Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "jefferson-thomas"
Civil Rights Events -- Little Rock Nine -- The Second Attempt
In the following weeks, federal judge Richard Davies began legal proceedings against Governor Faubus, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to persuade Faubus to remove the National Guard and let the Little Rock Nine enter the school.
Judge Davies ordered the Guard removed on September 20, and the Little Rock Police Department took over to maintain order. The police escorted the nine African-American students into the school on September 23, through an angry mob of some 1,000 white protesters gathered outside. Amidst ensuing rioting, the police removed the nine students (Little 3).
During the interim of waiting to be accepted into the high school building, the Little Rock Nine stayed home. During that time and afterward Elizabeth [Eckford] received long-distance calls, and as many as 50 letters a day, from all over the world. One, from a 16-year-old in Japan, was addressed simply to "Miss Elizabeth Eckford, Littol Rocke, USA." A few sympathetic whites left cash for her at her grandfather's store. On her birthday in October, a white man came to her home and gave her a new wristwatch, a gift from his dying wife. To a few reporters, Elizabeth told her story, "punctuated with sobs." "Elizabeth Ann Eckford, 15, is the most sensitive of the children," a reporter from NBC told a radio audience. "She's also the prettiest girl. She's pensive, the kind of person who loves deeply and can be hurt deeply." Checks flooded into the N.A.A.C.P. With all this visibility came repercussions. Someone threw a brick through the window of her grandfather's store. And something descended on Elizabeth that has never fully lifted. Afterward, says another of the Nine, Jefferson Thomas, "she walked with her head down, as if she wanted to make sure the floor didn't open up beneath her" (Margolick 4).
An angry mob of more than a thousand white people had gathered in front of the school, chanting racist refrains like “Go back to Africa”. In her memoir Warriors Don’t Cry, Melba Pattillo described the Little Rock Nine’s second attempt to enter Central High’s building this way.
Huge mob. As we're being let out of this car on the side - I think it's 14th Street side - I hear all this noise again. I haven't been to many really big events in my life. But what I remember is, like, going to the rodeo or going to a parade. … And I'm hearing this crowd and their sawhorses. I see sawhorses holding them back, and I think, oh, boy. And, you know, if you've never been in a situation like this, you don't - how you're going to feel is odd. So I got out of the side of the car, and the police were escorting us up the side steps and everything like that.
And the thing is that once you step inside of Central High School, it's so huge. And it was so dark in there, you know. And we were greeted by this sort of middle-aged, dark-haired woman, who was quite, I would say, unwelcoming and said she was going to take us to where we needed to go, which, at that point, was to the office. And so we were marched down this hall of screaming, yelling, spitting young people - young white people, who didn't want us there - to the principal's office. And there we gathered, and they were going to assign us classrooms.
Now, understand, if you've got seven floors of classrooms, but you've only got nine people, and you've got all those hundreds of students, I think you would've put them in close proximity to each other so you could guard them. But no, no, no, no, no. They said, hey, you want integration, you going to get integration. And they sent us nine different ways. And that was really - as we said goodbye to each other, that was really horrible. And among us was Thelma Jean Mothershed, who had a very bad heart. At this point, she turns kind of a purpley (ph) blue, and she's sitting down on her haunches, and we're waiting for her to turn the right color again. So that was a little unsettling.
…
And so - like, I suppose shortly after 11 - between 11, 11:30, something like that - this woman who had escorted us in came back to get us again and said, follow me, get up, follow me now, collect your books.
Now, all the while, I'd been in almost any classroom. Now, I was, one, exposed to the outside. I could hear this crowd, this mob that had gathered outside. And there was no doubt, there had to be hundreds of people out there. And so this woman collects us and takes us all to the office. And we get to the office, and they say that, look, we're going to have to somehow get you out of here. We have a problem. Mobs are beginning to burst into the school, and you're not safe, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. And at the same time, they stick us into this side room while they confer with added policeman - some, I think, from North Little Rock. And, you know, you had lawmakers - I mean, law officers in there from all sorts of places, right?
And so they start to consult with each other. And I, Ms. Nosypot (ph) - that's why I grew up to be a news reporter - I put my ear in there because I want to know. Don't be consulting without me. And one guy says, well, look, you know, maybe what we're going to have to do is to put one out there, and we're going to have to let them hang that kid while we get the other eight out. At least we'll save eight. So by this, I know right away that, you know, we got a big problem here.
And then another white gentleman - tall - I believe to be assistant chief of police of North Little Rock, stood up and said, no, look, I'm a parent, I'm not doing this. I'm getting them all out. We're going. We're going to do it. And so he's the one who led us down the stairs of this huge castle-like building - Central High School - round, and round, and round and down into a basement. And I thought to myself, well, if you're ever going to be killed, this is where you're going to get it. And who were these white men with us, and what did they really want? Truth was, they were policemen - Little Rock and North Little Rock - truth was that they saved our lives (Davies 2-5).
Other members of the Little Rock Nine reflected on that day’s experience.
Minnijean Brown commented: “I really think that we were afraid to look at the mob; at least I was … So we just heard it and it was like a sports event, that sound, the roar, but it was a roar of hatred, and just thinking about it makes me shake.”
She says of her young self: “I’m nobody. I’ve never been hated. I’ve been loved all my life. I’m beautiful. I’m smart. I just can’t believe this. So I kind of describe it as having my heart broken. Of course, you know as an ‘American’ even living in a segregated society you do all the anthems and the pledges and you’re hiding under the desk from the Russians, and so brainwashing works well. So the heartbreak was: ‘I’m supposed to be living in a democracy. What? These people hate me. They don’t know me. They want to kill me.’”
The mob started a riot and police decided to remove the students for their own safety. “At about 10am they said: ‘You’ve got to come down to the office,’ and we went down into the basement. They put us in these cars and the cops driving the cars were shaking. They had the guns and sticks and they were scared. ‘Oh wow, this is scary.’ Some of us were told to keep our heads down (Smith 2).
Ernest Green, interviewed, said: Well when we finally got in the school, … I do remember that … a number of students… jumped out of the windows, the segregationists. That they refused to … attend school with us and uh, we were guided to our homeroom and our… classes. … I was in the Physics class. And a monitor came up from the principal's office, and told me that I was to go to the principal's office. When we got down there the other eight students were there. And at that time we were told by the principal that … we would have to be sent home for our own safety. That the … police were having difficult holding the guards, uh, holding the mob back at the barricades. And that if they broke through, they could not be responsibly for our safety. They didn't have enough protection. So we were whisked out of a side door. … I didn't have any idea how big the mob—mob was outside the school until again, until after, after we got home. It was almost like being in the eye of a hurricane (Eyes 5).
Carlotta Watts LaNier recalled: “We went in through a side door, some field marshals of the NAACP and some fathers of the Little Rock Nine. . . . That was like 8:30 in the morning, and by 11:30 they had spirited us out of there. . . The city sent Little Rock’s finest there, which was about 17 of them. That’s all they had to be around the school, and they couldn’t hold back that many people,” LaNier remembers. “Kids were jumping out of windows and others were saying ‘Get one of them, let’s hang them.”
LaNier was in the rear of the school in geometry class when the police came to remove her, and she says she didn’t see any of that until it was on the evening news.
“It was on the radio, too, I guess because my mother was standing in the yard when the policeman dropped me off. She had gotten a number of phone calls from her sister and from my great aunts and so forth to ‘go up and get (me),’ but there was no way she could have done that anyway. And the gray hair she has on her head. . . started that day” (Keyes 2).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering the Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air. January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371....
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb....
Keyes, Allison. “The Youngest of the Little Rock Nine Speaks About Holding on to History.” Smithsonian.com. September 5, 2017. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/black-....
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/....
Smith, David. “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.” The Guardian. September 24, 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201....
Judge Davies ordered the Guard removed on September 20, and the Little Rock Police Department took over to maintain order. The police escorted the nine African-American students into the school on September 23, through an angry mob of some 1,000 white protesters gathered outside. Amidst ensuing rioting, the police removed the nine students (Little 3).
During the interim of waiting to be accepted into the high school building, the Little Rock Nine stayed home. During that time and afterward Elizabeth [Eckford] received long-distance calls, and as many as 50 letters a day, from all over the world. One, from a 16-year-old in Japan, was addressed simply to "Miss Elizabeth Eckford, Littol Rocke, USA." A few sympathetic whites left cash for her at her grandfather's store. On her birthday in October, a white man came to her home and gave her a new wristwatch, a gift from his dying wife. To a few reporters, Elizabeth told her story, "punctuated with sobs." "Elizabeth Ann Eckford, 15, is the most sensitive of the children," a reporter from NBC told a radio audience. "She's also the prettiest girl. She's pensive, the kind of person who loves deeply and can be hurt deeply." Checks flooded into the N.A.A.C.P. With all this visibility came repercussions. Someone threw a brick through the window of her grandfather's store. And something descended on Elizabeth that has never fully lifted. Afterward, says another of the Nine, Jefferson Thomas, "she walked with her head down, as if she wanted to make sure the floor didn't open up beneath her" (Margolick 4).
An angry mob of more than a thousand white people had gathered in front of the school, chanting racist refrains like “Go back to Africa”. In her memoir Warriors Don’t Cry, Melba Pattillo described the Little Rock Nine’s second attempt to enter Central High’s building this way.
Huge mob. As we're being let out of this car on the side - I think it's 14th Street side - I hear all this noise again. I haven't been to many really big events in my life. But what I remember is, like, going to the rodeo or going to a parade. … And I'm hearing this crowd and their sawhorses. I see sawhorses holding them back, and I think, oh, boy. And, you know, if you've never been in a situation like this, you don't - how you're going to feel is odd. So I got out of the side of the car, and the police were escorting us up the side steps and everything like that.
And the thing is that once you step inside of Central High School, it's so huge. And it was so dark in there, you know. And we were greeted by this sort of middle-aged, dark-haired woman, who was quite, I would say, unwelcoming and said she was going to take us to where we needed to go, which, at that point, was to the office. And so we were marched down this hall of screaming, yelling, spitting young people - young white people, who didn't want us there - to the principal's office. And there we gathered, and they were going to assign us classrooms.
Now, understand, if you've got seven floors of classrooms, but you've only got nine people, and you've got all those hundreds of students, I think you would've put them in close proximity to each other so you could guard them. But no, no, no, no, no. They said, hey, you want integration, you going to get integration. And they sent us nine different ways. And that was really - as we said goodbye to each other, that was really horrible. And among us was Thelma Jean Mothershed, who had a very bad heart. At this point, she turns kind of a purpley (ph) blue, and she's sitting down on her haunches, and we're waiting for her to turn the right color again. So that was a little unsettling.
…
And so - like, I suppose shortly after 11 - between 11, 11:30, something like that - this woman who had escorted us in came back to get us again and said, follow me, get up, follow me now, collect your books.
Now, all the while, I'd been in almost any classroom. Now, I was, one, exposed to the outside. I could hear this crowd, this mob that had gathered outside. And there was no doubt, there had to be hundreds of people out there. And so this woman collects us and takes us all to the office. And we get to the office, and they say that, look, we're going to have to somehow get you out of here. We have a problem. Mobs are beginning to burst into the school, and you're not safe, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. And at the same time, they stick us into this side room while they confer with added policeman - some, I think, from North Little Rock. And, you know, you had lawmakers - I mean, law officers in there from all sorts of places, right?
