It was 60-years ago today when four girls stepped forward and changed the makeup of New Orleans educational frontier forever.
Ruby Bridges, Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne became the first African American girls to break the color barrier at a segregate school in New Orleans.
When they all got rides to school they had no idea the people gathered outside were protesting them.
"When we turned on Saint Claude it was mobs of people, I didn't even recognize they were all white. You know just mobs of people, police on horseback, knowing that a parade used to pass here I thought a parade was coming," Leona Tate told WWL-TV.
Escorted by Federal Marshalls, Ruby Bridges entered Williams Frantz Elementary School a few miles away.
Now McDonogh Number 19 is being converted into theTate, Etienne and Prevost Center.
The building will help heal the community and serve as a social justice education center and senior housing facility.
"The racism part started here and I feel like this is where it's going to heal,” Tate says. “We're going to have some racial healing here. I want it to end here."