Eyes on the Prize Page 15

  Other whites, however, lost sympathy for the governor. “I began to change,” remembers Craig Rains, a white senior at Central during the 1957–1958 school year, “from being … a moderate, who, if I had my way, would have said, ‘Let’s don’t integrate, because it’s the state’s right to decide.’ I changed to someone who felt a real sense of compassion for those students, and felt like they deserved something that I had, and I also developed a real dislike for the people that were out there causing problems.”

  Jefferson Thomas waits for a bus while white students taunt him from across the street.

  At Central High, the presence of the military did not deter adamant segregationists from venting their hostility. Melba Pattillo Beals recalls that at first “there was a feeling of pride and hope that year—yes, this is the United States, yes, there is a reason I salute the flag, and it’s going to be okay. These [soldiers will] go with us the first time, [and then it will] be okay. The troops did not, however, mean the end of harassment. It meant the declaration of war.” The black youngsters were growing up fast. “I worried about silly things, like keeping my saddle shoes straight, what am I going to wear today—things that a fifteen-year-old girl does worry about,” Beals says, “but also which part of the hall to walk in that’s the safest. Who’s going to hit me with what? Is it going to be hot soup today? Is it going to be so greasy that it ruins the dress my grandmother made for me? How’s this day going to go?”

  When Minniejean Brown was selected to sing a solo for the glee club, the Mothers’ League of Little Rock Central High School protested to school officials that the black students “are not supposed to take part in things like that …”

  One day in October, Elizabeth Eckford walked into the office of Vice Principal Elizabeth Huckaby, who remembers that the girl was “red-eyed, her handkerchief a damp ball in her hand … ‘I want to go home,’ she said. Her story was one that became too familiar during the rest of the year from all the black children … the name-calling, thrown objects, trippings, shovings, kickings … It would not do for the nine to leave. It would make it harder for them to return. It would put pressure on everyone involved, from the president on down … I finally persuaded Elizabeth to stay and walked with her to her history class.”

  Daisy Bates and the Long Fight in Little Rock

  Long before desegregation became an issue in Little Rock, Daisy Bates played an active role in the battle for civil rights. In 1941, Bates and her husband, L. C., bought the Arkansas State Press, a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 20,000 at its peak. “Our decision was based on the conviction that a newspaper was needed to carry on the fight for Negro rights as nothing else can,” Bates wrote later. The State Press crusaded against police brutality, slum housing, and injustice in the courts.

  I walked out onto the lawn. I heard the deep drone of big planes, and it sounded like music to my ears. I walked around the yard. I saw other women standing in their yards, looking upward, listening. I heard the subdued laughter of children and realized how long it had been since I’d heard that sound. Kept within doors in recent days, they now spilled out onto yards and driveways. From an open kitchen doorway Mrs. Anderson was heard singing. “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen …” A fear-paralyzed city had begun to stir.

  Around 6 P.M., the long line of trucks, jeeps, and staff cars entered the heart of the city to the wailing sound of sirens and the dramatic flashing of lights from the police cars escorting the caravan to Central High School. The “Battle of Little Rock” was on.

  Some of the citizens watching the arrival of the troops cried with relief. Others cursed the federal government for “invading our city.” One got the impression that the “Solid South” was no longer solid.

  A young white reporter rushed to my house and grabbed me by the hands, swinging me around. “Daisy, they’re here! The soldiers are here! Aren’t you excited? Aren’t you happy?”

  “Excited, yes, but not happy,” I said after getting myself unwhirled. “Any time it takes eleven thousand five hundred soldiers to assure nine Negro children their constitutional right in a democratic society, I can’t be happy.”

  “I think I understand how you feel,” the reporter said. “You’re thinking about all the other southern Negro children who’ll have to ‘hit the line’ someday.”

  “Yes, and I’m sure there will be many.”

  “What’s the next move?” he asked. “Will the children be going back to Central tomorrow?”

  I parried the question. I knew the parents would be on tenterhooks waiting to hear from me, and with the same question on their minds. I delayed calling them. I was awaiting a call from Superintendent Blossom. Finally, about 10 P.M., I called all the parents to tell them I had not heard from Mr. Blossom. I assumed that the mob would be at the school the next morning, and therefore decided that the children could not be sent to Central the next day, troops or not.

  Shortly after midnight Mr. Blossom telephoned. “Mrs. Bates, I understand you instructed the children that they were not to go to Central in the morning.”

  “That is correct.”

  “But General Walker said that he is here to put the children in school. So you must have them at your house by eight thirty in the morning.” Major General Edwin A. Walker, chief of the Arkansas Military District, had been put in command of the 101st Airborne Division and newly federalized Arkansas militia.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t reach them. We have an agreement that if I want them, I will call before midnight. In order to get some sleep and avoid the harassing calls, they take their phones off the hook after midnight.” How I wish I had done the same, I thought wearily, as I listened to the superintendent’s urgent tones. “I suppose I could go to each home, but I can’t go alone,” I said.