And so they start to consult with each other. And I, Ms. Nosypot (ph) - that's why I grew up to be a news reporter - I put my ear in there because I want to know. Don't be consulting without me. And one guy says, well, look, you know, maybe what we're going to have to do is to put one out there, and we're going to have to let them hang that kid while we get the other eight out. At least we'll save eight. So by this, I know right away that, you know, we got a big problem here.
And then another white gentleman - tall - I believe to be assistant chief of police of North Little Rock, stood up and said, no, look, I'm a parent, I'm not doing this. I'm getting them all out. We're going. We're going to do it. And so he's the one who led us down the stairs of this huge castle-like building - Central High School - round, and round, and round and down into a basement. And I thought to myself, well, if you're ever going to be killed, this is where you're going to get it. And who were these white men with us, and what did they really want? Truth was, they were policemen - Little Rock and North Little Rock - truth was that they saved our lives (Davies 2-5).
Other members of the Little Rock Nine reflected on that day’s experience.
Minnijean Brown commented: “I really think that we were afraid to look at the mob; at least I was … So we just heard it and it was like a sports event, that sound, the roar, but it was a roar of hatred, and just thinking about it makes me shake.”
She says of her young self: “I’m nobody. I’ve never been hated. I’ve been loved all my life. I’m beautiful. I’m smart. I just can’t believe this. So I kind of describe it as having my heart broken. Of course, you know as an ‘American’ even living in a segregated society you do all the anthems and the pledges and you’re hiding under the desk from the Russians, and so brainwashing works well. So the heartbreak was: ‘I’m supposed to be living in a democracy. What? These people hate me. They don’t know me. They want to kill me.’”
The mob started a riot and police decided to remove the students for their own safety. “At about 10am they said: ‘You’ve got to come down to the office,’ and we went down into the basement. They put us in these cars and the cops driving the cars were shaking. They had the guns and sticks and they were scared. ‘Oh wow, this is scary.’ Some of us were told to keep our heads down (Smith 2).
Ernest Green, interviewed, said: Well when we finally got in the school, … I do remember that … a number of students… jumped out of the windows, the segregationists. That they refused to … attend school with us and uh, we were guided to our homeroom and our… classes. … I was in the Physics class. And a monitor came up from the principal's office, and told me that I was to go to the principal's office. When we got down there the other eight students were there. And at that time we were told by the principal that … we would have to be sent home for our own safety. That the … police were having difficult holding the guards, uh, holding the mob back at the barricades. And that if they broke through, they could not be responsibly for our safety. They didn't have enough protection. So we were whisked out of a side door. … I didn't have any idea how big the mob—mob was outside the school until again, until after, after we got home. It was almost like being in the eye of a hurricane (Eyes 5).
Carlotta Watts LaNier recalled: “We went in through a side door, some field marshals of the NAACP and some fathers of the Little Rock Nine. . . . That was like 8:30 in the morning, and by 11:30 they had spirited us out of there. . . The city sent Little Rock’s finest there, which was about 17 of them. That’s all they had to be around the school, and they couldn’t hold back that many people,” LaNier remembers. “Kids were jumping out of windows and others were saying ‘Get one of them, let’s hang them.”
LaNier was in the rear of the school in geometry class when the police came to remove her, and she says she didn’t see any of that until it was on the evening news.
“It was on the radio, too, I guess because my mother was standing in the yard when the policeman dropped me off. She had gotten a number of phone calls from her sister and from my great aunts and so forth to ‘go up and get (me),’ but there was no way she could have done that anyway. And the gray hair she has on her head. . . started that day” (Keyes 2).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering the Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air. January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371....
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb....
Keyes, Allison. “The Youngest of the Little Rock Nine Speaks About Holding on to History.” Smithsonian.com. September 5, 2017. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/black-....
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/....
Smith, David. “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.” The Guardian. September 24, 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201....
Surviving the Year
The crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in late September 1957 caused by Governor Faubus’s employment of the state’s national guard to prevent the admittance of nine African American students and subsequent mob interference forced President Eisenhower to employ 1,200 101st Airborne Division paratroopers to effect integration.
The soldiers escorted the students single file into the school for their first full day of classes and dispersed the demonstrators. The US’s racial shame had been exposed, shown on TV and reported in newspapers around the world.
…
… although 25 September is the date people remember, troops remained at Central High School for the rest the school year and the Little Rock Nine ran the gauntlet of hatred every day. They were taunted, assaulted and spat upon by their white counterparts; a straw effigy of a black person was hung from a tree. They were kept apart in different classes so they could not vouch for each other’s claims (Smith 2).
Gloria Ray was pushed down a flight of stairs.
Not long after the “Little Rock Nine” entered the school, Melba Pattillo told a reporter for The New York Times:
"When I got to my English class one boy jumped up to his feet and began to talk. He told the others to walk out with him because a 'nigger' was in their class. He kept talking and talking, but no one listened. The teacher told him to leave the room. The boy started for the door and shouted: 'Who’s going with me?' No one did. So he said in disgust, 'Chicken!' and left" (Choices 1).
... a distinct minority of segregationist students—estimates vary between 50 and 200—set the tone, intimidating all the others (few labels were more noxious than "nigger lover") into silence. Their campaign of unremitting but largely clandestine harassment was abetted by school officials who, fearful of making things even worse, ignored all but the most flagrant offenders. The black students, already scattered, became almost entirely isolated, none more than Elizabeth [Eckford]. In classes, she was made to sit by herself, always at the back, often with no one nearby. In the corridors, there was always a space around her. Even the few white children she knew steered clear: Please don't let them know you know me, their eyes seemed to plead. Only during the last class of the day—speech—did she encounter any friendly faces: two, fellow students named Ken Reinhardt and Ann Williams. "I can still see how she looked that [first] day," Ann Williams Wedaman recalls. "Nobody needs to be that lonely." A few other students did speak to her, it was true, but only to hear what "it" sounded like.
Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby wrote that less than a week into school Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.
The list could have been much longer: Elizabeth gradually stopped reporting problems, because they were so chronic, and because complaining about them did no good. In history class, for instance, a boy with bad skin and a protruding Adam's apple sat behind her muttering "nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger" daily, while classmates looked the other way. The boy, Charles Sawrie, looks back on it all with shame. "It was all kind of stupid," he says. "I just wanted to get a name for myself. I don't remember anything about her except she was black and my job was to make it as rough for the blacks as I could." For Sawrie, the problem was one of class as well as race: for all the abuse these black children were taking, some people actually cared about them, as they did not for poor white kids like himself. Elizabeth sensed as much; she says she actually felt sorry for him.
Most of her tormentors, though, were girls, suggesting the attacks were coordinated. They were also disciplined. The girls left another of the Nine, Thelma Mothershed, who had a serious heart ailment, alone: they didn't want to kill the black students, only drive them out. The local National Guardsmen were either indifferent or even sympathetic to the bigots, and Elizabeth didn't seek their help. "Elizabeth is more anxious to be independent than safe," Mrs. Huckaby wrote. Instead, she fended for herself: a houseful of seamstresses had plenty of straight pins, and she stuck them around the edges of her binder, turning it into a shield. That didn't help in gym class, where supervision was the spottiest; white girls would put broken glass on the shower-room floor, and scald her by flushing all the toilets simultaneously. (The girls showering nearby had evidently been forewarned, and knew when to step aside.)
Worse even than those who harassed her were the vastly larger number of students who ignored her altogether. Then there was Miss Emily Penton's history class, in which she got to hear that slavery actually civilized blacks, that the black officeholders during Reconstruction were "ignoramuses," that the Ku Klux Klan was founded to defend white womanhood. A stern woman with a pince-nez who had taught at Central since it opened, Miss Penton refused even to touch Elizabeth. When there was money to collect, she made her put the coins down on her desk. (When Elizabeth complained about her, she was informed that Miss Penton not only was a graduate of the University of Chicago but also was very much respected in the community.)
Elizabeth could not turn to Daisy Bates and the N.A.A.C.P., which, she felt, had its own agenda. She could not turn to her mother, who would have yanked her out of Central had she known what was happening. Or to her father, who to this day is largely unsympathetic. "Just a little pushing and shoving" is how he once characterized what his daughter had endured. (When Elizabeth and I visited him, he told her that black America was at war at the time; she was, he said, a soldier doing her duty. Besides, he never saw any marks on her.) She couldn't talk to the other black students; none were in her classes, and away from Central, school was the last thing they wanted to discuss. She could not talk to friends; the few she had had steered clear. She couldn't talk to the local press, which either sympathized with the segregationists or ducked the story. That spring a white student told Stan Opotowsky of the New York Post that the nine blacks appeared "in a state of shock." "They jump when you speak," she said (Margolick 8-10).
One student who braved pier pressure was Robin Woods. The day after federal troops escorted the Little Rock Nine to their classes, she told the following to a reporter of the New York Post:
"If there was trouble at Central High yesterday, it was all on the outside. We didn’t have anything at all going on inside. I got integrated yesterday. It was in my first English class. There was only 15 minutes to go, and a Negro boy came into class. That was the first time I’d ever gone to school with a Negro, and it didn’t hurt a bit."
"And when Elizabeth had to walk down in front of the school I was there and I saw that. And may I say, I was very ashamed—I felt like crying—because she was so brave when she did that. And we just weren’t behaving ourselves, just jeering her. I think if we had any sort of decency, we wouldn’t have acted that way. But I think if everybody would just obey the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have others do unto you—might be the solution. How would you like to have to walk down the street with everybody yelling behind you like they yelled behind Elizabeth?"
Terrence Roberts, one of the “Little Rock Nine,” was assigned to Robin’s algebra class. Realizing he didn’t have a math book, Robin made “a gut level decision” and pulled her desk over to his so they could share her book. There was “a gasp of disbelief.” For the rest of the year, segregationists harassed Robin and her family (Choices 5).
Melba Pattillo would eventually write about her experiences in a book titled “Warriors Don’t Cry.” Elizabeth would criticize Melba for exaggeration. Here is what Melba revealed in an interview conducted by Dave Davies for NPR.
Light paper and take a match, light a piece of paper and then throw it on you. Particularly in study hall, they loved that trick. Hit you, throw things at you. A favorite thing was to do something to your back, smear peanut butter. And one of the most heinous crimes was to smear peanut butter and glumpy (ph) stuff under your seat, so that you didn't notice, really. When I was walking in class, I was sort of looking around my back when I would sit down in it.
…
Constantly name calling, which, after a while, I have to say to you, becomes in some ways as painful or more than the physicality of the incident because you begin to question in your mind as a child, who am I? Who am I really?
…
Tripped - tripped up so you fall. The most dangerous way was, a gentleman passes you with a plastic toy gun, and you think, OK, I'm going to get wet. But you're not. You're going to get acid in your eyes. And that's what happened to me. And my bodyguard [paratroooper assigned to accompany her in the hallways], who I don't name - I think I call him Johnny Black. Anyway, he caught my ponytail - I have really long hair - and he grabbed my ponytail and ran, forcing me to run, and jammed my face beneath the water fountain and ran water all over my eyes. And that's what saved my sight.
