SUMMER 2025
ISSUE 03

₁ Veronica Hill, interview by Edie Ambrose, 1990, Box 18, United Teachers of New Orleans, Local 527 Collection. Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special Collections, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UTNO Local 527 Collection).

₂ “School Board Votes Raises for Negroes,” New Orleans Item, September 1, 1937.

₃ Bernard A. Cook and James R. Watson, Louisiana Labor: From Slavery to ‘Right-to-Work’ (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), 203.

₄ David Lee Wells, “The ILWU in New Orleans: CIO Radicalism in the Crescent City, 1937-1957” (M.A. thesis. University of New Orleans, 1979), 97.

₅ “The Sharecroppers Union,” Louisiana Weekly, May 16, 1936.

₆ Leslie Gale Parr, A will of her own: Sarah Towles Reed and the pursuit of democracy in Southern Public Education (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 100.

₇ Veronica Hill, interview by Al Kennedy, 1994, Folder 1269, Al Kennedy Collection. Earl K. Long Library, Louisiana and Special Collections, University of New Orleans.

₈ Parr, A Will of Her Own.

₉ Veronica Hill interview, cited in Parr, 2010, p. 103.

₁₀ Parr, A Will of Her Own.

₁₁ “School Board Votes Raises for Negroes,” New Orleans Item, September 1, 1937.

₁₂ Veronica Hill, interview by Edie Ambrose, UTNO Local 527 Collection.

₁₃ For an extended discussion of New Orleans teachers’ pay equalization fight, see Donald E. DeVore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent city schools: Public education in New Orleans, 1841-1991 (New Orleans, LA: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 1991); see also Kristen L. Buras, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2015).

₁₄ Veronica Hill, interview by Edie Ambrose, UTNO Local 527 Collection.

In August 1937, a group of 14 New Orleans teachers descended upon a school board meeting by way of a fire escape. Two weeks prior, the district had announced that after three rounds of Depression-era pay cuts, pay would be restored for white teachers only. “When this [notice of white teacher raises] came out in the newspaper,” said teacher organizer Veronica Hill, “everybody rose up.”¹ A mass meeting held at the Central Congregational Church sparked a petition with hundreds of signatures demanding a raise for all educators. Teachers from the New Orleans Teachers Association (NOTA) representing Black teachers and the New Orleans Public School Teachers Association (NOPSTA) representing white teachers jointly targeted the August board meeting to deliver their demand. Upon arriving at the school administration building on the day of the board meeting, teachers were promptly blocked from entry through the front door. From there, the New Orleans Item reported, all 14 teachers “marched outside [and] marched up a fire escape to the fifth floor.” The teachers scaled the five stories up the fire escape and, with assistance from a janitor, slipped in through a window. They made their way down to the board meeting on the third floor and delivered their demand. The next day, the board announced that all teachers would receive the raise.²

The year 1937 was one of increasingly militant worker activity in New Orleans. The arrival of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the relocation of the Communist-led Sharecropper’s Union headquarters to New Orleans in 1936 marked a contrast from the “shocked quiescence of [New Orleans] labor” in the early years of the Depression.³ The CIO established a foothold in the city through the International Longshoremen Workers Union (ILWU), and the small New Orleans ILWU local became “an example of union democracy, racial solidarity, and militance unmatched . . . in the Jim Crow era.”⁴ The Sharecropper’s Union counted over one thousand Louisiana members by 1936 and merged with the Louisiana Farmers’ Union (LFU) the following year, also forming ties with teachers.⁵ Just two months prior to the teachers’ 1937 school-board action, a group of white residents in a nearby parish attacked two Black LFU organizers with ties to Sarah Towles Reed, the white founder of NOPSTA. An investigation of the attacks concluded, “it is no accident that the first violence [against LFU organizers] occurred on Towles’ plantation. Her treason to the local mores is savagely resented.”⁶ The teachers were not deterred.

The militant spirit and interracial solidarity of the 1937 school-board action catalyzed unionization efforts and opened new lines of communication between the segregated associations. “So many [teachers] were really afraid to protest,” NOTA organizer Veronica Hill recalled, “but this was the last straw. They began to understand there really was a need for organization.”⁷ Black and white New Orleans teachers, who worked in segregated schools and belonged to segregated teachers’ associations, had rarely organized together. Black teachers formed the Louisiana Colored Teachers’ Association (LCTA) in 1901, along with the NOTA local chapter, after being denied entry in the white Louisiana Teachers Association, but they were not affiliated with a union. White teachers in NOPSTA had formed AFT 353 in 1935. Days after the 1937 board-meeting action, Sarah Towles Reed and two other NOPSTA organizers met with Veronica Hill and members of NOTA. They urged the NOTA teachers to unionize, citing their own experience forming an AFT chapter two years prior. The associations continued to meet in the subsequent weeks and discussed the need to organize together for salary increases, particularly for non-degreed teachers.⁸

Weeks later, NOTA passed a resolution to affiliate with the AFT. Overcoming a small minority of educators who “didn’t think teachers ought to be associated with longshoremen—that sort of nonsense,”⁹ AFT 527 membership swelled to three quarters of all Black teachers within six months.¹⁰ AFT 527 and AFT 353 remained segregated, and three more decades passed before the Black and white New Orleans locals merged to form the first integrated teachers’ union in the South. Yet, the formation of AFT 527 pushed the teachers’ struggle for equal pay between Black and white educators forward. Although teachers had secured equal raises through the 1937 board action, Black New Orleans teachers were still paid up to 18 percent less in base wages than their white counterparts.¹¹ Veronica Hill recounted, “we decided that we cannot wait any more time . . . for equalization of salaries.”¹² Teachers launched a campaign through the New Orleans Citizens Committee for Equalizing Educational Opportunities and won pay equalization for Black and white educators in 1943.¹³ Teachers later traced the connections between the fire escape action in 1937 and their successful fight for unionization and pay equalization.

A half century after the fire escape action, Veronica Hill looked back: “One of the things I’ll always remember was the board [meeting action] . . . the white and the Black teachers coming together . . . [We] were adamant.”¹⁴ The 1937 charge up the fire escape fueled the teachers’ unionization efforts and pay equalization campaign. More than this, it seeded a legacy of collaboration among white and Black teacher unionists acting in “treason to the local mores” of racial hierarchy under Jim Crow segregation – a legacy that was cemented years later when New Orleans teachers became the first in the South to form an integrated union.