In this article, Buras chronicles the struggle against closing Frederick Douglass High School in New Orleans. Amid mass charter school development and the School Facilities Master Plan aimed at reconstructing the city's education landscape, Douglass remained one of the only open access public high schools in the historic Upper 9th Ward. The community's spirited effort to honor the school's African American legacy and acquire greater resources from the state-run Recovery School District, in opposition to support for privately managed charter schools, provides a striking case study of resistance to current reforms and their costs. It also highlights the danger of school closures in the absence of historical context, which explains the challenges of all-Black public schools through a critical analysis of white supremacy and racially targeted state disinvestment.