[Earnest Green contradicted this event]
I had what are called primary, secondary and tertiary guards. Your primary guard was one nearest to you. Your secondary were two people who were out so many feet. And your tertiary were - they could be as many as six people, depending on what your day had been like. But they could never touch those other children. In some ways, they were just kind of like, you know, bullies that were, like, you know threatening them. They didn't - they were admonished that they couldn't touch other kids.
So, for example, when I went to the bathroom, one of the things I learned to do then, which I'm having to get out of doing now, which the doctor just lectured me about last Friday, was drink water - drink enough water - because my whole thing in Central High School was, if you don't drink water, you don't have to go to the bathroom. And so I really worked at that hard.
… these ladies [in the bathroom] would come by, and then once again, we have the old let's light the papers - and at this point, they would get on either side of me and in front, and they would light notebook paper with matches, and then they would throw it in on you.
Interviewer Dave Davies: I made a quick list of some of the ways that you were assaulted. I'm just going to read them here - knocked downstairs, spit upon, kicked on the shins, raw eggs poured over your head, acid thrown in your eyes, locker trashed, you were pushed against a wall and choked, hit across the back with a tennis racket so hard you spit up blood, pelted with snowballs that had large rocks in the middle. And this is just a partial list of the things that you and the other eight kids suffered. Did you report these things to anybody, to the school administrators? Did anybody do anything?
Melba Pattillo: In the beginning, we did report these kinds of attacks, but we learned quickly that nothing was ever going to be done about them. And I remember once watching this guy kick Terry [Terrance Roberts], and we told the principal, and he said, you know, unless I see it myself personally or some teacher sees it, it's not valid. And so they weren't going to do anything to us because, you know, you had the white citizens' club. You had all these white parents who were on their case. And they wanted to get us out, and they figured if they were violent enough over a long enough period of time, that, you know, it would be OK (Davies 6-9).
Interviewed for “Eyes on the Prize,” Ernest Green offered this:
… we were always getting calls in the middle of the night. And this one time there was a call that said, one of the girls would be squirted in the face with acid in a water pistol. And we'd better watch out. So that next morning, walking through the halls, and this was after our individual guards [stopped being with them --] before we [had] had individual paratroopers that escorted us from class to class in the hallway. And halfway through the school year they withdrew those, outside of the school and only had the guards stationed outside. Anyway, sure enough, I was walking with Melba Patillo and this kid walks up with a water pistol and squirts her in the face and it turns out it had water. But it was that level of harassment. One of the other things I remember always was in gym… you get into the locker room and the locker room gets steamed up. There was always incidents of these guys wetting up towels and throwing ‘em over where we were. Well we got to be a little cagey about that. We would start dressing in one place, move to another so they were always throwing towels over… some other area. It was a low level of harassment and I guess we sort of put away any idea that we were in immediate physical harm, that anybody was going to kill us. That didn't seem likely (Eyes 4).
On three separate occasions, Minnijean [Brown Trickey] had cafeteria food spilled on her, but none of her white abusers ever seemed to get punished.
In December 1957, she dropped her chili-laden lunch tray on the heads of two boys in the cafeteria who were taunting and knocking into her. She was suspended for six days. That school notice is now part of the Smithsonian collection along with a heartfelt note by her parents documenting all the abuse that their daughter had endured leading up to the incident. Then in February 1958, Trickey verbally responded to some jeering girls who had hit her in the head with a purse. That retaliation caused Trickey to be expelled from Central High.
“I had a sense of failure that lasted for decades over that.” … After she left Central, white students held printed signs that said, “One down…eight to go” (Harvey 3).
"We were always getting hit and kicked," she [Minnijean] remembers. "Some of the boys wore these toe plates and heel plates so they could kick pretty hard."
On Dec. 17, 1957, things came to a head. [She] … was inching her way between the tables in the lunchroom.
"I was holding the tray above their heads, trying to get through the aisle," she recalls.
Meanwhile, junior Dent Gitchel was trying to eat his lunch.
"There were some guys harassing her along the aisle," he says. "Some people would refuse to move their chairs, and I think somebody kicked a chair at her."
Minnijean dropped her tray, spilling chili on Gitchel.
"Pandemonium broke loose in the cafeteria at that moment," he recalls.
Both students were ordered to the principal's office.
"When I got to the office, the girls' vice principal asked me if I had done it on purpose," [Minnijean] …recalls. "And I said, 'Accidentally on purpose.' That's because I really hadn't understood it."
The school sent Gitchel home to change his clothes. He was back in school that afternoon (Chadwick and Proffitt 1).
Earnest Green remembered the incident somewhat differently.
"Minnie was about five foot ten and this fellow couldn’t have been more than five-five, five-four. And he reminded me of a small dog, yelping [His words were “nigger, nigger, nigger”] at somebody’s leg. Minnie had just picked up her chili, and before I could even say, 'Minnie, why don’t you tell him to shut up?' Minnie had taken this chili and dumped it on this dude’s head. There was absolute silence in the place, and then the help, all black, broke into applause. And the white kids, the other white kids there didn’t know what to do. It was the first time that anybody, I’m sure, had seen somebody black retaliate in that sense."
Minnijean was suspended for six days. Soon after the incident, a white student emptied a bowl of hot soup on her. He was suspended for two days. In February, Minnijean verbally responded to harassment by a white student. She was expelled from Central High for the rest of the year.
Minnijean said of the incident:
"I just can’t take everything they throw at me without fighting back. I don’t think people realize what goes on at Central. You just wouldn’t believe it. They throw rocks, they spill ink on your clothes, they call you 'nigger,' they just keep bothering you every five minutes. The white students hate me. Why do they hate me so much" (Choices 4)?
Through the 1999 book Bitters in the Honey by Beth Roy, [Minnijean Brown] Trickey was able to hear the perspective of white students who resisted segregation. Roy conducted oral histories with white alumni 40 years afterwards to explore the crisis at Central High. Trickey discovered that she in particular angered white classmates because they said, “She walked the halls of Central like she belonged there.”
Trickey also realizes now that she may have been singled out for harsher treatment. At an awards ceremony in 2009, she was speaking with Jefferson Thomas, one of the Nine, when he suddenly turned to her and said, “You know, you were the target.”
“We were all targets,” she laughed at him dismissively.
“No, you were the target, and when you left, I was the target,” he revealed (Harvey 4).
Trickey says the chili incident in the lunchroom taught her this lesson: She could not be perfect, even if it meant letting down the people who needed her as a civil rights symbol, and further upsetting the racists who taunted her every day.
"You have to be perfect to come to our imperfect school," she says they seemed to be telling her. "That is the nature of racism .... We'll do everything we can to make sure that you can't measure up, for as long as this country exists. And we'll do that so well, you'll think it's your own fault" (Chadwick and Proffitt 2).
Terrance Roberts said he constantly wanted to give up at Central High. Every day he walked onto campus there was a very real and regular threat of being beaten. He recounted a time when his face was smashed into gravel. While it was happening, he remembers thinking how senseless the attack was; he said he couldn’t even muster up the desire to hit back (Breaux 3).
The surviving members of the Little Rock Nine remember Jefferson Thomas fondly. "I will miss his calculated sense of humor," said [Carlotta Walls] LaNier… "He had a way of asking a question and ending it with a joke, probably to ease the pain during our teenage years at Central. He was a Christian who sincerely promoted racial harmony and took his responsibilities seriously."
"Jefferson has always been, to us, a brother," said Melba Pattillo Beals …He's funny and very strong, like when we would have a very difficult day, things were absolutely at their worst, he would say, 'Smile, you're on Candid Camera,' or, you know, 'Look at what you're wearing!' He was just really, really funny."
Thomas' quiet demeanor made him a target for bullies.
“I do remember [the family] got a call that he had been knocked out -- someone had hit him on the back of head while he was at a locker in hallway," said Jessie Agee, another sister of Thomas'. "But he wanted to continue on with it."
When it was time to leave school, he'd run home, and one of his older brothers -- armed with a tire iron -- would wait around a corner to escort him the rest of the way, Agee said (Little 2).
Small and frail, [Thelma] Mothershed didn't face as much physical abuse as the other members of the Little Rock Nine. But there were other forms of resistance. She recalled a teacher who wouldn't touch anything she had (Shmoop 1).
"My homeroom teacher . . . did strange little things. I remember that when we were absent, we’d have to go to the office and get a readmittance slip. When I would come in to give her my readmittance slip, she wouldn’t take it. So I would just put it down on the desk, and then she would sign it and put it in the book and slide it back across to me. Now, that was really strange. I guess she had to do something to show her class that she wasn’t particularly happy about me being in there. And then she—well, they set us in alphabetical order and in the row where I was, there were about two seats behind me—and she started the next person at the front seat in the next row, because she knew nobody wanted to sit behind me. She just kept those two chairs empty. So she did little strange, subtle things—subtle as a ton of bricks" (Choices 4).
Works cited:
Breaux, Aimee. “What advice did a Little Rock Nine member have for Iowa City students?” Iowa City Press Citizen. April 6, 2018. Web. https://www.press-citizen.com/story/n... .
Chadwick, Alex and Proffitt, Steve. “Revisiting the Little Rock Chili Incident.” NPR, December 17, 2007. Web. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s....
“Choices People Made: White Students and Teachers at Central High School.” Facing History and Ourselves. Web. https://www.facinghistory.org/choices....
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371....
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb....
Harvey, Lucy. “A Member of the Little Rock Nine Discusses Her Struggle to Attend Central High.” Smithsonian.com, April 22, 2016. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
“'Little Rock Nine' member Jefferson Thomas dead at 67.” CNN. September 6, 2010. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/06/obit....
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/....
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Thelma Mothershed in Executive Order 10730: Little Rock Nine." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc.. November 11, 2008. Web. https://www.shmoop.com/historical-tex....
Smith, David. “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.” The Guardian. September 24, 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201....
The soldiers escorted the students single file into the school for their first full day of classes and dispersed the demonstrators. The US’s racial shame had been exposed, shown on TV and reported in newspapers around the world.
…
… although 25 September is the date people remember, troops remained at Central High School for the rest the school year and the Little Rock Nine ran the gauntlet of hatred every day. They were taunted, assaulted and spat upon by their white counterparts; a straw effigy of a black person was hung from a tree. They were kept apart in different classes so they could not vouch for each other’s claims (Smith 2).
Gloria Ray was pushed down a flight of stairs.
Not long after the “Little Rock Nine” entered the school, Melba Pattillo told a reporter for The New York Times:
"When I got to my English class one boy jumped up to his feet and began to talk. He told the others to walk out with him because a 'nigger' was in their class. He kept talking and talking, but no one listened. The teacher told him to leave the room. The boy started for the door and shouted: 'Who’s going with me?' No one did. So he said in disgust, 'Chicken!' and left" (Choices 1).
