Copyright by Caroline Booth Pinkston 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Caroline Booth Pinkston Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Remembering Ruby, Forgetting Frantz: Civil Rights Memory, Education Reform, and the Struggle for Social Justice in New Orleans Public Schools, 1960-2014 Committee: Julia Mickenberg, Supervisor Cary Cordova Janet Davis Shirley Thompson Noah De Lissovoy Remembering Ruby, Forgetting Frantz: Civil Rights Memory, Education Reform, and the Struggle for Social Justice in New Orleans Public Schools, 1960-2014 by Caroline Booth Pinkston Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2019 Dedication For the faculty, staff, and - most of all - the students of Validus Preparatory Academy, my first and best guides into the world of teaching and learning, and the ones who first made me fall in love with what a school can be. Acknowledgements This project owes a great deal to the faculty and staff at the University of Texas who helped to usher it into existence. I am grateful to my committee - Julia Mickenberg, Cary Cordova, Shirley Thompson, Janet Davis, and Noah De Lissovoy - for their care and attention to this project. But even more so, I am grateful for their generosity, guidance, and mentorship throughout the past seven years - for their teaching, their conversation, and their encouragement. In particular, I wish to thank Julia, my advisor and the chair of my committee, for her many close and careful readings of this project, and for her consistent support of my goals. The Department of American Studies, the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation all provided funding and institutional support without which this project could not exist. The National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation are also responsible for pairing me with an excellent mentor in Janelle Scott, who provided insightful feedback and guidance from the first moment I met with her, about this project and about academic life more broadly. A thank you is owed, as well, to the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans, which connected me to vital resources and, more broadly, made me feel as though my project had a home base in New Orleans. This project also grew out of the support of a whole community of friends and fellow students who nurtured my scholarship and, most importantly, provided me with companionship along the way. Thank you to all the participants, both graduate students and faculty, in the American Studies Graduate Writing Workshop who read and provided feedback on my work - and thank you to Lauren Gutterman for organizing that space, and for all the ways in which she works to make graduate students in our department feel valued and supported. I am particularly grateful to Josh Kopin, Natalie Zelt, and Robert Oxford, who read my writing time and again, who tolerated my anxieties, and who gave me both structure and community when I needed it most. A broader thank you is owed to all the members of my graduate community, both at UT and in my NAEd/Spencer cohort, for being a part of the ecosystem in which this project was born and raised. I’d like to make special mention of two groups within that larger universe: the brave little cohort of students with whom I embarked on this journey seven years ago, and the students several years ahead of me who helped me see that there was a light at the end of it - especially Susan Quesal, whose wisdom has been a sustaining force. Graduate school can be a labyrinth, and I am grateful to all those who helped me navigate it, to the faculty and colleagues who helped me make sense of this process and where it might make take me, and to the people working behind the scenes to make it all possible - I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Chad Crawford in this regard. A network of individuals from around the country helped guide my research for this project. I am especially indebted to the librarians and archivists who supported my research at the Earl K. Long Special Collections Library at the University of New Orleans and at the Norman Rockwell Museum and Archive, as well as the staff - current and former - at the Louisiana Department of Historic Preservation. I am grateful to all those who took time to speak with me about this project, including Ken Ducote, Chester Martin, Jerry Pavlon-Blum, Mario Chiodo, Donna Fricker, Raynard Sanders, Charles Hatfield, Leona Tate, Matt Sakakeeny, Chris Hines, and Kate Mehok. I owe a particular thank you to Al Kennedy, who not only shared his own v insights generously, but connected me to so many others, as well. As an outsider to New Orleans, I am deeply appreciative of the many people there who, like Dr. Kennedy and many others, went out of their way to make time and space for me and for this project in their busy lives. And I would be remiss to mention the generosity I encountered in New Orleans without giving a particular thank you to Allie Manker, Sean Murphy, and Mindy, for sharing their space and their time and their lives with me so very openly, and in doing so, for helping me feel like I had a real home in New Orleans. I am forever grateful. It takes a village to write a dissertation, and I am lucky to have been surrounded by a network of support that extended far beyond the walls of the academy. My friends and family - who put up with me, cheered me on, and celebrated with me - have made their mark on this project, as have my dogs, Thelma and Ruth, my steadfast companions through some otherwise very long and lonely hours of writing. There are two people who deserve special mention. Thank you to Natalie Zelt, my writing partner and my dear friend, for reading each page of this dissertation - but more so, for being there every step of the way with me since day one. I am so very lucky that I got to do graduate school with you. And to my husband John, for everything, but above all else, for making sure I knew that I was loved whether or not I ever finished this dissertation - which is what I needed to know in order to finish it. vi Abstract Remembering Ruby, Forgetting Frantz: Civil Rights Memory, Education Reform, and the Struggle for Social Justice in New Orleans Public Schools, 1960-2014 Caroline Booth Pinkston, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Julia Mickenberg This project is an interdisciplinary exploration of the national memory of school integration and its stakes for evolving education reform movements, grounded in a case study of Ruby Bridges and the William Frantz School. In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges embarked on a struggle to integrate William Frantz Elementary in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Her harrowing ordeal captured the hearts of the nation and transformed Bridges into a powerful icon of the civil rights movement. Today, a statue of Bridges honors that history in the courtyard of the Frantz building, but Frantz Elementary itself closed in 2005 after years of failing to meet state standards. The historic Frantz building now houses Akili Academy, one of the many charter schools around which the New Orleans public school system was remade in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This project brings together cultural memory studies, childhood studies, education history, and education policy to chart an evolving popular memory of Ruby Bridges and the Frantz School against the backdrop of shifting tides of education reform in New Orleans from integration to the charter school takeover. I trace the construction of Ruby Bridges as an icon of the civil rights movement, and examine how the history and memory of Bridges and the Frantz School have been mobilized by various stakeholders in the years after 1960. I aim to highlight what is erased and obscured in dominant narratives of both the individual and the institution, to engage with alternative interpretations of that history, and to trace the connections between the popular memory of social justice movements, local education histories, and evolving education reform agendas. Ultimately, this project sheds light on the place of the past in competing visions for the future of New Orleans public schools. vii Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Constructing A Civil Rights Icon: Norman Rockwell, Robert Coles, and the Emergence of Ruby in American Memory ............................................................... 32 Time to Take the Story Back: Ruby Bridges as Author, Activist, and Icon .................. 101 Famous Frantz, Failing Frantz: Marking the History of the William Frantz School, 1960 - 2005 ........................................................................................................... 153 Fighting for Frantz’s Future: The Ruby Bridges School for Community Service & Social Justice, and the Place of the Past in Post-Katrina New Orleans Public Education .............................................................................................................. 207 Conclusion: Akili Academy ........................................................................................ 257 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 278 viii Introduction A bronze statue sits in the courtyard of the William Frantz School building on North Galvez Street in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans. The statue depicts a young African- American girl, with school books under her arm and a bow in her hair, standing by a staircase. The child represented in the statue is Ruby Bridges, and she is depicted here at the age of six, standing by the front steps of William Frantz Elementary, the school that she desegregated on November 14th of 1960.