Desegregating a New Orleans public high school
In 1960, four six-year-old Black girls, flanked by U.S. Marshals, desegregated two New Orleans public schools. Seven years later, Black students were finally able to enter John McDonogh Senior High School.
In the fall of 1967, Pam Matthews was one of the first Black students to walk the hallways of the John Mac, as the school is known. A strong student, Matthews focused on academics, but made friends dressed in the school’s signature green and yellow colors – as a cheerleader, on the dance team as a Trojanette, and in drama club.
Though she had attended strong schools within the Black community, Matthews could see that there were more resources and freedom within John McDonogh, a school that had been built and operated for white students. And the school offered a wealth of extracurriculars. “John Mac didn’t miss a beat when it came to social things for the kids to do,” Matthews said.
The books were nicer – “new and gently used” – no longer well-used books that were sometimes hand-me-downs from white schools. And her class sizes were definitely smaller than comparable classes in local Black high schools, which were overflowing with students at the time.
Yet analysts say that these inequities aren’t a thing of the past in New Orleans. The sorts of inequities that were starkly apparent in 1967 within an officially segregated school system still stubbornly persist within New Orleans schools, even 20 years after the reforms implemented after Hurricane Katrina, in the nation’s most drastic education experiment.
Today, almost all local white students are clustered in a small subset of public schools described as “concentrated advantage” schools by a groundbreaking, year-long analysis released in 2019 by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. In the remaining schools, students are almost entirely Black, with high levels of economic disadvantage.
Former Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. described it as “this bifurcated system.”
Few places better illustrate the story of these persistent inequities than John McDonogh Senior High School, where desegregation triggered decades of infrastructure and academic neglect that weren’t reversed until the building reopened as Bricolage Academy, a k-8 charter school with a significantly whiter student body.
Choosing between John Mac and Clark
In 1968, half a mile away, a year after Matthews walked into John McDonogh, Deborah Richardson enrolled in Joseph S. Clark High School. She couldn’t see herself attending John McDonogh, which was “lily white” at the time, she said. So she chose Clark.
At the time, ninth graders in downtown New Orleans were offered a choice between two high schools, in two distinctly different 6th Ward buildings.
There was John McDonogh Senior High School, a grand brick building on Esplanade Avenue, which was designed for white students by E.A. Christy, the school district’s celebrated architect.
Seven blocks towards the river stood the much more plain building that housed Clark, which opened its door in 1947, as the first high school for Black students below Canal Street.
Historically, the New Orleans school district was a dual system: high school students were assigned by race to neighborhood/district school buildings that were designated for either white or Negro students.
For the decade before desegregation began in New Orleans, schools for white students operated under-capacity while Black schools were overflowing. In response, the New Orleans public schools instituted a “platoon” system for Black students. At all-Black schools like Clark, students rotated days and start times to avoid overcrowding classrooms. In the 1950s, Clark enrolled 2,000 students, with 1,000 attending classes during each platoon.
As a white school, John Mac had plenty of space and never was required to platoon.
At Clark, Richardson spent part of high school divided into platoons, divided into groups with staggered start times. She also learned Black excellence in academics from Black teachers, she said. She specialized in vo-tech career classes, taking home economics to learn more about styling hair and working as a seamstress – trades that would define her life.
She came to Clark from the Lafitte public housing development, where her family moved when she was a teenager. The Lafitte was filled with children, playing in shared courtyards. “ We’d hang on the back of cars and catch rides on our skates. We’d build skate mobiles,” she recalled. “We made ropes out of four-leaf clovers.” She soon learned that she was good with her hands. She would knock on her neighbor’s door when she heard the sewing machine fire up. Early on, she transitioned to styling hair. “ I started doing hair as a young child in the projects because I had to do my little sister’s hair,” she said.
Neighbors would come to her Lafitte courtyard so Richardson could style their hair. “They would shampoo it at home and come and bring their rollers and I would roll it, you know, as best I could. I got really good at it.”
Graduating from two Black high schools, Clark and John Mac
Matthews enrolled at John McDonogh because her mother insisted. As the eldest daughter, “I did as I was told,” she said.
Entering John Mac was a stark difference from her previous all-Black schools, Valena C. Jones, Andrew J. Bell, and Rivers Fredrick. She doesn’t remember any white students at her primary school, even after desegregation efforts began. She entered John Mac with other Black peers, many who lived in the St. Bernard public housing development and would pass near her house on Annette Street in the 7th Ward as they walked to school.