... a distinct minority of segregationist students—estimates vary between 50 and 200—set the tone, intimidating all the others (few labels were more noxious than "nigger lover") into silence. Their campaign of unremitting but largely clandestine harassment was abetted by school officials who, fearful of making things even worse, ignored all but the most flagrant offenders. The black students, already scattered, became almost entirely isolated, none more than Elizabeth [Eckford]. In classes, she was made to sit by herself, always at the back, often with no one nearby. In the corridors, there was always a space around her. Even the few white children she knew steered clear: Please don't let them know you know me, their eyes seemed to plead. Only during the last class of the day—speech—did she encounter any friendly faces: two, fellow students named Ken Reinhardt and Ann Williams. "I can still see how she looked that [first] day," Ann Williams Wedaman recalls. "Nobody needs to be that lonely." A few other students did speak to her, it was true, but only to hear what "it" sounded like.
Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby wrote that less than a week into school Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.
The list could have been much longer: Elizabeth gradually stopped reporting problems, because they were so chronic, and because complaining about them did no good. In history class, for instance, a boy with bad skin and a protruding Adam's apple sat behind her muttering "nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger" daily, while classmates looked the other way. The boy, Charles Sawrie, looks back on it all with shame. "It was all kind of stupid," he says. "I just wanted to get a name for myself. I don't remember anything about her except she was black and my job was to make it as rough for the blacks as I could." For Sawrie, the problem was one of class as well as race: for all the abuse these black children were taking, some people actually cared about them, as they did not for poor white kids like himself. Elizabeth sensed as much; she says she actually felt sorry for him.
Most of her tormentors, though, were girls, suggesting the attacks were coordinated. They were also disciplined. The girls left another of the Nine, Thelma Mothershed, who had a serious heart ailment, alone: they didn't want to kill the black students, only drive them out. The local National Guardsmen were either indifferent or even sympathetic to the bigots, and Elizabeth didn't seek their help. "Elizabeth is more anxious to be independent than safe," Mrs. Huckaby wrote. Instead, she fended for herself: a houseful of seamstresses had plenty of straight pins, and she stuck them around the edges of her binder, turning it into a shield. That didn't help in gym class, where supervision was the spottiest; white girls would put broken glass on the shower-room floor, and scald her by flushing all the toilets simultaneously. (The girls showering nearby had evidently been forewarned, and knew when to step aside.)
Worse even than those who harassed her were the vastly larger number of students who ignored her altogether. Then there was Miss Emily Penton's history class, in which she got to hear that slavery actually civilized blacks, that the black officeholders during Reconstruction were "ignoramuses," that the Ku Klux Klan was founded to defend white womanhood. A stern woman with a pince-nez who had taught at Central since it opened, Miss Penton refused even to touch Elizabeth. When there was money to collect, she made her put the coins down on her desk. (When Elizabeth complained about her, she was informed that Miss Penton not only was a graduate of the University of Chicago but also was very much respected in the community.)
Elizabeth could not turn to Daisy Bates and the N.A.A.C.P., which, she felt, had its own agenda. She could not turn to her mother, who would have yanked her out of Central had she known what was happening. Or to her father, who to this day is largely unsympathetic. "Just a little pushing and shoving" is how he once characterized what his daughter had endured. (When Elizabeth and I visited him, he told her that black America was at war at the time; she was, he said, a soldier doing her duty. Besides, he never saw any marks on her.) She couldn't talk to the other black students; none were in her classes, and away from Central, school was the last thing they wanted to discuss. She could not talk to friends; the few she had had steered clear. She couldn't talk to the local press, which either sympathized with the segregationists or ducked the story. That spring a white student told Stan Opotowsky of the New York Post that the nine blacks appeared "in a state of shock." "They jump when you speak," she said (Margolick 8-10).
One student who braved pier pressure was Robin Woods. The day after federal troops escorted the Little Rock Nine to their classes, she told the following to a reporter of the New York Post:
"If there was trouble at Central High yesterday, it was all on the outside. We didn’t have anything at all going on inside. I got integrated yesterday. It was in my first English class. There was only 15 minutes to go, and a Negro boy came into class. That was the first time I’d ever gone to school with a Negro, and it didn’t hurt a bit."
"And when Elizabeth had to walk down in front of the school I was there and I saw that. And may I say, I was very ashamed—I felt like crying—because she was so brave when she did that. And we just weren’t behaving ourselves, just jeering her. I think if we had any sort of decency, we wouldn’t have acted that way. But I think if everybody would just obey the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have others do unto you—might be the solution. How would you like to have to walk down the street with everybody yelling behind you like they yelled behind Elizabeth?"
Terrence Roberts, one of the “Little Rock Nine,” was assigned to Robin’s algebra class. Realizing he didn’t have a math book, Robin made “a gut level decision” and pulled her desk over to his so they could share her book. There was “a gasp of disbelief.” For the rest of the year, segregationists harassed Robin and her family (Choices 5).
Melba Pattillo would eventually write about her experiences in a book titled “Warriors Don’t Cry.” Elizabeth would criticize Melba for exaggeration. Here is what Melba revealed in an interview conducted by Dave Davies for NPR.
Light paper and take a match, light a piece of paper and then throw it on you. Particularly in study hall, they loved that trick. Hit you, throw things at you. A favorite thing was to do something to your back, smear peanut butter. And one of the most heinous crimes was to smear peanut butter and glumpy (ph) stuff under your seat, so that you didn't notice, really. When I was walking in class, I was sort of looking around my back when I would sit down in it.
…
Constantly name calling, which, after a while, I have to say to you, becomes in some ways as painful or more than the physicality of the incident because you begin to question in your mind as a child, who am I? Who am I really?
…
Tripped - tripped up so you fall. The most dangerous way was, a gentleman passes you with a plastic toy gun, and you think, OK, I'm going to get wet. But you're not. You're going to get acid in your eyes. And that's what happened to me. And my bodyguard [paratroooper assigned to accompany her in the hallways], who I don't name - I think I call him Johnny Black. Anyway, he caught my ponytail - I have really long hair - and he grabbed my ponytail and ran, forcing me to run, and jammed my face beneath the water fountain and ran water all over my eyes. And that's what saved my sight.
[Earnest Green contradicted this event]
I had what are called primary, secondary and tertiary guards. Your primary guard was one nearest to you. Your secondary were two people who were out so many feet. And your tertiary were - they could be as many as six people, depending on what your day had been like. But they could never touch those other children. In some ways, they were just kind of like, you know, bullies that were, like, you know threatening them. They didn't - they were admonished that they couldn't touch other kids.
So, for example, when I went to the bathroom, one of the things I learned to do then, which I'm having to get out of doing now, which the doctor just lectured me about last Friday, was drink water - drink enough water - because my whole thing in Central High School was, if you don't drink water, you don't have to go to the bathroom. And so I really worked at that hard.
… these ladies [in the bathroom] would come by, and then once again, we have the old let's light the papers - and at this point, they would get on either side of me and in front, and they would light notebook paper with matches, and then they would throw it in on you.
Interviewer Dave Davies: I made a quick list of some of the ways that you were assaulted. I'm just going to read them here - knocked downstairs, spit upon, kicked on the shins, raw eggs poured over your head, acid thrown in your eyes, locker trashed, you were pushed against a wall and choked, hit across the back with a tennis racket so hard you spit up blood, pelted with snowballs that had large rocks in the middle. And this is just a partial list of the things that you and the other eight kids suffered. Did you report these things to anybody, to the school administrators? Did anybody do anything?
Melba Pattillo: In the beginning, we did report these kinds of attacks, but we learned quickly that nothing was ever going to be done about them. And I remember once watching this guy kick Terry [Terrance Roberts], and we told the principal, and he said, you know, unless I see it myself personally or some teacher sees it, it's not valid. And so they weren't going to do anything to us because, you know, you had the white citizens' club. You had all these white parents who were on their case. And they wanted to get us out, and they figured if they were violent enough over a long enough period of time, that, you know, it would be OK (Davies 6-9).
Interviewed for “Eyes on the Prize,” Ernest Green offered this:
… we were always getting calls in the middle of the night. And this one time there was a call that said, one of the girls would be squirted in the face with acid in a water pistol. And we'd better watch out. So that next morning, walking through the halls, and this was after our individual guards [stopped being with them --] before we [had] had individual paratroopers that escorted us from class to class in the hallway. And halfway through the school year they withdrew those, outside of the school and only had the guards stationed outside. Anyway, sure enough, I was walking with Melba Patillo and this kid walks up with a water pistol and squirts her in the face and it turns out it had water. But it was that level of harassment. One of the other things I remember always was in gym… you get into the locker room and the locker room gets steamed up. There was always incidents of these guys wetting up towels and throwing ‘em over where we were. Well we got to be a little cagey about that. We would start dressing in one place, move to another so they were always throwing towels over… some other area. It was a low level of harassment and I guess we sort of put away any idea that we were in immediate physical harm, that anybody was going to kill us. That didn't seem likely (Eyes 4).
On three separate occasions, Minnijean [Brown Trickey] had cafeteria food spilled on her, but none of her white abusers ever seemed to get punished.
In December 1957, she dropped her chili-laden lunch tray on the heads of two boys in the cafeteria who were taunting and knocking into her. She was suspended for six days. That school notice is now part of the Smithsonian collection along with a heartfelt note by her parents documenting all the abuse that their daughter had endured leading up to the incident. Then in February 1958, Trickey verbally responded to some jeering girls who had hit her in the head with a purse. That retaliation caused Trickey to be expelled from Central High.
“I had a sense of failure that lasted for decades over that.” … After she left Central, white students held printed signs that said, “One down…eight to go” (Harvey 3).
"We were always getting hit and kicked," she [Minnijean] remembers. "Some of the boys wore these toe plates and heel plates so they could kick pretty hard."
On Dec. 17, 1957, things came to a head. [She] … was inching her way between the tables in the lunchroom.
"I was holding the tray above their heads, trying to get through the aisle," she recalls.
Meanwhile, junior Dent Gitchel was trying to eat his lunch.
"There were some guys harassing her along the aisle," he says. "Some people would refuse to move their chairs, and I think somebody kicked a chair at her."
Minnijean dropped her tray, spilling chili on Gitchel.
"Pandemonium broke loose in the cafeteria at that moment," he recalls.
Both students were ordered to the principal's office.
"When I got to the office, the girls' vice principal asked me if I had done it on purpose," [Minnijean] …recalls. "And I said, 'Accidentally on purpose.' That's because I really hadn't understood it."
The school sent Gitchel home to change his clothes. He was back in school that afternoon (Chadwick and Proffitt 1).
Earnest Green remembered the incident somewhat differently.
"Minnie was about five foot ten and this fellow couldn’t have been more than five-five, five-four. And he reminded me of a small dog, yelping [His words were “nigger, nigger, nigger”] at somebody’s leg. Minnie had just picked up her chili, and before I could even say, 'Minnie, why don’t you tell him to shut up?' Minnie had taken this chili and dumped it on this dude’s head. There was absolute silence in the place, and then the help, all black, broke into applause. And the white kids, the other white kids there didn’t know what to do. It was the first time that anybody, I’m sure, had seen somebody black retaliate in that sense."
Minnijean was suspended for six days. Soon after the incident, a white student emptied a bowl of hot soup on her. He was suspended for two days. In February, Minnijean verbally responded to harassment by a white student. She was expelled from Central High for the rest of the year.
Minnijean said of the incident:
"I just can’t take everything they throw at me without fighting back. I don’t think people realize what goes on at Central. You just wouldn’t believe it. They throw rocks, they spill ink on your clothes, they call you 'nigger,' they just keep bothering you every five minutes. The white students hate me. Why do they hate me so much" (Choices 4)?