  “I’ll call Hawkins and Christophe and ask them to accompany you,” Mr. Blossom said. “You may expect them shortly.” Edwin Hawkins was principal of Dunbar Junior High School and L. M. Christophe was principal of Horace Mann High School, both Negro schools.

  At about 1 A.M. the three of us set out. Our first stop was some eight blocks away, the home of fifteen-year-old Gloria Ray. We knocked for what seemed ten minutes before we got an answer. The door opened about three inches exposing the muzzle of a shotgun. Behind it stood Gloria’s father.

  In 1952, Daisy Bates became president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP. Six years later, Bates and the Little Rock Nine received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for their work in integrating Central High. Bates’ book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir, published in 1962, is excerpted here.

  “What do you want now?” was his none-too-cordial greeting, as he looked straight at me. He forgot—I hope that was the reason—to remove his finger from the trigger or at least to lower the gun.

  My eyes were fixed on the muzzle, and I could sense that Hawkins and Christophe, standing behind me, were riveted in attention. In my most pleasant, friendliest voice, and trying to look at him instead of the gun, I said that the children were to be at my house by eight thirty the next morning, and that those were the instructions of Superintendent Blossom.

  “I don’t care if the President of the United States gave you those instructions!” he said irritably. “I won’t let Gloria go. She’s faced two mobs and that’s enough.”

  Both Mr. Christophe and Mr. Hawkins assured him that with the federal troops there, the children would be safe. We all, of course, added that the decision was up to him. At that point I asked if he wouldn’t mind lowering his gun. He did. I told him if he changed his mind to bring Gloria to my house in the morning. Somewhat shakily we made our way to the car.

  “Good Lord,” sighed Mr. Christophe, “are we going to have to go through this with all nine sets of parents?”

  The children’s homes were widely scattered over Little Rock, and so our tour took better than three hours. Our encounter with Mr. Ray impressed on our minds the need to identify ourselves immediately upon entering the grounds of each home. Bu
t the cautious parents still greeted us with gun in hand, although they were a little more calm than Mr. Ray, and accepted the change in plans without objection.

  At eight twenty-five the next morning, all the children except Gloria had arrived. My phone rang. “What time are we to be there, Mrs. Bates?” It was Gloria.

  “They’re all here now.”

  “Wait for me!” she said. “I’ll be right over!”

  In less than ten minutes, Mr. Ray, shy and smiling, led Gloria into the house. He looked down at his daughter with pride. “Here, Daisy, she’s yours. She’s determined to go. Take her. You seem to have more influence over her than I have, anyhow.”

  No sooner had Gloria joined the group than I was called to the telephone. A school official wanted to know whether the children were there. “All nine,” I answered. I was told that a convoy for them was on its way.

  While we waited, reporters were asking the nine how they felt, and the children, tense and excited, found it difficult to be articulate about the significance of the troops’ mission. Half an hour crawled by. Jeff [Jefferson Thomas], standing at the window, called out, “The Army’s here! They’re here!”

  Jeeps were rolling down Twenty-eighth Street. Two passed our house and parked at the end of the block, while two remained at the other end of the block. Paratroopers quickly jumped out and stood across the width of the street at each end of the block—those at the western end standing at attention facing west, and those at the eastern end facing east.

  An Army station wagon stopped in front of our house. While photographers, perched precariously on the tops of cars and rooftops, went into action, the paratrooper in charge of the detail leaped out of the station wagon and started up our driveway. As he approached, I heard Minniejean say gleefully, “Oh, look at them, they’re so—so soldierly! It gives you goose pimples to look at them!” And then she added solemnly, “For the first time in my life, I feel like an American citizen.”

  The officer was at the door, and as I opened it, he saluted and said, his voice ringing through the sudden quiet of the livingroom where a number of friends and parents of the nine had gathered to witness this moment in history: “Mrs. Bates, we’re ready for the children. We will return them to your home at three thirty o’clock.”

  I watched them follow him down the sidewalk. Another paratrooper held open the door of the station wagon, and they got in. Turning back into the room, my eyes none too dry, I saw the parents with tears of happiness in their eyes as they watched the group drive off.

  The harassment continued through the school year. For several days, anonymous telephone callers to the homes of the black students threatened to shoot the children with acid-filled water pistols. Soon after, a white student pulled out a water gun and sprayed a black girl in the face. She became hysterical, thinking she had been shot with acid, though it was indeed only water.

  Shortly before Christmas, one of the Little Rock Nine decided to fight back. “For a couple of weeks there had been a number of white kids following us,” recalls Ernest Green, “continuously calling us niggers. ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’—one right after the other. Minniejean Brown was in the lunch line with me, and there was this white kid who was much shorter than Minnie … he reminded me of a small dog yelping at somebody’s leg.

  After Minniejean Brown was expelled, someone at Central High added the “One down … eight to go” card to the repertoire of cards such as these that circulated among segregationist students.

