By Garry Blanson
“You have to know the past to understand the present.” — Carl Sagan
In order to better understand why a small clan of white people, the Neville Charter Association, are so adamant about pushing for Neville High School to become a charter school, we need to go back to the year 1931, the year when Neville High School opened as a white-only school.
Once we visit the past history of Neville High School, we can fully understand why a small group of white citizens in Monroe would be so concerned about taking a high school whose current student body is approximately 60% Black and making it a charter school.
You see, around 1929, the former old white-only high school, City High, was becoming too small to accommodate the number of white students attending the school. Therefore, white people decided to have a new school built. By the way, I haven’t been able to confirm that this new school opened as City High, but I have reason to suspect that it could have been. Nevertheless, it is a fact that when the school was first built, Black (“Negro”) students were not allowed to attend Neville High School.
As a matter of fact, the school actually operated in Monroe for almost four decades as a white-only high school.
These days, some people don’t like it when I bring up the racism that Black students had to endure in Monroe. It seems as though they can’t relate to, or don’t want to relate to, Black children being told they couldn’t attend a school simply because of the color of their skin. However, when I ask them how they would feel if they were discriminated against because they were white, all of a sudden they tend to get pretty quiet.
With that said, let me inform everyone about the 1980 Judge Stagg Court Order Ruling that triggered the last “white exodus” at Neville High School. You see, Judge Stagg’s ruling included rezoning of the high schools in Monroe; however, it didn’t take effect until 1981.
So in 1981, when Judge Stagg’s consent decree went into effect, it disrupted the lives of many students in Monroe — Black and white. Interestingly, it was Judge Stagg’s ruling that sent many new Black students to Neville High School, and, as I alluded to earlier, contributed to the departure of many white students as well.
Now, let’s fast-forward to the year 2024, when the Neville Charter Association presented its proposal to make Neville a charter school to the Monroe City School Board for approval, under the guises that they want to avoid financial bureaucracy and gain financial and operational autonomy — when they are really trying to make Neville High School a charter school so they can cherry-pick the students they want attending Neville.
Furthermore, little has been mentioned publicly about the rezoning of several Monroe City Schools, and that many of the Black students now attending Neville will have to attend other schools.
In closing, I would like to state what everyone in the City of Monroe already knows to be a true fact:
“Ain’t no way in West Hell are a significant number of white parents living in Monroe, Louisiana, going to enroll their white children at Neville High School as long as the current percentage of Black students attending Neville remains at 60% or above!”
