The Earl K. Long Library’s special collection containing material that documents more than 150 years of Orleans Parish School Board history is expanding.
Library officials have received a cache of memorabilia that includes band uniforms, trophies, plaques from defunct or renamed schools, and even a brick from William Frantz Elementary School, the formerly all-white public school that 6-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated in 1960.
“The artifacts are a different type of content for the OPSB collection, because most of the materials currently in the collection consist of print and audio-visual materials,” said Connie Phelps, Louisiana and Special Collections librarian. “The band uniforms are significant for this collection because 91 Library Special Collections generally doesn’t collect fabric or textiles."
The collection has been housed in the library since 1983 and has more than 170 years of school board records, rules and regulations, legal files for landmark education cases, an oral history collection, school newsletters, yearbooks and thousands of photographs, some dating to the 19th century.
This week Sharon Hunter, the administrative records manager for NOLA Public Schools, shepherded to 91 additional documents and artifacts containing decades of history from several schools.
“I was telling the new superintendent about how special this collection is and how people do use it,” Hunter said. “How they (use it to) find people as well as writing thesis and articles about the district.”
Hunter said the special collection is especially beneficial considering the transformation the school district has undergone as one that is made up solely of independent charter schools.
“It’s not what it was, and this captures all of the history,” Hunter said.
Al Kennedy, a historian of the city’s public schools, who helped to establish the Orleans Parish School Board Collection, said he is pleased by the addition.
“That’s the cool part about a living collection; what Sharon’s doing is just keeping it alive,” Kennedy said. “You’d hate to see an institution that is still going strong not have a continuous history.”
The special collection, which is housed on the fourth floor of the library, is one of the most requested collections, Phelps said. Researchers, writers, journalists and the general public make use of its contents or contact staff members with questions they hope can be answered through materials in the collection.
An author sent the library staff copies of her recently published children’s book, “Small Shoes, Great Strides,” for their help in finding the names of teachers who were on staff at McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School when it was integrated in 1960.
The book, by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, tells the story of first-graders Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost who help to integrate the formerly all-white public elementary school. The trio entered McDonogh the same day Bridges headed into Frantz and faced a similarly incensed mob that hurled racist chants as the little girls walked into the school.
A favorite story of Phelps’, which she said is indicative of the far-reaching depths of the collection, involves an email inquiry sent to the library. The person had the name of a woman and was asking if she could be located in one of the old high school yearbooks.
“I looked it up and it had a photo of her there, and I sent it to him,” Phelps said. “He said, ‘This is my grandmother, I’ve never seen a picture of her before.’”
“It’s truly a treasure trove,” Phelps said of the collection.
Now Phelps and her special collections team of James Hodges, Ron Joullian and Lindsey Reno, will comb through that trove to process all of the new material.
It’s a process that will take about a year and some research to determine best practices for preserving, and possibly exhibiting, the uniforms, said Hodges, archivist and assistant library system administrator.
“We are set up for archival documents, so artifacts are a bit less common,” Hodges said. “This is kind of building a museum aspect of an archive rather than a document aspect. This will allow us to have some stuff that is for exhibits. Like that brick, that’s something that’s tangible evidence of Ruby Bridges’ school.”