Through the 1999 book Bitters in the Honey by Beth Roy, [Minnijean Brown] Trickey was able to hear the perspective of white students who resisted segregation. Roy conducted oral histories with white alumni 40 years afterwards to explore the crisis at Central High. Trickey discovered that she in particular angered white classmates because they said, “She walked the halls of Central like she belonged there.”
Trickey also realizes now that she may have been singled out for harsher treatment. At an awards ceremony in 2009, she was speaking with Jefferson Thomas, one of the Nine, when he suddenly turned to her and said, “You know, you were the target.”
“We were all targets,” she laughed at him dismissively.
“No, you were the target, and when you left, I was the target,” he revealed (Harvey 4).
Trickey says the chili incident in the lunchroom taught her this lesson: She could not be perfect, even if it meant letting down the people who needed her as a civil rights symbol, and further upsetting the racists who taunted her every day.
"You have to be perfect to come to our imperfect school," she says they seemed to be telling her. "That is the nature of racism .... We'll do everything we can to make sure that you can't measure up, for as long as this country exists. And we'll do that so well, you'll think it's your own fault" (Chadwick and Proffitt 2).
Terrance Roberts said he constantly wanted to give up at Central High. Every day he walked onto campus there was a very real and regular threat of being beaten. He recounted a time when his face was smashed into gravel. While it was happening, he remembers thinking how senseless the attack was; he said he couldn’t even muster up the desire to hit back (Breaux 3).
The surviving members of the Little Rock Nine remember Jefferson Thomas fondly. "I will miss his calculated sense of humor," said [Carlotta Walls] LaNier… "He had a way of asking a question and ending it with a joke, probably to ease the pain during our teenage years at Central. He was a Christian who sincerely promoted racial harmony and took his responsibilities seriously."
"Jefferson has always been, to us, a brother," said Melba Pattillo Beals …He's funny and very strong, like when we would have a very difficult day, things were absolutely at their worst, he would say, 'Smile, you're on Candid Camera,' or, you know, 'Look at what you're wearing!' He was just really, really funny."
Thomas' quiet demeanor made him a target for bullies.
“I do remember [the family] got a call that he had been knocked out -- someone had hit him on the back of head while he was at a locker in hallway," said Jessie Agee, another sister of Thomas'. "But he wanted to continue on with it."
When it was time to leave school, he'd run home, and one of his older brothers -- armed with a tire iron -- would wait around a corner to escort him the rest of the way, Agee said (Little 2).
Small and frail, [Thelma] Mothershed didn't face as much physical abuse as the other members of the Little Rock Nine. But there were other forms of resistance. She recalled a teacher who wouldn't touch anything she had (Shmoop 1).
"My homeroom teacher . . . did strange little things. I remember that when we were absent, we’d have to go to the office and get a readmittance slip. When I would come in to give her my readmittance slip, she wouldn’t take it. So I would just put it down on the desk, and then she would sign it and put it in the book and slide it back across to me. Now, that was really strange. I guess she had to do something to show her class that she wasn’t particularly happy about me being in there. And then she—well, they set us in alphabetical order and in the row where I was, there were about two seats behind me—and she started the next person at the front seat in the next row, because she knew nobody wanted to sit behind me. She just kept those two chairs empty. So she did little strange, subtle things—subtle as a ton of bricks" (Choices 4).
Works cited:
Breaux, Aimee. “What advice did a Little Rock Nine member have for Iowa City students?” Iowa City Press Citizen. April 6, 2018. Web. https://www.press-citizen.com/story/n... .
Chadwick, Alex and Proffitt, Steve. “Revisiting the Little Rock Chili Incident.” NPR, December 17, 2007. Web. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s....
“Choices People Made: White Students and Teachers at Central High School.” Facing History and Ourselves. Web. https://www.facinghistory.org/choices....
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371....
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb....
Harvey, Lucy. “A Member of the Little Rock Nine Discusses Her Struggle to Attend Central High.” Smithsonian.com, April 22, 2016. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
“'Little Rock Nine' member Jefferson Thomas dead at 67.” CNN. September 6, 2010. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/06/obit....
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/....
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Thelma Mothershed in Executive Order 10730: Little Rock Nine." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc.. November 11, 2008. Web. https://www.shmoop.com/historical-tex....
Smith, David. “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.” The Guardian. September 24, 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201....
Little Rock Nine -- Motivations, Parent Sacrifices, Commentaries
Researching each member of the Little Rock Nine, I was amazed to discover how little each anticipated what would befall them. Their reasons for volunteering to help integrate Central High School were not altruistic. They were instead self-advantageous.
Minnijean [Brown] was the eldest of four children born to Willie Brown, a mason and landscaping contractor, and his wife, Imogene, a nurse’s aid, seamstress and homemaker. A native of Little Rock, she attended segregated schools and started senior high school as a 10th grader in 1956 at the newly opened Horace Mann School for African-Americans. It was across town from where she lived and offered no bus service.
… Minnijean heard an announcement on the school intercom about enrolling at Central and decided to sign up. … her real motivation for attending Central was that it was nine blocks from her house and she and her two best friends, Melba Pattillo and Thelma Mothershed would be able to walk there.
“The nine of us were not especially political,” she says. “We thought, we can walk to Central, it’s a huge, beautiful school, this is gonna be great,” she remembers.
“I really thought that if we went to school together, the white kids are going to be like me, curious and thoughtful, and we can just cut all this segregation stuff out,” she recalls (Harvey 4).
"I figured, I’m a nice person. Once they get to know me, they’ll see I’m okay. We’ll be friends” (Choices 2).
Minnijean didn’t intend to make a political statement when she set off with [her] two friends for her first day in high school. She was, after all, only 15. “I mean, part of growing up in a segregated society is that it’s a little sort of enclave and you know everybody… So, I was thinking: ‘Wow! I can meet some other kids.’”
… “We went to get new shoes and we were really trying to decide what to wear. So we were very teenage-esque about it, just totally naive.”
Once engaged, as did her compatriots, she refused to quit. “It’s the going back: that’s the bravery, that’s the courage … It’s the going home and saying: ‘Wow, they’re not stopping me, I’ll go back no matter what.’ There is no courage at the outset: the courage kicks in later.” She was first suspended, and then expelled, for retaliating against tormentors who went unpunished (Smith 5).
“I had a sense of failure that lasted for decades over that …” After she left Central, white students held printed signs that said, “One down…eight to go.”
Following her mid-year dismissal, [she] was invited to New York City to live in the home of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, African-American psychologists who had conducted pioneering research that exposed the negative effects of segregation on African-American children.
While living with the Clarks, [she] attended the New Lincoln School, a progressive, experimental K-12 school that focused on the arts, to finish out her 11th- and 12th-grade years.
“I was very, very grateful for the gift that I’d been given,” she says. “My classmates at New Lincoln allowed me to be the girl that I should have been, and allowed me to do all the things I thought I might do at Central.”
Minnijean went on to attend Southern Illinois University and majored in journalism. In 1967, she married Roy Trickey, a fisheries biologist, and they started a family, which eventually included six children. They moved to Canada to protest the Vietnam War, and she earned both a bachelors and masters degree in social work. Later in her career, she returned to the United States and served in the Clinton administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Workforce Diversity at the Department of the Interior. Now, she works as an activist on behalf of peacemaking, youth leadership, the environment and many other social justice issues.
…
One truth that she now understands is that many of her white classmates had been taught to hate. “We couldn’t expect the white kids at Central High to go against what they had learned their whole lives,” she says (Harvey 5-6).
The Little Rock Nine could be forgiven a sense of frustration at such uneven progress. “It’s all institutional and it’s all centuries old,” says Trickey, “so we’re seeing the result of policies that have been made over time. It has become more visible because the people who are running the country now are profoundly intentionally ignorant.”
After the first black US president was succeeded by a man supported by white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, Trickey sees history coming full circle. “People went into their basements and pulled out the old signs that they used in Little Rock, in Selma, across the country. “Integration is a sin”, “Integration is an abomination against God”, “Integration is communism”. They’re using the same ones they used 60 years ago. But there will be young people like the Little Rock Nine who are gonna keep going; I’m trying to train as many of them as I can” (Smith 5-6).
Carlotta Walls wanted a better education. She had been a student at an all-black junior high school, where her homeroom teacher was aware of a district-wide decision to gradually implement the changes that would be required. That teacher asked the students if they were interested in attending Central High, the city’s most prestigious high school. Carlotta jumped at the opportunity and signed up without asking her parents. “I knew what Brown meant, and I expected schools to be integrated … I wanted the best education available.” It wasn’t until her registration card arrived in the mail in July that her parents found out she had enrolled.
… like the eight other black students, [she] endured daily indignities, threats and violence. Students spat on her and yelled insults like “baboon.” They knocked books out of her hands and kicked her when she bent down to pick them up.
Despite the constant attacks, Carlotta refused to cry or retaliate. “I considered my tormentors to be ignorant people,” she says. “They did not understand that I had a right to be at Central. They had no understanding of our history, Constitution or democracy. … “I learned early that while the soldiers were there to make sure the nine of us stayed alive, for anything short of that, I was pretty much on my own.”
And attending class in 1957 wasn’t the end of the fight for the Little Rock Nine, either. The next year, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s public high schools to avoid integration, leaving 3,700 students stranded. Carlotta was not deterred, completing 11th grade by taking correspondence courses. Just a month before receiving her high school diploma, a bomb blew through her house. Carlotta made a point of returning to school the following day. “If I had not gone,” [Carlotta Walls] LaNier told NBC News in 2015, “they would have felt like they had won” (Mai 1-2).
“… her choice of school and the racial tensions surrounding the nine students did affect her family. “My father lost every job . . . once they found out who he really was. One thing after another. So it was tough on them, but they remained supportive. I’ve said so often in presentations that the real heroes and sheroes are the parents” (Keyes 2).
Carlotta, the youngest of the nine, became a property broker in Denver.
On May 25, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, became the first African-American graduate of Central High. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. attended graduation ceremonies at Central High School in May 1958 to see Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, receive his diploma.
In September 1958, one year after Central High was integrated, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s high schools for the entire year, pending a public vote, to prevent African-American attendance. Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration and the schools remained closed.
Other than Green, the rest of the Little Rock Nine completed their high school careers via correspondence or at other high schools across the country. [Elizabeth] Eckford joined the Army and later earned her General Education Equivalency diploma. Little Rock’s high schools reopened in August 1959 (Little 2-3).
Ernest Green interviewed.
… it was in August, early August I was working for a locker-room attendant at a country club. It was white. In fact it was a Jewish country club. … [I was] a towel attendant. … we got called down to the school board office, one evening. … I was informed that afternoon that I was one of the students selected. … Now, four of them I knew. We grew up, lived in the same neighborhood. Uh, same church, … went to junior high school and the earlier grades at the same time. But the next morning the newspapers ran the names … of the nine, nine of us who were going to Central. And I'll never forget I went back to work the next day. Uh, this young guy, he was about my age, his folks were members of the club, he came up to me and said, "How could you do it?" I said, "What do you mean, how could I do it?" He said, "You seem like such a nice fellow." And uh, you know, "Why is it you want to go, go to Central. Why do you want to destroy our relationship?" … it begin to hit me that … going there was not going to be as simple as I had thought the first time when I signed up. I was still committed to go but it made me know at that time that it…was going to mean a lot to a lot of people in that city. … particularly to white folks. And from then on, … events started to cascade.