Her mother shielded her from any of the flashpoints that surrounded integration, she said. So the larger social forces were not top of mind for her. “I didn’t understand integrating all that much.”
During Matthews’ four years, the school flipped racially. “It was 90% white when we got there and by the time we graduated it was 95% Black. I can remember maybe 10 white kids graduating with us.”
She graduated in the class of 1972 and went to Delgado Community College to study nursing.
Richardson graduated from Clark in 1971 and began working at Raymond’s Beauty Supply, a local distributor. As hair products were released, she would demonstrate the new products for stylists.
After a Jheri curl demonstration for students at L.E. Rabouin Vocational High School, teacher Merle Morvant asked Richardson if she’d be willing to teach. Even now, she can remember what Morvant told her. “ She said, ‘I really love the way you handled this, this whole situation. The girls came in, you told ’em what you was was expected of them, and they listened to you.’”
Morvant suggested that Richardson follow her talent even further. “ Why don’t you come to summer school?” she asked Richardson. “‘You ever thought about teaching cosmetology?’”
She was sold. It was her chance, she said, to guide young students along the same vocational-education career path she’d followed since her days at Clark.
Building a program in a “school of last resort.”
Richardson was hired by John Mac in 1982 and soon developed a full teaching program within a custom-made salon built within the building.
In 1975, U.S. District Judge Herbert W. Christenberry had ended the longtime desegregation lawsuit in Orleans Parish, ruling that the court’s orders over the previous 23 years had resulted in the “substantial elimination of the effects of past discrimination,” he wrote.
Yet integration eluded John Mac, where the student body was almost entirely Black during her decades-long career at the school, Richardson said.
Her program was renowned across the city for its successful graduates and careful teaching. Every student of hers received a Styrofoam head and styled hair on it, building up their required hours until they could pass the state board exams each spring. For 30 years, from her one-of-a-kind John Mac classroom, she helped to mold hairdressers who knew how to style, stock high-quality products and run businesses that supported their households.
Richardson became a well-known force with the city’s public schools, because of her expertise and because she could relate to what students were struggling with. She’d lived in the same areas, knew many of the same families, and had been a young parent who struggled to pay bills. Students within the John Mac program moved forward thanks to Richardson’s signature blend of encouragement, tough love, and deep experience within her field.
But in the late 1990s, Richardson said the school began to change. John McDonogh became a sort of school of last resort. District officials, she said, gave students who got in trouble two options: “You can go to alternative school or you can go to John Mac.”
That changed the dynamic of the school. Instead of the groups of friends who’d grown up together downtown, students from across the city landed on Esplanade Avenue. Students from uptown and downtown mixed, which worried her.
In the spring of 2003, on the day she took her students to the state cosmetology exam in Baton Rouge, two men rushed in the gymnasium door armed with a pistol and an AK-47.
“ They came in the door shooting, shooting in the air, shooting in the ceiling, bullets ricocheting off, hurting two students, one in the leg and one somewhere else, and all of this is going on,” Richardson said. A 15-year-old student, Jonathan “Caveman” Williams, was hit by 10 bullets and killed. `
Her husband, Harold Richardson, also a teacher, was there. “He didn’t have a clue until he heard the first shot. Then they shot the little boy while he was sitting in the gymnasium.” The student tried to get up, only to be shot again, she said.
Floodlines
Retaliatory violence wasn’t uncommon in New Orleans neighborhoods, Richardson said, who found it was nerve-wracking to have it cross the line into a school building.
With increased security, school continued on. But afterward, it seemed like the brazen act made the school’s downward trajectory almost a certainty. John Mac continued to be defined by the shooting even a decade later.
Richardson kept a close watch on her students and continued her reputation for excellence on her own. But as the school year began in August 2005, a new teacher was trying to change the cosmetology curriculum. After a particularly tense meeting on Friday, August 26, Richardson emerged, prepared to fight for her program.
Instead, Katrina hit Florida, then headed to New Orleans, gathering strength as it moved. “Sunday, we had to evacuate. It was mandatory evacuation,” she said. “Katrina came and we could not come home.”
Life had changed forever for New Orleanians. But when John Mac re-opened, she knew her name would be one of the first in people’s mind. “As long as the school had a cosmetology program, I was gonna be there,” she said. “If I wasn’t there, they wasn’t gonna have no program.”
The post-Katrina fight
In June of 2006, Richardson returned to a devastated New Orleans. As she ran into former neighbors and students, she doled out hugs and encouragement. She knew the path to rebuild would be a long one.
