in the courtyard and a classroom honors her name, this history has a visible presence. But Frantz Elementary itself no longer exists: after years of failing to meet state standards, the school was finally closed after Katrina. The building now houses Akili Academy, a charter school serving a 97% black student body.

The Ruby Bridges story is emblematic of a popular narrative of civil rights history, one that focuses on larger-than-life heroes and emphasizes progress and eventual victory over the forces of racism in American life. Putting childhood and memory studies in conversation with critical curriculum studies, this paper explores the contradictions and possibilities that arise when Akili Academy draws on civil rights memory in the space of the Frantz building. This case study sheds light on the sense of mission that drives the charter reform movement: charter school advocates in New Orleans and elsewhere articulate their work as a form of social justice, staking a claim as heirs to the legacy of the civil rights movement. At Akili Academy, this positioning exists at the level of the building itself, but the school’s literal proximity to civil rights history highlights some the contradictions that emerge from this relationship. At its core, civil rights history is about grassroots resistance to the status quo. But in the service of neoliberal projects, what happens to this history, and what lessons does this pedagogy offer to students in a rapidly changing public systems? What avenues of dissent are flattened, what visions of protest and progress are elevated, and what possibilities for new forms of resistance emerge?

Author

• Caroline Pinkston, University of Texas at Austin