THE SOUTH: The Battle of New Orleans

Each morning the women gathered in an ecstasy of hatred on the streets of New Orleans, where two schools had been ordered by U.S. courts to integrate. They shrieked like harridans, cursed, kicked and clawed at the few who dared brave their lines. At McDonough 19 School, a boycott by white pupils was complete: three Negro girls, all first-graders, attended alone. But at William Frantz School a six-year-old Negro girl was joined by two white children, then by four, then by six, and at week’s end by ten. New Orleans seemed ready to return to the U.S.

The battle of New Orleans last week was fought both on the streets and in the courts. Methodically, relentlessly, the courts tore down segregation’s façade. A three-judge federal panel denied the legality of interposition—the odd notion that a state government may interpose itself between the judgments of the U.S. Supreme Court and the people. Interposition, said the court, “is not a constitutional doctrine. If taken seriously, it is illegal defiance of constitutional authority.”

The three judges further opened the way for the Orleans Parish School Board to claim $1,262,000 in funds that had been ordered withheld by the Louisiana legislature; the ruling was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, where hopefully it will receive top priority on the calendar as a matter of “paramount public importance.” During the week, no less than 700 officials, including Governor Jimmie Davis, were federally enjoined against interfering with integration.

“I Won’t Do It.” As the legal struggle went against segregation, the fury of the mob outside the schools increased. The taunts grew more venomous. Husky men began to appear, ominously and silently, among the jeering women. The first to run the white boycott at William Frantz School was the Rev. Lloyd A. Foreman, 34, a Methodist minister. Walking his small daughter into the school, Foreman was shoved by the mob. “Don’t touch me,” he snapped. “You can talk to me—but don’t touch me.” Next to brave the mob were James and Daisey Gabrielle with their daughter Yolanda, 6. Gabrielle, a worker in the New Orleans sewerage and water commission, guided Yolanda to safety while Daisey Gabrielle, swinging a big pocketbook, cleared a path through the crowd. “No mob’s going to tell me what to do,” said she. “If you give in to this mob, you have to give in to all of them, and I won’t do it.”

A native of Costa Rica and mother of six, Daisey had kept her daughter home when the school reopened after the Thanksgiving holiday: “I was so scared. Who am I to fight the whole state of Louisiana and the Governor, I asked myself.” But later, she had second thoughts. “My conscience tore at me. I knew if I gave up, the minister would give up too, and there’d be no white child left.”

Amid the growing tension, New Orleans’ police reinforced their cordon around the school. That only seemed to make the mob angrier. Reporters and photographers were attacked. The Rev. Jerome Drolet, a Catholic priest who accompanied the Foremans to school one morning, was met with cries of “bastard,” “Communist” and “nigger lover.” Restlessly, the mob moved to the Foremans’ frame cottage, stoned the family’s black-and-white dog. “Look,” cried one woman, “even their dog’s integrated.” When police shooed the women away, they went to a hospitable neighbor’s lawn, where self-styled “cheerleaders” chanted their favorite doggerel: “Nigger lover, nigger lover, nigger lover, Jew: we hate niggers, we hate you.” In front of the shabby public-housing apartment where the Gabrielles live, a crowd of children waved Confederate flags and piped: “All I want for Christmas is a clean white school.”

“We’re Going to Help.” Against the mob’s passion, the Foreman and Gabrielle families wavered. The Foremans. harassed by obscene telephone calls, moved to the home of friends. Lloyd Foreman hesitated about bringing his little girl to school again. “Frankly,” he said, “at this point, I don’t know what they might try.” Jim Gabrielle’s boss told him—mistakenly—that his daughter had been shot. Daisey Gabrielle, ostracized by her neighbors, stood fast. “Neighbors change,” she said. “Principles don’t.”

Then, almost overnight, a reaction seemed to set in. Both the Foremans and the Gabrielles began getting sympathetic letters. Daisey Gabrielle and Yolanda were driven home from school by members of a housewives’ volunteer committee. “We’re gathering the people who want to send their children to school but need help,” explained one of the volunteers. “We’re going to help them. We might have to run a kind of Berlin airlift during the next week or two.” The slowly growing number of white pupils at Frantz was still another evidence that the power of the mob was ebbing. In New Orleans, Jim Crow education was dying hard—but did seem to be dying surely.