Though 80% of the city had flooded, with faulty levees that burst across the city, high ground areas, like Esplanade Ridge, stayed mostly dry. So the grand old John McDonogh building sustained minor damage. It reopened for the 2006-07 school year to students from across the city. Still, the district had not invested in the school for decades, Richardson said. After years of deferred maintenance, the windows leaked, parts of the basement had flooded. Its facade sorely needed a facelift.
Instead of a facelift, the entire school system went under the knife.
By the time Richardson returned, the state’s rapid conversion of New Orleans schools into charters was well underway. The school district negotiated a landmark $2 billion FEMA settlement to rebuild and renovate its buildings, giving the city perhaps the newest fleet of schools in the country through a construction boom that created state-of-the-art buildings, likely the most undisputed positive aspect of the post-Katrina school reforms.
While residents were still displaced, the state legislature had acted quickly — changing state law to allow the state to take control of New Orleans’ public schools. The state-run Recovery School District (RSD) took over more than 100 of the district’s 120-some schools, including John McDonogh. New Orleans teachers were fired en masse. Without students, who were also displaced, the district had no per-pupil funding to pay teachers.
Yet after Katrina, Richardson would see school leaders reject both ideals that she held dear. As schools re-opened under the auspices of the state and newly contracted charter operators, she saw how Black teachers were less readily hired. Plus, the public school focus moved almost entirely to academics, without any room for the trades that had long been a staple of education and life-skills within the city of New Orleans.
As students returned, the RSD instituted new requirements. To be re-hired, teachers, even those who had been in the classroom for decades, had to take exams – which contained many questions from 4th-grade LEAP exams, some teachers reported. . After being fired, some veteran teachers were reluctant to return. Those that did apply were often looked over in favor of young teachers straight out of college. On school facades across town, charter operators also changed historic names, leaving few traces of pre-Katrina New Orleans schools.
The public-school workforce flipped almost entirely, from a school system defined by Black career educators, many with decades of experience, to new college grads, mostly white, who were recruited to work in New Orleans schools, though many had never before run a classroom. “There wasn’t hardly any veteran teachers, hardly any black teachers, you know, just young white people,” Richardson said. “It was just a big cultural change. I would drive to school and see these little cars from all the different states up north,” she said. “They hired all these young people and most of them were white.”
In later years, system administrators worked to increase numbers of Black and New Orleanian-native teachers, after continued criticism from parents coupled with research showing that Black students were more successful when taught by Black teachers.
From the start, Richardson’s gut told her that such dramatic shifts were unhealthy for traumatized students recovering from a disaster, who instead needed consistency. “This is not gonna work,” she recalled saying to herself. “You know, this is not gonna work.”
John Mac as the only option
Kareem Kennedy grew up in the 7th Ward as one of nine children. Raised by his aunt Alice, he attended Langston Hughes for elementary and F.W. Gregory for middle school. After failing standardized tests, he’d been forced to repeat fourth grade.
He rebounded academically and was optimistic in August 2005 as he headed to John F. Kennedy High School next to City Park. But he would only attend school for two weeks — Kennedy’s campus was left deluged by floodwater after Katrina, its building slated for demolition. Kennedy recounted his schooling in a book, Aunt Alice vs. Bob Marley, published by the Neighborhood Story Project. After the storm, he boarded a bus to Houston with a friend.
In Texas, he’d seen a different reality. He attended classes in a Houston high school that felt like a college campus, he said. He and several friends enrolled there. He took business law, typing, and other classes he hadn’t dreamed of in New Orleans.
But outside of school, the displaced youngsters faced hurdles. “I had a lot of friends who were kind of raising ourselves, like me,” he said, “because some of our parents and guardians went back to New Orleans and were trying to figure things out and get trailers and get stuff set up to get back home.”
In 2007, he returned to New Orleans, moving into his cousin’s FEMA trailer. “ The city was basically a skeleton of its old self,” Kennedy said, describing the large X’s spray-painted onto homes by emergency personnel searching for survivors.
When he went to the school district to enroll in high school, he was given one choice — John McDonogh.
He knew about the school’s reputation and the gym shooting. But he had no other options, with most other high schools ruined by floodwaters. On his first day on Esplanade Avenue, he found blue-shirted security officers standing at attention outside the school’s gate.
It seemed unnecessary, he said. “They had NOPD in there, had the metal detectors — it was just a whole ordeal just getting through the gate,” he said. For those already struggling with anxiety, it seemed to make everything worse, he said. The student body also included students from all across town. Fights were the expected result.
