Students integrated Baton Rouge schools recall troubled days

Four old friends reminisced recently for an audience at LSU Law School about their senior year of high school, a year when they made history, but which left them each with lasting scars.

They were four out of 28 Black teenagers in Baton Rouge who agreed in fall 1963 to leave their all-Black high schools and integrate four all-White high schools.

They comprised one of many difficult chapters in the long and still ongoing effort to end segregation of races in public schools.

The event Tuesday at LSU dealt with more than just their stories. It focused on the legal history of school desegregation in the United States, starting with Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that found racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The event, howeve