Civil rights icon Leona Tate is excited this week.
The Historic New Orleans Collection held a reception for their newest exhibition on Thursday that includes her personal story.
In 1960, Tate was among the first Black students at one of New Orleans’ formerly all-white schools.
“The exhibit is fantastic,” Tate told Verite News during an interview before the reception.
She was one of several high-profile civil rights figures who came out to celebrate the opening of the exhibit.
“The Trail They Blazed,” on display in the French Quarter at the HNOC, is an oral history project that showcases the city’s civil rights activism – as told by the people who lived it.
Researchers collected testimonies from people who participated in some of the city’s most pivotal civil rights moments during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. It opened to the public last week and will be open for a year.
“New Orleans especially, has a really long history of civil rights activism,” Eric Seiferth, the lead curator for the project, said. “We really looked at the mid-century movement in New Orleans.”
The exhibit is opening as the Trump administration has sought to eliminate so-called “race-centered” interpretations of American history and cancelled grants for arts programs that don’t align with the administration’s priorities. In April, the Institute of Museum and Library Services terminated two grants previously awarded to the Whitney Plantation, a museum in an antebellum plantation in Wallace, Louisiana that centers the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked there in its exhibitions.
Tate now runs the Tate, Etienne, Prevost Center — a civil rights museum at the former site of McDonogh 19 Elementary School, the school she desegregated along with Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne, when they were six years old. She said she finds the Trump administration’s attacks hurtful, adding that she thinks the administration is afraid of confronting the country’s sordid racial history.
“Why are we afraid to tell the truth?” she said. “It makes me feel like they’re doing this because they’re embarrassed of what happened.”
The work that culminated in the new exhibit started nine years ago. In 2016, researchers from the museum started interviewing people who had been active in the Civil Rights movement, gathering more than 50 hours of oral histories, Seiferth said. They called the effort “The NOLA Resistance Oral History Project.”
In response to a desire to meet community members close to home, the museum created a traveling exhibit that printed out peoples’ stories on panels that were displayed at public libraries and educational institutions around the city. The traveling exhibit started in September 2023 and will make its way to Xavier University toward the end of summer, according to Seiferth.
“We had so much success with it,” Seiferth said, “that we wanted to do something here.”
Setting up the show at the HNOC’s French Quarter museum meant that it could include original artifacts that needed preservation, such as hand written contemporary notes and original photos. The traveling show used printouts of the artifacts on the panels. It also means the exhibit can reach a larger audience because of the number of tourists who visit the museum, Seiferth said.
“New Orleans was a really integral part of the national Civil Rights Movement,” Seiferth said, “but it holds kind of a small place in the national idea of the civil rights movement.”
The collection is broken up into seven story pods that tell the story of key moments like the march on New Orleans City Hall in 1963, school desegregation, the push to register Black citizens to vote, and lunch counter sit-in demonstrations — one of which led to a Supreme Court case.
The decision of the court in Lombard v. Louisiana overturned the convictions of the demonstrators who had been arrested for not leaving, which paved the way for further sit-in protests.
Tate’s story is featured in the exhibition’s “School Desegregation” section. Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, escorted by a U.S. Marshal, integrated the school in the Lower 9th Ward at the same time as Ruby Bridges was integrating a school in the Upper 9th Ward. The scene with Bridges was captured in the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With.”
During Thursday evening’s opening celebration, attendees shared their thoughts on navigating Black histories during a time when the federal government has been antagonistic to those view points.
Daniel Hammer, president and CEO of the HNOC, praised the almost decade-long project and said organizations like his have to lead the way.
“There is a strong desire in America to engage with history,” Hammer said, “and so we need to guide that conversation, and we need to do it thoughtfully and carefully.”
Being a private institution helps inoculate the HNOC from some of the pains other museums face that rely more heavily on public grants, Seiferth said.
Local author and journalist Megan Braden-Perry said she’s a big fan of the work the HNOC does. She told Verite that it’s a challenging time to put on an exhibit like “The Trail They Blazed,” but she said she prefers that educational institutions tell the truth about history.
“It’s scary, because you want to get money, you want to get funding, but you have to watch the way you word things, but also you don’t want to lie. It’s tough,” she said.
Civil rights activist Don C. Hubbard, featured in the “March on City Hall” section of the exhibit, was also at the opening reception. He helped organize the 1963 march that called on the city to support equal employment opportunities for the city’s Black citizens and repeal city ordinances calling for segregation.
“We decided not to go to the March on Washington, because we thought the march could take care of itself,” Hubbard said. “But there were too many things in New Orleans that needed to be addressed, so we started to organize to march on City Hall.”
Hubbard, who today owns a bed and breakfast in the city, said that it was important for him to share his story in the exhibit so it would be preserved.
“History’s got to be recorded somewhere,” he said.
The Historic New Orleans Collection is located at 520 Royal St. The museum exhibition runs through June 2026.
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