…
Well I wasn't [expecting] any trouble. I think … given the fact that … there had been other schools in Arkansas that had been integrated. Fort Smith, Arkansas and some others, the buses in Little Rock had been desegregated without any problems. The library and … the university, the medical and … law school had admitted some blacks. So it was an expectation that there would be problems minimally, uh, nothing of a major cause celebre that would put Little Rock on the map … as it occurred.
…
… the real heroes and heroines in Little Rock were the parents. They were the ones behind the scenes, who had to deal with the pressures, who had to watch their children go off into an unknown and not know whether they would come back, uh, in one piece. And to me that's uh, that's one hell of a sacrifice.
…
… halfway through the school year we knew we were doing something for everybody in the town, everybody black in the town. And that the longer we stayed there and if we successfully completed there it would be difficult, impossible for anybody to say that … black people couldn't uh, compete in that environment and two, that … one more all white institution [was] broken down (Eyes 5-8).
Speaking by phone from Little Rock, Ernest Green, now 75, admits he is “disappointed” but insists he is also “pleased” by the evolution of the past 60 years.
“The US is still segregated by housing and employment, which are the two pillars we still have to struggle with,” he says. “But I believe our experience will act as an inspiration to many young people. It may inspire some on the other side: there’s probably a crowd that wants to go back to slavery, but we won’t let them.
“I survived a year of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor, in 1957. If we pace ourselves according to what Trump wants, obviously we’ll go backwards. The idea is to continue the fight and push for equity in this country.”
Green recalls a little-remembered line from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington in 1963, in which the civil rights leader argued that America had defaulted on its constitutional promise to citizens of colour, like a check that comes back marked “insufficient funds”.
But King refused to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt.
“Dr Martin Luther King said the US had given black people a bad check; we’re still waiting for the check to be honoured” (Smith 4-5).
Ernest Green served as assistant secretary of the federal Department of Labor under President Jimmy Carter and worked for Lehman Brothers in Washington DC.
Our guest today is Melba Pattillo Beals, one of those students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine. She wrote in her book "Warriors Don't Cry," that every day, she got up, polished her saddle shoes and went off to war. After that school year, Pattillo Beals went to California, where she got an education and pursued careers as a TV journalist, magazine writer, communications executive and university professor.
But as you'll hear, her year at Central High left emotional scars that were long-lasting. …
Essentially by watching my parents and by seeing them freeze up when we go places, by seeing the difference in their behavior in my presence in the home, in church and around each other, versus their behavior when we went to the grocery store, which was around the corner. That would be my first little glimpse of a world beyond my home - the grocery store.
It would also be when the insurance man visited my house, and I would see how my father went into the back room and armed himself. And this is what he'd choose - to take this brush and this cloth. And he cleaned off his shotgun because he was steamed at the way that the insurance man and the milkman and all these white delivery men treated my mother. My mother was very beautiful. She looked perhaps Hawaiian or - she's partially American-Indian, so she had sort of wavy hair to her waist and really beautiful skin and all of this. She did not look as though she were particularly black.
And they would come to the house. And as they were trying to collect or deliver whatever, they would, like, flirt with her. And I could watch my father's response, which was that he was helpless, powerless. But oh, was he (unintelligible) steamingly angry. I watched my mother's response, which was to walk a very thin line - to push them away, to get rid of them but, at the same time, not to really annoy them. Do you know what I mean?
…
Every single time day turned to night, I was frightened that the Klan would ride. From a very early age, again, I watched the parents around me pull the shades, quiet us all down to make our house look as though we were being very good Negroes, pull us in, pull anything from the outside that looked as though we were engaged in any activities they would object to. I watched this routine go on for all of my early life.
…
Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine [black students to attend Central High School] by people being frightened and people being threatened because by this time, the White Citizens' Council had nominated a committee of white people to go door to door, contact you through your doctor, contact you through whomever to get to you to tell you, oh, now, you know, you don't want to integrate. But eventually, to qualify - in the beginning, to qualify, you had to have good grades, and you had to have a record of not fighting, not talking back, a record of being a good student behavior-wise and academically.
…
Two guys parked outside my house who threatened to do bad things. My grandmother was a shooter because she grew up partially in a reservation, and her relatives, her uncles and her father were Indians - American Indians. She knew she could shoot a gnat at a hundred yards. Do you know what I'm saying? And so she kept a shotgun, Mr. Higgenbottom, on her windowsill because people would come. And at one point, they did shoot into the house, as you'll remember early in the Little Rock incident. And they took away her green vase - her flower vase that was on the TV, shattered it.
… some of my own people were not quite happy with me because they were losing their jobs. … Because they worked for the same white people that my grandmother worked for. My grandmother was a maid - a dollar a day in white lady's kitchens. And she was careful never, ever to connect herself to me, one of the Little Rock Nine. She just would say, oh, my goodness. That's news. I wonder whose child that is - because she had a different last name than we did. She never told any of her white employers that that's who she was. And the black people were losing jobs consistently.
…
I mean, Gloria Ray Karlmark's husband - sorry - father lost his job. … My mom lost her [teaching] job. … There were sane, God-fearing white people in Little Rock, Ark., who honestly gave us help, some of them by giving jobs to the black people who'd been fired, by giving money to the black people who'd been fired, by giving them jobs, like, in their yards - mow here, mow there, mow everywhere. Go work for Uncle and Daddy in Chicago. Carlotta [Walls] LaNier's father, for example, left Little Rock and went to work in Chicago. He went away to work. And he'd send money back and come back, sometimes, on the weekends. And so some of the white people were very generous in their attempts - in their efforts to help us. And that should really be clear.
…
The governor, Governor Faubus, closed all schools to keep us from returning in the school year of 1958. And that was difficult because he closed black schools. And those black children called us - they called me - and at church, treated us terribly because we'd taken away from them now their Christmas donations, their jobs, their homes and now their schools. And they were unhappy. …
Warned by family relatives that passed as white that segregationists had targeted Melba’s life, my grandmother and mother listened to the NAACP. The NAACP had always said some of us may have to leave. They sent out inquiries to different NAACPs across the country, saying, look. We need a home for these kids. We need some protection. Who's going to give it? In this case, out of Northern California came Dr. and Mrs. George McCabe, who would, until this moment of this day, be my parents and my family (Davies, interviewer 6-10).
As Terrance Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, told Iowa City high school students Friday, he knew as a teenager that the man would lose his job regardless of whether he let his daughter attended Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
“That was no mystery, I could have told him that, even as a 15-year-old kid in Little Rock,” he said. “I knew enough about the dynamics of racism to understand that if you ever have the temerity to send your child into an area that white people think is sacrosanct, you are in trouble already.”
For more than 300 years between the start of slavery in the U.S. and Brown v. Board of Education, it was constitutionally and legally possible to discriminate against people on the basis of color, Roberts began.
He said all of the changes since have been cosmetic, not fundamental enough to address the deeper, ingrained problem.
He said living in a system of legalized segregation his whole childhood is what led him to volunteer to help desegregate Central High. Up until that point, Roberts said, he just felt powerless to make a difference.
“My ancestors had met the end of their lives in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality,” he said. “I could not say no to my opportunity. It would have been tantamount to turning around and spitting on their graves” Breaux 2-3).
When people asked me about progress I would always say there has been absolutely none. But my wife would tell me, “You have to acknowledge that some things have shifted.” And begrudgingly I came to accept that. I can live a life now where I am less vulnerable to the forces around me. However, I can’t be used as a barometer and then suggest that progress has been made when I look at the sea of people who are still vulnerable to the forces around them: economically, socially, culturally. We can’t declare as a group that we’ve made progress when not everybody can participate in this so-called progress (Perlman 2).
Terrence Roberts became a psychologist and management executive in Pasadena, California.
Jefferson Thomas was a track athlete at the African-American Dunbar Junior High School in Little Rock when he volunteered to attend Central High as a sophomore. … one of the reasons Thomas was inspired to volunteer came to him in biology class. At his old school, the class and the teacher had to share one frog when it came time to dissecting an animal.
"But he heard at Central, all the students had their own frog to dissect. And he said he wanted to go to Central High because he would be in a class where each student had their own frog," He said, 'I just want my own frog.'"
"He found out about the wonderful education they were getting there, and that's what he wanted to experience…" … everyone in their family, except their mother, thought Thomas' attempt to go to Central was a good idea. "She wasn't too keen on it, but she went along with it. His father wanted him to do it. She finally gave in. Him being the youngest, she was very protective of him …"
After graduating from Central, he entered Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, but joined his family after they relocated to Los Angeles in 1961. He attended Los Angeles State College, where he was a member of the student government and president of the Associated Engineers.
He was inducted into the Army in 1966, and was assigned to duty in south Vietnam with the 9th Infantry Division, the biography said. "He served as an infantry squad leader and directed numerous field campaigns as they confronted enemy troops" (Little Rock Thomas 1-2).
Thomas "was a straight, ordinary, next-door-living kind of guy" with a wonderful sense of humor, [Melba Pattillo] Beals said Monday.
"He had this ability to keep things in perspective, used a lot of humor and was great at telling stories," [Terrence] Roberts said. "We talked often about how things went for us in life, and Jeff was a very satisfied person."
Thomas was born Sept. 19, 1942, the youngest of seven children. He volunteered to go to Central High beginning in his sophomore year because he wanted to improve his chances of attending college.
"I took a lot of abuse. But I made it a challenge to think every day, 'You can't make me quit,' " Thomas told the Columbus Dispatch in 2000.
He stayed in Little Rock the next year after Faubus closed the school. Thomas took correspondence courses, then he and [Carlotta Walls] LaNier returned for the 1959-60 school year and graduated from Central in May 1960.
Thomas told The Times his father lost his job as a salesman for International Harvester after refusing to move his son out of Little Rock.
…
"In my life there have been two periods of time that were very trying: Central High and Vietnam," he told The Times in 1987 (Thursby 1-2).
"The first day of school opened my eyes," said Gloria Ray, who entered Central High School as a junior. "I hadn't been brought up to accept being less than equal. I had not been brought up to accept not being allowed to pursue education"
Education was important in the Ray home. Gloria's father had worked with George Washington Carver and founded the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service for Negroes. Her mother was a sociologist, but when she refused to take Gloria out of Central High, she lost her job with the state of Arkansas.
Ray made it through the year at Central but finished her high school education in Kansas City, Missouri. …
Ray is proud of the Little Rock Nine, but the memories of that year are difficult. "When the soldiers blocked my entrance to the school […] Gloria Ray, the child, ceased to exist at that moment," she said.
"I see there the girl who thought that she would be welcomed to the Central High School and was rejected in a way that was beyond her imagination from the community that she lived in all of her life. […] I try actually not even to look at those old pictures, because it's a lost childhood to me" (Shmoop Gloria 1-2).
"You want to go where?" Thelma Mothershed's mom asked her about her decision to go to Central High School. "Are you crazy?".
