Through the eyes and ears of a 6-year-old, desegregation day at McDonogh 19 Elementary School looked and sounded like Mardi Gras. As the little girl grabbed her father’s hand, he told her to look straight ahead.

“And, of course, I didn’t look straight ahead,” Tessie Prevost Williams told an interviewer years later. “I was looking around to see what was going on. I could hear this crowd screaming and then I saw the police on horses and it was like Mardi Gras. That’s what it looked like.”

But that day was far from it.

Williams, one of the four girls who integrated New Orleans public schools on Nov. 14, 1960, died July 6. She was 69.

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Known as the “McDonogh 3,” Williams, Gail Etienne and Leona Tate integrated McDonogh 19 while another 6-year-old, Ruby Bridges, did the same at William Frantz Elementary School. As part of the NOLA Resistance Oral History Project, Williams described that day.

“My mother had my clothes laid out,” she said. “I remember the marshals coming. I went with my daddy. We parked maybe two blocks away from the school. All I could see was this crowd of people. I thought it was Mardi Gras because that’s the very spot where we would go to watch the parade.” 

Williams also remembered the prayers of her paternal grandmother, who she described as an outspoken Christian woman.

“I remember her praying for us, praying for the teachers, praying for other students. She asked the Lord to take care of us,” Williams said. “What I didn’t realize until I got to be an adult was that our first grade teacher along with the marshals went through this but they still had to go back to a community that did not agree” with what they were doing.

Born in 1954, Williams worked as an administrative assistant at the LSU School of Dentistry for many years. The school described her as being “quiet and unassuming. You’d never know that …she played a key role in the history of the civil rights movement. You’d never guess that her unshakable dignity was shaped by hatred from people who didn’t know her and love from the people who did.”

The hate came via letters and phone calls. The love came from her community and church, Branch Bell Baptist. 

“I’ll never forget,” Williams recalled, “this guy said: ‘Y’all saw that crowd out there jeering at you but what you didn’t see was the Black crowd. We were out there cheering in support. There were as many of us out there cheering in support as there were white people hating you.’ ” 

At least two white people didn’t hate the girls: first grade teacher Florence Meyers and U.S. Marshal Bob Butler. 

Meyers was the girls’ only teacher for a year. “She was soft spoken and she was nice to us,” Williams said. “We would pray with her at school. We really loved her. She was just a sweet person.” 

Butler told Williams that he protected her because it was his job. A bond eventually developed.

“We would ride home in the evening and he would ask about school,” she  said. “When we met 50 years later, there was a connection. We still just connected.”

That connection was so strong that Williams kept some of Butler’s ashes in her Laplace home. After spreading his ashes on the McDonogh 19 grounds, Butler’s wife Pat gave some ashes to the “McDonogh 3.”

Because the girls had Meyers and the school all to themselves, the year at McDonogh 19 was isolating but not horrible, according to Williams. That changed when they were transferred to integrated T.J. Semmes School near the Industrial Canal.

“The white teachers and students did not want us there,” Williams was quoted in a LSU School of Dentistry article. “Every day there were beatings and cursing. They spat on us and ripped off our clothes.” 

As a result, Williams went to Joseph S. Clark Senior High School, where she did not have to deal with racial issues. The students were all Black.

The McDonogh 19 experience, however, did not impact her.  

“I understand the importance but I don’t feel that important,” Williams said. “I played a role in history, but it’s not a big deal to me. It just amazes me that there are so many people interested in that. The attention just amazes me.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...