Helena High School History
Helena High School in Greensburg, La. originally opened in 1957 and was involved in a decades-long court case centered around desegregation. The lawsuit began when the parents of Black children in St. Helena Parish sued the school district in 1952 for operating separate, unequal, and racially segregated schools. The original lawsuit was signed by the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. It predated the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education and was the oldest ongoing desegregation case in Louisiana until its resolution in 2018. Nearby Tangipahoa Parish has a similar desegregation lawsuit that is still currently ongoing. St. Helena High School became St. Helena Central Middle School after integration, but this school closed in 2015. The building is now in operation as St. Helena Early Learning Center, serving PreK-2.
African American High Schools in Louisiana Before 1970 