Mrs. Mothershed's immediate concern wasn't integration. It was her daughter's health. Thelma had a congenital heart condition, and her mother worried she might not be able to physically make it around the big school.
But Mothershed had made up her mind, and after her parents discussed it, they agreed. Mothershed wanted to be a teacher and she figured going to Central could help her get into college.
Mothershed is a Central graduate, although she received her diploma by mail after taking correspondence courses. She fulfilled her childhood dream, teaching home economics for 28 years in East St. Louis, Illinois. In the classroom, she was determined to treat all her students equally.
Mothershed … knows everyone needs a hand sometimes. She's worked with troubled kids at a juvenile detention center and, through the American Red Cross, taught survival skills to homeless women (Shmoop Mothershed 1).
She lives now in Little Rock.
Works cited:
Breaux, Aimee. “What advice did a Little Rock Nine member have for Iowa City students?” Iowa City Press Citizen. April 6, 2018. Web.
“Choices People Made: The Little Rock Nine and Their Parents.” Facing History and Ourselves. Web. https://www.facinghistory.org/for-edu....
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371....
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb....
Harvey, Lucy. “A Member of the Little Rock Nine Discusses Her Struggle to Attend Central High.” Smithsonian.com, April 22, 2016. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
Keyes, Allison. “The Youngest of the Little Rock Nine Speaks About Holding on to History.” Smithsonian.com. September 5, 2017. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/black-....
“'Little Rock Nine' member Jefferson Thomas dead at 67.” CNN. September 6, 2010. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/06/obit....
Mai, Lina. “'I Had a Right to Be at Central': Remembering Little Rock's Integration Battle.” Time. September 22, 2017. Web. http://time.com/4948704/little-rock-n....
Perlman, Stacey. “60 Years After Little Rock: A Q&A with Terrence Roberts.” Facing Today: a Facing History Blog. September 26, 2017. Web. http://facingtoday.facinghistory.org/....
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Gloria Ray in Executive Order 10730: Little Rock Nine." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. https://www.shmoop.com/historical-tex....
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Thelma Mothershed in Executive Order 10730: Little Rock Nine." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc.. November 11, 2008. Web. https://www.shmoop.com/historical-tex....
Smith, David. “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.” The Guardian. September 24, 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201....
Thursby, Keith. “One of the Little Rock Nine.” Los Angeles Times. September 7, 2010. Web. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/....
Minnijean [Brown] was the eldest of four children born to Willie Brown, a mason and landscaping contractor, and his wife, Imogene, a nurse’s aid, seamstress and homemaker. A native of Little Rock, she attended segregated schools and started senior high school as a 10th grader in 1956 at the newly opened Horace Mann School for African-Americans. It was across town from where she lived and offered no bus service.
… Minnijean heard an announcement on the school intercom about enrolling at Central and decided to sign up. … her real motivation for attending Central was that it was nine blocks from her house and she and her two best friends, Melba Pattillo and Thelma Mothershed would be able to walk there.
“The nine of us were not especially political,” she says. “We thought, we can walk to Central, it’s a huge, beautiful school, this is gonna be great,” she remembers.
“I really thought that if we went to school together, the white kids are going to be like me, curious and thoughtful, and we can just cut all this segregation stuff out,” she recalls (Harvey 4).
"I figured, I’m a nice person. Once they get to know me, they’ll see I’m okay. We’ll be friends” (Choices 2).
Minnijean didn’t intend to make a political statement when she set off with [her] two friends for her first day in high school. She was, after all, only 15. “I mean, part of growing up in a segregated society is that it’s a little sort of enclave and you know everybody… So, I was thinking: ‘Wow! I can meet some other kids.’”
… “We went to get new shoes and we were really trying to decide what to wear. So we were very teenage-esque about it, just totally naive.”
Once engaged, as did her compatriots, she refused to quit. “It’s the going back: that’s the bravery, that’s the courage … It’s the going home and saying: ‘Wow, they’re not stopping me, I’ll go back no matter what.’ There is no courage at the outset: the courage kicks in later.” She was first suspended, and then expelled, for retaliating against tormentors who went unpunished (Smith 5).
“I had a sense of failure that lasted for decades over that …” After she left Central, white students held printed signs that said, “One down…eight to go.”
Following her mid-year dismissal, [she] was invited to New York City to live in the home of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, African-American psychologists who had conducted pioneering research that exposed the negative effects of segregation on African-American children.
While living with the Clarks, [she] attended the New Lincoln School, a progressive, experimental K-12 school that focused on the arts, to finish out her 11th- and 12th-grade years.
“I was very, very grateful for the gift that I’d been given,” she says. “My classmates at New Lincoln allowed me to be the girl that I should have been, and allowed me to do all the things I thought I might do at Central.”
Minnijean went on to attend Southern Illinois University and majored in journalism. In 1967, she married Roy Trickey, a fisheries biologist, and they started a family, which eventually included six children. They moved to Canada to protest the Vietnam War, and she earned both a bachelors and masters degree in social work. Later in her career, she returned to the United States and served in the Clinton administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Workforce Diversity at the Department of the Interior. Now, she works as an activist on behalf of peacemaking, youth leadership, the environment and many other social justice issues.
…
One truth that she now understands is that many of her white classmates had been taught to hate. “We couldn’t expect the white kids at Central High to go against what they had learned their whole lives,” she says (Harvey 5-6).
The Little Rock Nine could be forgiven a sense of frustration at such uneven progress. “It’s all institutional and it’s all centuries old,” says Trickey, “so we’re seeing the result of policies that have been made over time. It has become more visible because the people who are running the country now are profoundly intentionally ignorant.”
After the first black US president was succeeded by a man supported by white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, Trickey sees history coming full circle. “People went into their basements and pulled out the old signs that they used in Little Rock, in Selma, across the country. “Integration is a sin”, “Integration is an abomination against God”, “Integration is communism”. They’re using the same ones they used 60 years ago. But there will be young people like the Little Rock Nine who are gonna keep going; I’m trying to train as many of them as I can” (Smith 5-6).
Carlotta Walls wanted a better education. She had been a student at an all-black junior high school, where her homeroom teacher was aware of a district-wide decision to gradually implement the changes that would be required. That teacher asked the students if they were interested in attending Central High, the city’s most prestigious high school. Carlotta jumped at the opportunity and signed up without asking her parents. “I knew what Brown meant, and I expected schools to be integrated … I wanted the best education available.” It wasn’t until her registration card arrived in the mail in July that her parents found out she had enrolled.
… like the eight other black students, [she] endured daily indignities, threats and violence. Students spat on her and yelled insults like “baboon.” They knocked books out of her hands and kicked her when she bent down to pick them up.
Despite the constant attacks, Carlotta refused to cry or retaliate. “I considered my tormentors to be ignorant people,” she says. “They did not understand that I had a right to be at Central. They had no understanding of our history, Constitution or democracy. … “I learned early that while the soldiers were there to make sure the nine of us stayed alive, for anything short of that, I was pretty much on my own.”
And attending class in 1957 wasn’t the end of the fight for the Little Rock Nine, either. The next year, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s public high schools to avoid integration, leaving 3,700 students stranded. Carlotta was not deterred, completing 11th grade by taking correspondence courses. Just a month before receiving her high school diploma, a bomb blew through her house. Carlotta made a point of returning to school the following day. “If I had not gone,” [Carlotta Walls] LaNier told NBC News in 2015, “they would have felt like they had won” (Mai 1-2).
“… her choice of school and the racial tensions surrounding the nine students did affect her family. “My father lost every job . . . once they found out who he really was. One thing after another. So it was tough on them, but they remained supportive. I’ve said so often in presentations that the real heroes and sheroes are the parents” (Keyes 2).
Carlotta, the youngest of the nine, became a property broker in Denver.
On May 25, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, became the first African-American graduate of Central High. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. attended graduation ceremonies at Central High School in May 1958 to see Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, receive his diploma.
In September 1958, one year after Central High was integrated, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s high schools for the entire year, pending a public vote, to prevent African-American attendance. Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration and the schools remained closed.
Other than Green, the rest of the Little Rock Nine completed their high school careers via correspondence or at other high schools across the country. [Elizabeth] Eckford joined the Army and later earned her General Education Equivalency diploma. Little Rock’s high schools reopened in August 1959 (Little 2-3).
Ernest Green interviewed.
… it was in August, early August I was working for a locker-room attendant at a country club. It was white. In fact it was a Jewish country club. … [I was] a towel attendant. … we got called down to the school board office, one evening. … I was informed that afternoon that I was one of the students selected. … Now, four of them I knew. We grew up, lived in the same neighborhood. Uh, same church, … went to junior high school and the earlier grades at the same time. But the next morning the newspapers ran the names … of the nine, nine of us who were going to Central. And I'll never forget I went back to work the next day. Uh, this young guy, he was about my age, his folks were members of the club, he came up to me and said, "How could you do it?" I said, "What do you mean, how could I do it?" He said, "You seem like such a nice fellow." And uh, you know, "Why is it you want to go, go to Central. Why do you want to destroy our relationship?" … it begin to hit me that … going there was not going to be as simple as I had thought the first time when I signed up. I was still committed to go but it made me know at that time that it…was going to mean a lot to a lot of people in that city. … particularly to white folks. And from then on, … events started to cascade.
…
Well I wasn't [expecting] any trouble. I think … given the fact that … there had been other schools in Arkansas that had been integrated. Fort Smith, Arkansas and some others, the buses in Little Rock had been desegregated without any problems. The library and … the university, the medical and … law school had admitted some blacks. So it was an expectation that there would be problems minimally, uh, nothing of a major cause celebre that would put Little Rock on the map … as it occurred.
…
… the real heroes and heroines in Little Rock were the parents. They were the ones behind the scenes, who had to deal with the pressures, who had to watch their children go off into an unknown and not know whether they would come back, uh, in one piece. And to me that's uh, that's one hell of a sacrifice.
…
… halfway through the school year we knew we were doing something for everybody in the town, everybody black in the town. And that the longer we stayed there and if we successfully completed there it would be difficult, impossible for anybody to say that … black people couldn't uh, compete in that environment and two, that … one more all white institution [was] broken down (Eyes 5-8).
Speaking by phone from Little Rock, Ernest Green, now 75, admits he is “disappointed” but insists he is also “pleased” by the evolution of the past 60 years.
“The US is still segregated by housing and employment, which are the two pillars we still have to struggle with,” he says. “But I believe our experience will act as an inspiration to many young people. It may inspire some on the other side: there’s probably a crowd that wants to go back to slavery, but we won’t let them.
“I survived a year of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor, in 1957. If we pace ourselves according to what Trump wants, obviously we’ll go backwards. The idea is to continue the fight and push for equity in this country.”
Green recalls a little-remembered line from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington in 1963, in which the civil rights leader argued that America had defaulted on its constitutional promise to citizens of colour, like a check that comes back marked “insufficient funds”.
But King refused to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt.
“Dr Martin Luther King said the US had given black people a bad check; we’re still waiting for the check to be honoured” (Smith 4-5).
Ernest Green served as assistant secretary of the federal Department of Labor under President Jimmy Carter and worked for Lehman Brothers in Washington DC.
