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As a Six-Year-Old, Leona Tate Helped Desegregate Schools. Now She Wants Others To Learn That History

Updated: Nov 10, 2022

Tate plans to open an educational center in the New Orleans school she attended as one of only three black students in 1960.

Head shot of Leona Tate against a brown background, leaning forward slightly with her hands folded beneath her chin and smiling warmly at the camera.

Clutching a small purse, six-year-old Leona Tate walked into McDonogh 19 Elementary School here and helped to desegregate the South. Images of that November morning in 1960 are seared into the national memory: Tate and three other little first-grade girls in white dresses and hair ribbons walking into New Orleans schools, flanked by federal marshals and heckled by hateful crowds.





 
 
 

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