John Scott, Artist: Unless you understand the so called lack of contradiction in contradictory things in New Orleans, it's going to be difficult for you to understand New Orleans. Explained in the simplest way is, if you have ever seen a second line in New Orleans, you could have a thousand people in the street. Each one of those people are actually dancing, doing their own thing. Absolute diversity. But every last one of them, are dancing to the exact same beat. Complete unity. And it's harmonious. And it exists. It's the only city in the world that I know of, where you can have total unity, and absolute diversity, existing simultaneously, without contradiction.
Narrator: The news cameras were already rolling by the time six-year-old Ruby Bridges arrived at William J. Frantz Elementary School, on the morning of November 14th, 1960. This was, after all, no ordinary school day -- and Bridges was no ordinary first grader. The instant she crossed the threshold, William J. Frantz became the first integrated public school in New Orleans.
Frantz Elementary was located in the Ninth Ward, a swampy, flood-prone district, downriver from the French Quarter. Long considered undesirable by wealthy New Orleanians, the area had first been settled by poor blacks and immigrant laborers at the turn-of-the-century -- and, like some of the older neighborhoods in the city, it remained racially-mixed.
John Biguenet, Writer: Racism took a very particular form in New Orleans. On a personal level there may really have been a great deal of courtesy between whites and blacks but on the other hand, institutionally, in terms of the educational system, in terms of its wretched public housing, the effects of the institutionalized racism here were just as pernicious as they were anywhere else in the United States.
Narrator: For more than sixty years -- ever since the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson -- most public schools in the United States had been strictly segregated.
In New Orleans, as in the rest of the country, those designated for African-Americans often had been shamefully neglected. But the ones in the Ninth Ward had been among the city's worst -- dilapidated, unheated and so overcrowded that school board officials had resorted to holding two half-day sessions in order to accommodate all the black students.
Then, in 1955, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education -- declaring "separate but equal" unconstitutional and demanding the speedy desegregation of schools throughout the United States.
Raphael Cassimere, Jr., Historian: I was in class and the telephone rang and my teacher was always serious but when she got off the phone, she was smiling and we knew it was something important and she tried to explain to us what had happened. Immediately I thought about the whites in my neighborhood. I lived in the lower Ninth Ward at that time and I wondered whether or not we're going to be going to school together. I mean, I didn't realize that it was really going to be the beginning of mass exodus of the whites out of the public school system.
Narrator: By the time little Ruby Bridges left Frantz Elementary at the end of her first day, a large crowd of angry whites had gathered outside, chanting racist slogans. Over the days that followed, the crowd grew larger and ever more vicious. Meanwhile, scores of white parents pulled their children out of school.
Interviewer: Did you just take your children out of school?
Mother: I did, I did.
Interviewer: Why did you do that?
Mother: Because they're not supposed to go with the negroes, that's why.
Interviewer: Why do you say that?
Mother: Why? Because they wasn't brought up to go with them. That's why.
Interviewer: What are you going to do about an education for your children now?
Mother: I work and go bring them to a private school. (cheers)
Narrator: For whites opposed to integration, the options were few. They could send their children to expensive parochial or private schools, as many wealthy New Orleanians already did. Or they could join the migration out to the suburbs -- which by now was well under way.
Like their peers in Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles, middle-class New Orleanians had been leaving the city in droves since the mid-1940's, following the direction of newly-completed highways and causeways into the surrounding parishes.
Now, desegregation would fuel that trend -- and many Ninth Ward whites would head east to St. Bernard Parish, where they would find all-white neighborhoods and all-white schools.
Kalamu ya Salaamu, Writer: For survival's sake we've had to live together. Right. Together in the sense of next to each other, and if not accepting, at least tolerating each other. Come the 50's, the development of the expressways they find a way to live and not be together. And if you're not living next to each other you don't have to get along.
John Biguenet, Writer: New Orleans schools of course suffered enormously as whites fled, and the tax base with them. And the schools became predominantly black. So integration isn't really an accurate term for what happened, it was simply a different kind of segregation that took its place.
Narrator: Over the next several decades, urban blight struck New Orleans with a vengeance. As huge numbers of middle-class residents fled, the city increasingly fell victim to violent crime and corruption, its infrastructure crumbling beneath the weight of perpetual neglect, its decline further speeding the exodus. Between 1960 and 2000, more than a hundred-thousand New Orleanians -- including some middle-class blacks and nearly two-thirds of the white population -- decamped to the suburbs.
George Schmidt, Painter: With suburbanization What we lost, was the consensus. You know, you had segregation. But we all shared the same cultural basis. Everybody ate the same food. Everybody celebrated the same celebrations. They shared in the same experience.
John Biguenet: We had a culture that had been living shoulder to shoulder, pressed against the, the Mississippi River and we wound up with an isolation between families that didn't exist in the city. There was a rupture between a continuous life that had been lived for hundreds of years in this particular place and the way it flowed out into surrounding parishes.
Narrator: By the beginning of the 21st century, 67 percent of the city's nearly half-million people were black -- and 28 percent of them were living below the poverty line.
Then, at the tail end of the summer 2005, came the storm that would change everything.
Reporter 1: The devastation that were seeing as we make our way towards the downtown New Orleans area is absolutely astonishing. Completely underwater, the entire residential area ...
Reporter 2: I am looking over a scene of utter devastation. An entire neighborhood and the water has come up to the eves of the houses, and I am told this is not the worst of it.
Mayor: The city of New Orleans is in a state of devastation. We probably have 80 percent of our city underwater.
Reporter 4: It is just unbelievable. I told you earlier today I didn't think this had turned out to be Armageddon. I was wrong.
Ari Kelman, Historian: In the immediate aftermath of Katrina some of the sadness and outrage I think was a byproduct of the fact that people throughout this country were seeing images of poverty and racism every night on their TV screens. Americans had to confront the fact that there is an African American underclass in this country that lives in harm's way. And that was very, very unsettling.
John Biguenet, Writer: People who were here took their own boats and went out and rescued people, neighbors from rooftops, they shared what little food and water they had, while we waited for the federal government to arrive. The federal government took five days. In the meantime, it was New Orleans that saved itself.
John Scott, Artist: We are the glue that keeps that city together. It's the love of the place. And maybe it's even a love/hate relationship between the people themselves that keeps that thing together, you know? Because there is polarization in New Orleans. That would be remiss if I said otherwise. But at the same time, you know, there are events and things there that bring people together, unlike anywhere else.