  “Minnie had just picked up her chili, and before I could even say … ‘Minnie, why don’t you tell him to shut up?’ Minnie … turned around and took that chili and dumped it on the dude’s head.” For a moment, the cafeteria was dead silent, Green remembers, “and then the help, all black, broke into applause. And the white kids there didn’t know what to do. It was the first time that anybody [there] had seen somebody black retaliate.”

  The incident led to Minniejean’s suspension. Then, in February, she was expelled from Central after a white girl called her a “nigger bitch” and she in turn denounced the young woman as “white trash.” Minniejean Brown moved to New York City, where she enrolled in another high school. She arrived in New York to the glare of flashbulbs; journalists from throughout the United States and abroad were now tracking the crisis at Little Rock. The New York Post editorialized, “Our town has long been a haven for refugees from all over the world. Their numbers will now be increased by one Negro American from Little Rock. Like all the others, Minniejean Brown, expelled from Central High School, will be looking for equality of opportunity … The school board, in expelling Minniejean, has put its stamp of approval on the segregationist strategy of terror.”

  After Brown’s departure, segregationist students added a new card to the collection circulating through the school. It read, “One down, eight to go.” Craig Rains recalls, “When school was out in May, they still hadn’t given up the fight. They came out with a two-color card that said, ‘Ike Go Home! Liberation Day, May 29, 1958.’” May 29 was graduation day at Central High.

  Ernest Green became the first black student to graduate from Central High. Police officers and federal troops stood guard as Green and his 601 white classmates received their diplomas. Green’s graduation was a victory, both real and symbolic, for all those who had fought for integration for so long. The seventeen-year-old sensed that, and it made him nervous. “I knew I was walking for the other eight students that were there,” Green said years later. “I figured I was making a statement and helping black people’s existence in Little Rock … I kept telling myself, I just can’t trip with all those cameras watching me. But I knew that once I got as far as that principal and received that diploma, I had cracked the wall.”

  The mostly white audience applauded enthusiastically as one by one the students came up to receive their diplomas. Then came Ernest Green’s moment. “When they called my name, there was nothing,” he said, “just the name, and then there was eerie silence. Nobody clapped. But I figured they didn’t have to … because after I got that diploma, that was it. I had accomplished what I had come there for.”

  That summer, Orval Faubus renewed his political posturing against integration. “I stand now and always in opposition to integration by force or at bayonet point,” he declared. In July, he won nomination for a third term as governor with an unprecedented sixty-nine percent of the vote. In September, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that integration must proceed in Little Rock. But Faubus continued to fight, closing down the schools altogether a few days later. He then helped a small group of segregationists set up the Little Rock Private School Corporation, to which he attempted to lease the public schools on a segregated basis. In a Gallup Poll taken in late 1958, Americans selected Faubus as one of their ten most admired men.

  On May 29, 1958, Ernest Green became the first black to graduate from Little Rock Central High School.

  During 1958, Little Rock’s public schools were closed. Nearly half of the city’s white students enrolled in private schools. One third of the students attended schools outside the city, and 643 white students did not attend any school that year. Most of the black high school students, including the Little Rock Nine, did not attend school either.

  The Supreme Court ruled that the closing of Little Rock’s high schools was unconstitutional and that “evasive schemes” could not be used to circumvent integration. In August 1959, the public high schools were reopened and integrated in accordance with federal requirements.

  Also in 1959, the board of directors of the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce issued a formal resolution, stating, “The [Brown] decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, however much we dislike it, is the declared law and is binding upon us. We think that the decision was erroneous and that it was a reversal of established law upon an unprecedented basis of psychology and sociology … [However] we must in honesty recognize that, because the Supreme Court is the Court of last resort in the country, what it has said must stand u
ntil there is a correcting constitutional amendment or until the Court corrects its own error.”

  The crisis at Little Rock, which threw a state government into direct conflict with the federal government, would have far-reaching repercussions throughout the country and throughout the civil rights movement. And, as it had in Little Rock, the desegregation issue would become a political football for the many southern politicians who were more interested in grandstanding than in fair play.

  Chapter Five

  Down Freedom’s Main Line

  The Movement’s Next Generation

  “When I was a boy, Nashville was a divided town … One day [my mother and I] were at Kress’s, [where they] had these beautiful marble water fountains. One said ‘Colored’ and one said ‘White.’ I went over to both fountains and tasted the water and told my mother, ‘Tastes the same to me, Mom.’”

  Leo Lillard, sit-in

  participant

  A Freedom Rider’s view through the bus window.

  When Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, Diane Nash was sixteen years old. When the Montgomery bus boycott ended victoriously, she was eighteen. When Emmett Till was murdered and the trial of his accused killers captured the nation’s attention in 1955, John Lewis was fifteen. When Elizabeth Eckford walked through a jeering white mob and into Little Rock’s Central High School, Lewis was seventeen. By 1960, Nash and Lewis were in college, members of a generation of blacks who had come of age during the momentous changes of the preceding decade. Youngsters had already played a crucial role in the civil rights movement—Linda Brown and Harry Briggs, Jr., Ernest Green and Elizabeth Eckford. This generation would go on to become even more deeply involved in the fight against racism.