The legislature had moved quickly to construct a different school system. But it hadn’t considered that the children who would return to New Orleans schools were severely traumatized by a disaster that had not only left 1,000 people dead but had given the nation a picture of severe poverty and chaos. That made business owners reluctant to hire displaced New Orleanians and gave fodder to schoolchildren in other cities, some of whom told displaced children to “swim home.”
Now, it seemed like the metal-detector clad schools were set up to scan returning New Orleans children, not embrace them. “We were literally teenagers going through a traumatic thing,” Kennedy said. The world “didn’t factor in what just happened, like what we, our parents were experiencing. What the city was experiencing.”
The charter operator who turned John Mac into a reality TV show
Richardson weighed her options, applied to the RSD and was hired. In 2006, she returned to Esplanade Avenue and restarted a cosmetology program with five Uptown students from Walter L. Cohen High School; five from McDonogh 35 in the 7th Ward; and a handful of returning students from John McDonogh.
But state officials wanted to hand off schools to charter operators. One of the out-of-town operators who expressed interest was Steve Barr, who had 20 schools under his oversight in Los Angeles. He won a contract to run John Mac through a newly created entity called Future is Now Schools (FINS) and then opened the campus to an Oprah Winfrey Network reality TV show, called “Blackboard Wars,” which described John Mac as one of the “most dangerous” high schools in the country.
In hindsight, it seemed as though Barr was less interested in helping disaster-worn children recover and more interested in exploiting the negatives of John Mac’s history for a television audience.
To Richardson, the untested, out-of-state group “hijacked” the New Orleans school. Barr had no understanding of the role of trades within an academic environment, Richardson recalled. At one point, he’d told her, “We don’t want cosmetology, we don’t want cosmetologists, we want cosmetology business owners.’” Richardson scoffs at the memory. “He wanted these children to own a business before they get outta high school – when they can’t even read.”
While under Barr’s oversight, John Mac struggled with enrollment and finances. Frequently cancelled charter board meetings shielded the charter group from public scrutiny.
The school failed to enroll enough students to meet its budget. It struggled academically, and earned one of the lowest state ratings ever doled out — 9.5 out of 150 points.
In 2014, at the end of its second year under the Future is Now, the district closed the fledgling school, citing a need for repairs. The superintendent of the RSD at the time, Patrick Dobard, focused his comments on the building — not the students inside it. “Speeding up this renovation will help to speed up the day when students can benefit from a world-class education at the John McDonogh High School facility,” he said.
Alumni cried foul about the guise for repair. The Orleans Parish School Board and Recovery School District fought in court about which agency would reopen a school in the building.
Richardson, too, believed the urgent renovation reasoning was a smokescreen. After 30 years, she packed up her desk and walked out the door, knowing it was the end.
“I was there forever,” Richardson said, remembering all the former colleagues who left her to retire or teach elsewhere. “They went, did this and I was still there.” So she knew that her walking away in 2014 sent a clear signal to everyone. “That was the last day of John McDonogh High School.”
Kareem Kennedy made the best of it at John Mac. In 2008, he’d donned the gold and green and graduated as a Trojan. Now, he lives out of town, partly because the changes to his hometown were just too much, he said.
Six years later, when John McDonogh closed, he was sad, he said. But he wasn’t necessarily surprised. Without its longstanding teachers and neighborhood kids, it no longer had a throughline to the city, he said. With the constant churn of the school system, he didn’t even know if his elementary school was open or in what shape or form. (It is, operating out of a brand-new building in Gentilly operated by charter operator FirstLine Schools.)
Certainly, some of what happened at John Mac is part of larger forces. The building that once housed Clark, Richardson’s alma mater, was also taken over by Morris-Jeff, another one of the city’s concentrated-advantage schools. Across New Orleans, the charter movement brought lots of attention — and outside funding.
The city has changed too. While New Orleans continues to be a majority-black city, the proportion of Black population has fallen from 67% pre-Katrina to 56%, while the share of white residents grew from 28% to 31%, and the number of Hispanic residents tripled, from 3% to 9%, according to 2024 U.S. Census data.
Despite all the reforms and recruitment efforts, most of the city’s white public school students attend roughly a dozen schools, in the cluster of “concentrated advantage” schools that were described in the 2019 Greater New Orleans Foundation study.
Ten years ago, another study examined the racial dynamics of the New Orleans charter school system and found the same inequities.
The study, done by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, found that 89% of white students and 73% of Asian students – along with 24% of Black students – attend this subset of schools, which the Stanford study described as “Tier 1” schools, which often carry school rankings of As and Bs. By contrast, the rest of schools are more than 90% Black and carry lower school rankings.
