All that's left of T. J. Semmes Elementary School is the scattered slabs of the building's brick foundation. The otherwise empty lot on the corner of Jourdan Avenue and North Rampart Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, is covered in clovers and dandelions, and surrounded by barbed-wire fencing contorted by time and neglect. Built in 1900 and named after a Confederate senator, the school remained open until 1978, when it closed due to financial problems. Hurricane Katrina accelerated the building's dilapidation, and in 2019 it was demolished. But in 1965, when the building still stood and the school still operated, my mother was a 6-year-old student at Semmes, a child with books in her hand and butterflies in her stomach as she entered her new school for the first time. She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers...
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