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Remembering the McDonogh Day Boycott of 1954 [1]

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Date: 2024-05-06  

McDonogh Day was an annual May 7 tradition in New Orleans. Public school students dressed in white would head downtown to honor John McDonogh, a slave owner who willed money to build public schools.

During the segregated ritual, white schools would parade through first. The Black schools had to wait in the heat for their turn.

“As a child, I was proud to participate,” La. Supreme Court Justice Revius Ortique Jr. said in the 1987 Xavier University documentary, “A House Divided.” “That was the day you got dressed up and you went up to the monument and you brought your flowers and you threw them there. It was pride.”

For the Black adults, however, the separate McDonogh Day ceremonies reinforced the notions of white superiority and Black inferiority.

“They said, ‘Enough is enough. We are not going to allow our children to be subjected to standing in the heat, waiting their turn, being told in a very public way that they are less than white children,’ ” education historian Walter C. Stern said during a 2020 WWNO 89.9 interview. “It was a real indicator of the growing Civil Rights Movement, this growing pressure not just for educational equity but racial justice more broadly.”

In 1954, two weeks before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, local NAACP director Arthur Chapital organized a McDonogh Day boycott, the city’s first civil rights protest. Ortique, then vice president at large of the Louisiana Council of Labor, spread the word on his radio show.

The Black community heeded the call. Only 34 of the city’s 32,000 Black students and one principal showed up. Mayor Chep Morrison was in front of City Hall holding 32 keys to the city for Black schools that never came.

“The McDonogh Day incident was the first concerted challenge that cut across all segments of the Black community,” Ortique Jr. said. “We spoke as one.”

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/05/06/bitd-mcdonogh-day-1954-boycott-segregation/

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