New Orleans thought of itself as cosmopolitan and liberal in contrast to provincial, racist Little Rock. We saw it differently. In Little Rock the white establishment, counting on the support of a significant part of the white middle class, had been prepared to take the first steps toward desegregation. Many of the white lower class objected to desegregation, because they feared that large numbers of black students would be accepted in their schools. In the school board elections in Little Rock, voting participation by the white lower class had until then been low. Many of the people who demonstrated at Little Rock Central High School to oppose integration did not come from the city, but rather from the rural areas in the southeast section of the state and from neighboring states.
As far as relationships between blacks and whites were concerned, New Orleans seemed to us much more backward than Little Rock. New Orleans and Louisiana generally were still very much part of the Deep South in their racial attitudes, while in the course of badly needed economic modernization, Little Rock and the western parts of Arkansas were prepared to gradually remove racial barriers.
Soon after my arrival in New Orleans I was named chair of the education committee of the local branch of the NAACP. The situation there proved to be considerably more difficult than in Little Rock. In New Orleans a discussion with the school board was unthinkable. The school board had to be forced, through a long process of legal actions, to finally admit five black girls into the first grade at two elementary schools in November of 1960. One of the girls was soon expelled because she turned out to have been born out of wedlock. The state of Louisiana banned the NAACP, an action which, however, was soon declared unconstitutional. While the case was still pending, the state of Louisiana persecuted the NAACP with arrests and house searches. The arrests included two white lawyers who had given legal assistance to the NAACP. The state legislature created a Committee for Un-American Activities, which harassed pro-integration activists. My name, I was told, also appears in the committees files. The local branch of the NAACP at that time continued to work illegally under the name “The New Orleans Improvement League.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 84