Fair ‘35
12th March 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
How many high schools in New Orleans can you name that are fighting for their very survival in the midst of celebrating their 100th anniversary?
How many high schools in New Orleans that have produced generations of local, state and national leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs and lawmakers have been forced to fight to remain open and restore their sterling reputation as state educational officials and the same unsavory types who descended on New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to fire thousands of public school teachers and administrators and turn local schools into experimental labs?
I can only name one: McDonogh 35.
Before 1917, there was no Black public high school in New Orleans. But that year a group of concerned citizens appealed to the Orleans Parish School System to convert McDonogh #13 Boys School into a secondary school for Black children.
McDonogh 35 remained the sole Black public high school in New Orleans until L.B. Landry and Booker T. Washington opened in 1942.
It just so happens that I am among the many thousands who consider themselves fortunate to have donned the school’s maroon and gold colors and learned what it means to have Roneagle pride.
I will never forget the day I fell in love with McDonogh 35. I was in the fifth grade at Bienville Elementary School and a member of the school’s crossing guard. On one Thursday, I sort of rushed the younger students across the street in an effort to get home as soon as possible in order to attend the ‘35-Carver football game at Tad Gormley Stadium in City Park with my pops.
When we finally made it there, the stadium was already packed and the atmosphere was electric. What I experienced on that fall evening forever transformed me.
Because my pops was a former McDonogh 35 teacher, he was able to introduce me to many of his former colleagues and students who literally took me under their Roneagle wings and let me know I was already part of the family. I was able to gather information about what it was like to attend the school and was happy to have the opportunity to just soak it all up.
I can’t tell you what the final score was that night but I can say with certainty that I left the game feeling like I won the lottery. With my heart and mind racing, I didn’t sleep very much that night. It dawned on me that I had fallen in love with “Fair ‘35.”
As I expected, competition was stiff to get into McDonogh 35.
When I read or hear about some of the struggles young people face in public and charter schools today, I know that I was blessed to go to ‘35 when I did and to become part of such an amazing legacy.
Hurricane Katrina might have taken away the old marching band helmet I was allowed to keep after my freshman year and the band jacket I received toward the end of my senior year, but it could never wash away the rich memories of great times with great teachers and some of the best friends I have ever known.
One of my biggest regrets is that I no longer have my ‘35 yearbooks. While I can’t name all of the names or remember all of the faces of my fellow Roneagles, I do remember those who have already moved on to the Village of the Ancestors like Junior Houston, one of the kindest and most humble human beings I have ever known, and Duane Carkum, who I had known since elementary school and had planned to collaborate with on a number of screenplays before his unexpected passing. They, and others who have moved on, will never be forgotten.
For most of its 100-year existence, the school had managed to maintain certain standards of academic excellence, decorum and behavior, but it all seemed to begin falling apart in the first decade of the 21st century.
Some of my former teachers would tell me that things are no longer as they were when I attended the school in the 1980s and former classmates who visited ‘35 also talked about a “rougher” group of students.
Given what I had experienced at the school, I couldn’t believe it. I used to tell friends who went to other schools all the time that I was probably aware of about five or six conflicts at the school over the four years I went there and at least half of those conflicts involved girls. And most of those conflicts didn’t escalate into fist fights.
That was pretty amazing, given the diversity of the student body and the many neighborhoods represented in the school. I was fortunate to sit in classrooms with some of the best and brightest students in the city, but some of them hailed from very tough neighborhoods and knew how to handle themselves in a fight. But they also knew that fighting was not tolerated at the school and learned how to resolve conflicts peacefully.
Some of them would share stories on Mondays about major fights that took place over the weekend between youths from rival wards that had a long history of violence and conflict. On at least one occasion, at a dance held at the St. Jude Community Center, I saw up close how dire the situation could get when cats from uptown New Orleans clashed with residents from the Iberville housing development. But these same students behaved like angels once they entered the peaceful confines of McDonogh 35.
I remember telling Dr. Morris F.X. Jeff Jr., one of my mentors and a family friend, that going to ‘35 made it easy for me to appreciate the many gifts that Africa and Africans brought to the planet and to America. New Orleans, after all, had long been called the most African city in America and there were certainly different vibes and activities going on in various neighborhoods and wards across the city.
All of those neighborhoods and wards were well-represented at ‘35, from the laid-back cats hailing from the Lower Ninth Ward to the smooth-talking and sometimes bold students from uptown, and the colorful brothers and sisters from the 7th Ward. Hollygrove, Tremé, Pigeon Town, Algiers, Seabrook, Sugar Hill, Voscoville, Academy Park, Pontchartrain Park and Gert Town were definitely in the house.