Behind the racial dynamics are educational inequities. Schools with more Black and economically disadvantaged students have more inexperienced teachers, who leave at higher rates each year, according to the Greater New Orleans Foundation 2019 study. Also, when compared with the city’s dozen “concentrated advantage”/Tier 1 schools, the remaining schools are far less likely to offer foreign language or advanced-placement classes.
Certainly, before Katrina, New Orleans schools were also largely segregated and unequal – and some educators and advocates in town have pushed successfully in recent years to hire more Black teachers, tweak enrollment formulas, and to give more funding to schools that enroll pupils with higher needs – all with an eye to making things more fair.
But there was a different sense of community before Katrina, says Kennedy, who describes today’s schools as the “skeletons” of community systems that were washed away after the storm. “These public institutions and these neighborhoods, these things are generational, cultural, and a lot of that got erased in the floodwaters, he said.”
Bricolage brings the building back to life
One day a few years after she’d left, Deborah Richardson drove past the John Mac building on her way home from teaching at a nearby school. As she drove along Esplanade, she noticed a work crew outside, pressure-washing the graceful old John McDonogh building.
She cried.
For her entire career, the building’s exterior had been covered with mold, mildew and dirt, Richardson said. “All of those years I was there. We begged them to pressure-wash the building.” But now that the school was no longer John McDonogh High, officials found the money to do it, she said.
Then the district went further and renovated the entire building for a new charter school, Bricolage Academy, an elementary school; the retrofit for younger students made the project even more expensive. Bricolage opened for students in 2018.
The building looked stunning. Some Trojan alums came by to take a peek. But Richadson didn’t want a tour. “ They couldn’t get me to step foot in there, because I thought that was just a slap in the face.”
Some John Mac alumni are happy that the John Mac building no longer houses a school of “last resort.” Almost overnight, Bricolage became a concentrated-advantage school. The start-up charter also ranked tenth in the city this year for how many of its students earned “mastery” level on Louisiana state standardized tests. Bricolage also consistently receives one of the highest numbers of applications from parents applying for kindergarten spots for their children within the system’s annual lottery system.
Bricolage started from kindergarten, adding a grade each year until it became a full k-8 school.
Bricolage’s student body also includes a larger proportion of Black children than many other concentrated-advantage schools. In 2024, 66% of Bricolage’s students were Black, lower than the 74% average across the district.
That diversity is what idealists had hoped for when integration began. Even so, the “diverse by design” model at Bricolage has always felt exclusionary to advocate Ashana Bigard on its face — because a majority of the city’s students are Black.
Bigard’s son attended Bricolage. Pam Matthews’ grandson also went there for a while.
But whenever Bigard walked her son through the grand Esplanade Avenue doors, she remembered how the school building looked when it was John Mac – and how it looks now.
“The amount of investment was night and day,” Bigard said. “It wasn’t there when it was an all-Black school.”
Several years ago, as the school was preparing to open, Richardson had a granddaughter ready to enter school. But she didn’t want her attending Bricolage, she decided.
The changes still hurt Richardson deeply, whenever she drives near the former Trojan Castle.
“When I pass there, I roll my eyes and my heart skips a beat — because I realize what they did to us — not just to teachers, but to students.”
This summer, longtime New Orleans educator Edward Brown was hired to lead Bricolage. He believes that his educators “carry the torch” of the Trojan legacy, he said.
From its start, Bricolage adopted the Trojan mascot and colors in a nod to that legacy. Images of the mascot and splashes of gold and green are seen throughout its corridors. And Brown feels the building’s deep history whenever he walks the beautiful hardwood floors within the historic structure, he said.
Brown has an appreciation for the history of John Mac that goes far beyond its architecture, because longtime John Mac teacher Dr. Raynard Sanders was Brown’s professor at Southern University of New Orleans. Through Sanders, Brown is well aware of the struggles that predate Bricolage. “A lot of sacrifice went into establishing Bricolage as a pillar in the community,” Brown said, acknowledging John Mac’s difficult years and longtime neglect.
“The institution went through some unfortunate challenges,” he said.
Yet Brown also knows that the Trojan Castle was home to talented students and to renowned educators like Sanders and Richardson, who produced greatness. “John Mac has a historic and impactful alumni base,” he said. “A lot of great people came out of that school.”
After Katrina, even graduates like Kareem showed a “high level of persistence” in getting their diplomas despite the trying times, he said. All of the history is part of John Mac’s proud legacy and he is dedicated to seeing Bricolage build upon that, he said. “We want to carry that on.”