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First students to integrate East Baton Rouge Parish schools discuss experience decades later
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Baton Rouge - Some of the first students to integrate the East Baton Rouge Parish School System spoke on a panel at LSU Law Center on Tuesday evening.
"It really was a living nightmare," Dr. Freya Anderson-Rivers said.
Anderson-Rivers attended Southern Lab School, but during her senior year, she went to what was, at the time, Lee High School. The school has since been renamed Liberty High School.
"We were all looking forward to things that seniors look forward to, signing books, and just to be with your classmates at this time, and then to be stripped away in a desegrated school, where no one spoke to me," she said.
She was among more than a dozen students who helped integrate East Baton Rouge Parish schools following Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, which ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional.
"It tasked those district courts with issuing desegregation orders for the local school districts to implement Brown v. Board with deliberate speed," Senior Counsel at the Legal Defense Fund Victor Jones said.
Dr. Anderson-Rivers was also the first black woman to attend LSU. During the summer of 1964, she filed suit to desegregate LSU's undergraduate program.
"Students still moving away from you in class, spitting on you, knocking you off the sidewalk, if you were close to someone. Teachers are ignoring you," she said.
Charles Burchell went to Southern Lab School, but in the fall of 1963, he went to Baton Rouge High School.
"The experience was mostly educational because we were not allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities. I was a member of the band, as were other people who went to other schools. There were sports, but we were not allowed to join them," Burchell said.
Merrill Patin, who went to Glen Oaks High School, and Elaine Boyle Patin, who went to Baton Rouge High, also spoke on the panel.
"I was the only boy at Glen Oaks and five other girls, and no one talked to me the whole day for the whole school year, except for the five black girls," Merrill Patin said.
But the legacy of Brown v. Board still continues, even seventy years after the landmark decision.
"We say that Brown II is the case that transformed American society. Any aspect of equal opportunity as you know it today stems from Brown v. Board," Jones said.
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