Students from these diverse and culturally vibrant neighborhoods and wards brought their own vernacular, flavor, swag and perspective into the school, making ‘’35 a quintessential salad bowl bursting with limitless possibilities.
I can say with great certainty that I benefited tremendously from being in such a dynamic learning environment, with the school resembling a United Nations of sorts. Most of us realized that we had more in common than we had ever imagined and even our differences played a critical role in our growth and progression as students.
Nestled at 1331 Kerlerec Street in the heart of the Faubourg Tremé, we were raised and molded in one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the U.S. that also happened to be the birthplace of jazz and a stone’s throw from the sacred ground of Congo Square.
It has been clear for quite some time that someone has an axe to grind with ‘35. One of the early clues was the decision to place the newest school campus near a juvenile detention center.
What message does it send to young people that the most productive learning environment chosen to accommodate them during their final four years of grade school is next to a “feeder institution” for the ever-growing prison-industrial complex?
Juveniles who have made mistakes deserve a legitimate shot at turning their lives around — something they are currently not getting in New Orleans or the rest of the state — and teenagers in general should not have to be reminded daily of the traps and snares that have been set for them by the criminal justice system.
Another clue that something was rotten in Gentilly was the spirit and design of the school.
As battered and bat-infested as the last ‘35 facility on Kerlerec Street was, it was never as drab, uninspired and unimaginative as the new design for ‘35 is.
There is nothing in the design of the school that jumps out at visitors or lets students know that they are valued and the reason that the school was built in the first place.
Even though the school has lots of land around it, even McDonogh 35 football coach Wayne Reese’s efforts to get someone to create a practice field on the 16-acre campus fell on deaf ears. Since moving to the new campus, the team has wasted precious time and energy boarding buses and having to find somewhere other than their own spacious campus to practice.
Then there was the change of venues for ‘35 and other New Orleans public schools. All of a sudden, ‘35 seemed to be playing all of its home games at the smaller Pan-American Stadium rather than the newly renovated Tad Gormley Stadium, which has since become the favorite site for matchups featuring Catholic League teams. McDonogh 35 hasn’t played many games at Tad Gormley of late that didn’t involve an opponent from the Catholic League.
You can count this new arrangement as one more example of the “Empire” striking back in post-Katrina New Orleans, turning back the clock on all the gains made by the majority-Black City and public school system since Brown v. The Board of Education.
There have been many changes designed to let Black folks in New Orleans know who is in charge of the city and school system post-Katrina including the mass firing of thousands of public school teachers, administrators and staffers, the forced merging of L.B. Landry and Edna Karr high schools in Algiers, the transformation of George Washington Carver High School into what amounts to a penal institution for high school students, a failed attempt to build a new school for Walter L. Cohen College Prep students atop a toxic landfill at the former site of Booker T. Washington High School and the mass chartering of the city’s public schools in a veiled effort to seize control of the lucrative contracts these schools sign with vendors.
For the record, Cohen College Prep won’t be rebuilt on the toxic Central City landfill but another public school for Black kids will. Score one for white supremacy and the Recovery School District, which was led at the time by a Black New Orleans native and Catholic school graduate.
It is amazing when one thinks about how easy it has been for the powers that be to find people that look like us to do us in. It happens in public education, local government, the police department, the judicial system, statewide education boards like the Board of Elementary and secondary Education and the State Legislature.
In many ways, McDonogh 35 represents an Ethiopia of sorts in the New Orleans public school system, the last educational institution standing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the onslaught of white supremacy that has swept over the city and claimed people’s homes, entire neighborhoods, schools, civil liberties, human rights, hopes and dreams.
Like Ethiopia, a beacon of inspiration in the Motherland because of its fierce independence and indomitable spirit, McDonogh 35 has to this point been unconquered and uncolonized by the powers that be.
But the current efforts to topple the city’s first Black college preparatory public school are daunting, to put it mildly.
It might have been tempting for some proud alumni to give up on the school and its future a long time ago were it not for ‘35’s long-held tradition of overcoming major adversity and succeeding against the odds.
The 7th Ward school, which counts the city’s first Black mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, civil rights warrior and later Judge Israel Augustine, education visionary Dr. Mack Spears, civil rights icon and Southern Christian Leadership Conference founder the Rev. Abraham Lincoln “A.L.” Davis, former NORD leader Morris F.X. Jeff Sr., former state legislator and civil rights giant the Rev. Avery C. Alexander. Judge Joan Bernard Armstrong and political pioneer and organizer Earl Amedee among its notable alumni, is not in the habit of giving up or letting a little adversity get in the way of fulfilling its mission.
Since its founding in 1917, the school has endured two World Wars, the Vietnam War, several wars in the Middle East and Jim Crow.
If the powers that be and those with their own agendas for McDonogh were looking for a fight, they found one.
This article originally published in the March 12, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