Our guest today is Melba Pattillo Beals, one of those students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine. She wrote in her book "Warriors Don't Cry," that every day, she got up, polished her saddle shoes and went off to war. After that school year, Pattillo Beals went to California, where she got an education and pursued careers as a TV journalist, magazine writer, communications executive and university professor.
But as you'll hear, her year at Central High left emotional scars that were long-lasting. …
Essentially by watching my parents and by seeing them freeze up when we go places, by seeing the difference in their behavior in my presence in the home, in church and around each other, versus their behavior when we went to the grocery store, which was around the corner. That would be my first little glimpse of a world beyond my home - the grocery store.
It would also be when the insurance man visited my house, and I would see how my father went into the back room and armed himself. And this is what he'd choose - to take this brush and this cloth. And he cleaned off his shotgun because he was steamed at the way that the insurance man and the milkman and all these white delivery men treated my mother. My mother was very beautiful. She looked perhaps Hawaiian or - she's partially American-Indian, so she had sort of wavy hair to her waist and really beautiful skin and all of this. She did not look as though she were particularly black.
And they would come to the house. And as they were trying to collect or deliver whatever, they would, like, flirt with her. And I could watch my father's response, which was that he was helpless, powerless. But oh, was he (unintelligible) steamingly angry. I watched my mother's response, which was to walk a very thin line - to push them away, to get rid of them but, at the same time, not to really annoy them. Do you know what I mean?
…
Every single time day turned to night, I was frightened that the Klan would ride. From a very early age, again, I watched the parents around me pull the shades, quiet us all down to make our house look as though we were being very good Negroes, pull us in, pull anything from the outside that looked as though we were engaged in any activities they would object to. I watched this routine go on for all of my early life.
…
Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine [black students to attend Central High School] by people being frightened and people being threatened because by this time, the White Citizens' Council had nominated a committee of white people to go door to door, contact you through your doctor, contact you through whomever to get to you to tell you, oh, now, you know, you don't want to integrate. But eventually, to qualify - in the beginning, to qualify, you had to have good grades, and you had to have a record of not fighting, not talking back, a record of being a good student behavior-wise and academically.
…
Two guys parked outside my house who threatened to do bad things. My grandmother was a shooter because she grew up partially in a reservation, and her relatives, her uncles and her father were Indians - American Indians. She knew she could shoot a gnat at a hundred yards. Do you know what I'm saying? And so she kept a shotgun, Mr. Higgenbottom, on her windowsill because people would come. And at one point, they did shoot into the house, as you'll remember early in the Little Rock incident. And they took away her green vase - her flower vase that was on the TV, shattered it.
… some of my own people were not quite happy with me because they were losing their jobs. … Because they worked for the same white people that my grandmother worked for. My grandmother was a maid - a dollar a day in white lady's kitchens. And she was careful never, ever to connect herself to me, one of the Little Rock Nine. She just would say, oh, my goodness. That's news. I wonder whose child that is - because she had a different last name than we did. She never told any of her white employers that that's who she was. And the black people were losing jobs consistently.
…
I mean, Gloria Ray Karlmark's husband - sorry - father lost his job. … My mom lost her [teaching] job. … There were sane, God-fearing white people in Little Rock, Ark., who honestly gave us help, some of them by giving jobs to the black people who'd been fired, by giving money to the black people who'd been fired, by giving them jobs, like, in their yards - mow here, mow there, mow everywhere. Go work for Uncle and Daddy in Chicago. Carlotta [Walls] LaNier's father, for example, left Little Rock and went to work in Chicago. He went away to work. And he'd send money back and come back, sometimes, on the weekends. And so some of the white people were very generous in their attempts - in their efforts to help us. And that should really be clear.
…
The governor, Governor Faubus, closed all schools to keep us from returning in the school year of 1958. And that was difficult because he closed black schools. And those black children called us - they called me - and at church, treated us terribly because we'd taken away from them now their Christmas donations, their jobs, their homes and now their schools. And they were unhappy. …
Warned by family relatives that passed as white that segregationists had targeted Melba’s life, my grandmother and mother listened to the NAACP. The NAACP had always said some of us may have to leave. They sent out inquiries to different NAACPs across the country, saying, look. We need a home for these kids. We need some protection. Who's going to give it? In this case, out of Northern California came Dr. and Mrs. George McCabe, who would, until this moment of this day, be my parents and my family (Davies, interviewer 6-10).
As Terrance Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, told Iowa City high school students Friday, he knew as a teenager that the man would lose his job regardless of whether he let his daughter attended Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
“That was no mystery, I could have told him that, even as a 15-year-old kid in Little Rock,” he said. “I knew enough about the dynamics of racism to understand that if you ever have the temerity to send your child into an area that white people think is sacrosanct, you are in trouble already.”
For more than 300 years between the start of slavery in the U.S. and Brown v. Board of Education, it was constitutionally and legally possible to discriminate against people on the basis of color, Roberts began.
He said all of the changes since have been cosmetic, not fundamental enough to address the deeper, ingrained problem.
He said living in a system of legalized segregation his whole childhood is what led him to volunteer to help desegregate Central High. Up until that point, Roberts said, he just felt powerless to make a difference.
“My ancestors had met the end of their lives in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality,” he said. “I could not say no to my opportunity. It would have been tantamount to turning around and spitting on their graves” Breaux 2-3).
When people asked me about progress I would always say there has been absolutely none. But my wife would tell me, “You have to acknowledge that some things have shifted.” And begrudgingly I came to accept that. I can live a life now where I am less vulnerable to the forces around me. However, I can’t be used as a barometer and then suggest that progress has been made when I look at the sea of people who are still vulnerable to the forces around them: economically, socially, culturally. We can’t declare as a group that we’ve made progress when not everybody can participate in this so-called progress (Perlman 2).
Terrence Roberts became a psychologist and management executive in Pasadena, California.
Jefferson Thomas was a track athlete at the African-American Dunbar Junior High School in Little Rock when he volunteered to attend Central High as a sophomore. … one of the reasons Thomas was inspired to volunteer came to him in biology class. At his old school, the class and the teacher had to share one frog when it came time to dissecting an animal.
"But he heard at Central, all the students had their own frog to dissect. And he said he wanted to go to Central High because he would be in a class where each student had their own frog," He said, 'I just want my own frog.'"
"He found out about the wonderful education they were getting there, and that's what he wanted to experience…" … everyone in their family, except their mother, thought Thomas' attempt to go to Central was a good idea. "She wasn't too keen on it, but she went along with it. His father wanted him to do it. She finally gave in. Him being the youngest, she was very protective of him …"
After graduating from Central, he entered Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, but joined his family after they relocated to Los Angeles in 1961. He attended Los Angeles State College, where he was a member of the student government and president of the Associated Engineers.
He was inducted into the Army in 1966, and was assigned to duty in south Vietnam with the 9th Infantry Division, the biography said. "He served as an infantry squad leader and directed numerous field campaigns as they confronted enemy troops" (Little Rock Thomas 1-2).
Thomas "was a straight, ordinary, next-door-living kind of guy" with a wonderful sense of humor, [Melba Pattillo] Beals said Monday.
"He had this ability to keep things in perspective, used a lot of humor and was great at telling stories," [Terrence] Roberts said. "We talked often about how things went for us in life, and Jeff was a very satisfied person."
Thomas was born Sept. 19, 1942, the youngest of seven children. He volunteered to go to Central High beginning in his sophomore year because he wanted to improve his chances of attending college.
"I took a lot of abuse. But I made it a challenge to think every day, 'You can't make me quit,' " Thomas told the Columbus Dispatch in 2000.
He stayed in Little Rock the next year after Faubus closed the school. Thomas took correspondence courses, then he and [Carlotta Walls] LaNier returned for the 1959-60 school year and graduated from Central in May 1960.
Thomas told The Times his father lost his job as a salesman for International Harvester after refusing to move his son out of Little Rock.
…
"In my life there have been two periods of time that were very trying: Central High and Vietnam," he told The Times in 1987 (Thursby 1-2).
"The first day of school opened my eyes," said Gloria Ray, who entered Central High School as a junior. "I hadn't been brought up to accept being less than equal. I had not been brought up to accept not being allowed to pursue education"
Education was important in the Ray home. Gloria's father had worked with George Washington Carver and founded the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service for Negroes. Her mother was a sociologist, but when she refused to take Gloria out of Central High, she lost her job with the state of Arkansas.
Ray made it through the year at Central but finished her high school education in Kansas City, Missouri. …
Ray is proud of the Little Rock Nine, but the memories of that year are difficult. "When the soldiers blocked my entrance to the school […] Gloria Ray, the child, ceased to exist at that moment," she said.
"I see there the girl who thought that she would be welcomed to the Central High School and was rejected in a way that was beyond her imagination from the community that she lived in all of her life. […] I try actually not even to look at those old pictures, because it's a lost childhood to me" (Shmoop Gloria 1-2).
"You want to go where?" Thelma Mothershed's mom asked her about her decision to go to Central High School. "Are you crazy?".
Mrs. Mothershed's immediate concern wasn't integration. It was her daughter's health. Thelma had a congenital heart condition, and her mother worried she might not be able to physically make it around the big school.
But Mothershed had made up her mind, and after her parents discussed it, they agreed. Mothershed wanted to be a teacher and she figured going to Central could help her get into college.
Mothershed is a Central graduate, although she received her diploma by mail after taking correspondence courses. She fulfilled her childhood dream, teaching home economics for 28 years in East St. Louis, Illinois. In the classroom, she was determined to treat all her students equally.
Mothershed … knows everyone needs a hand sometimes. She's worked with troubled kids at a juvenile detention center and, through the American Red Cross, taught survival skills to homeless women (Shmoop Mothershed 1).
She lives now in Little Rock.
Works cited:
Breaux, Aimee. “What advice did a Little Rock Nine member have for Iowa City students?” Iowa City Press Citizen. April 6, 2018. Web.
“Choices People Made: The Little Rock Nine and Their Parents.” Facing History and Ourselves. Web. https://www.facinghistory.org/for-edu....
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371....
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb....
Harvey, Lucy. “A Member of the Little Rock Nine Discusses Her Struggle to Attend Central High.” Smithsonian.com, April 22, 2016. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
Keyes, Allison. “The Youngest of the Little Rock Nine Speaks About Holding on to History.” Smithsonian.com. September 5, 2017. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths....
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/black-....
“'Little Rock Nine' member Jefferson Thomas dead at 67.” CNN. September 6, 2010. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/06/obit....
Mai, Lina. “'I Had a Right to Be at Central': Remembering Little Rock's Integration Battle.” Time. September 22, 2017. Web. http://time.com/4948704/little-rock-n....
Perlman, Stacey. “60 Years After Little Rock: A Q&A with Terrence Roberts.” Facing Today: a Facing History Blog. September 26, 2017. Web. http://facingtoday.facinghistory.org/....
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Gloria Ray in Executive Order 10730: Little Rock Nine." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. https://www.shmoop.com/historical-tex....
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Thelma Mothershed in Executive Order 10730: Little Rock Nine." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc.. November 11, 2008. Web. https://www.shmoop.com/historical-tex....
Smith, David. “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.” The Guardian. September 24, 2017. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201....
Thursby, Keith. “One of the Little Rock Nine.” Los Angeles Times. September 7, 2010. Web. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/....
