Student Activism

Like many colleges and universities nationwide, Tulane University has a troubled past when it comes to race. The school’s namesake, Paul Tulane, was a wealthy New Orleans merchant whose fortune likely had ties to slavery. When he endowed the school in 1881, it was explicitly for the education of “young white persons." After a court battle, Tulane admitted its first black students in 1963. Now, more than 50 years later, some say the university still has a long way to go to make its campus truly welcoming to black students.

A group of black women students is organizing for both cultural and policy changes to make that happen.

Young people are the most at risk for lead contamination; lead can cause lifelong developmental problems for kids who are exposed to it. And there are concerns about the possibility of lead in New Orleans’ drinking water, including in the city’s schools. After years of delay by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) to install water filters, one seventh-grader is taking matters into his own hands.

For many, the teenage years are a time when you start to realize the world isn’t fair, and life can be tough. Facing issues like income inequality, racism, and violence, can be overwhelming. One unique program in New Orleans is helping students engage with tough social issues through dance.

This week on The Reading Life: Wayne Wiegand, co-author with Shirley Wiegand, of “The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism.” We’ll also hear from novelist Silas House, whose new book is “Southernmost.”

When Americans are taught the story of school desegregation, they learn about the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education. But much of the work of desegregation happened outside the courtroom. Black children, some as young as six, put their bodies on the line every time they entered a white school, and nearly all of them were girls.

Pastor Lisa Fitzpatrick spends every weeknight at an old Catholic school building in Central City. Tonight she’s sliding slices of pizza onto paper plates for about a dozen hungry teenagers.

Students packed the courtyard at Benjamin Franklin High School Wednesday morning — just two days after the school had to cancel classes due to its own gun threat. They were among hundreds of students in New Orleans and thousands nationwide who left their classrooms Wednesday to take part in a national school walkout to protest gun violence after the latest school shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla.