Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "terrence-roberts"
Civil Rights Events -- Little Rock Nine -- First Day
In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America’s public schools was unconstitutional.
Until the court’s decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, requiring African-American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”
In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.
The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.
Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: the Capital Citizens Council and the Mother’s League of Central High School.
Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African-American newspaper.
Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations (Little 1-2).
Years later in an interview Melba Pattillo said: Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine 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 (Davies 1).
The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.
On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African-American students’ entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students’ own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if black students were allowed to enter the school.
The Mother’s League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Richard Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.
The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.
Elizabeth Eckford’s family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone (Little 1-2)
Interviewed years later, Ernest Green divulged the following.
Daisy [Bates] called us all up and told us that we were going to go to school as a group … and to arrange to meet at her house and there were a number of ministers … that … I was not aware of [that] … had been involved in trying to lay a groundwork to have … the integration of the schools reasonably accepted … by the people … in the city. So that morning, eight of us gathered at … Daisy's house, Elizabeth wasn't there. And … we went by car to Central, to the corner of 14th Street and Park. Uh… it was about eight o'clock that morning. And we made an attempt to go though the troops and … were denied access to the front of the school. And … we went home after that. Elizabeth had missed the call … she didn't have a phone I think. And that morning she was at the other end, two blocks down 16th, where there was nobody, no supporters at least, none of the ministers, none of the people that …had helped us … provide transportation up to the school and that she was down there facing the mob by herself. None of us knew that until we got home after school.
…
We just made a cursory kind of attempt to, to enter school that morning. Elizabeth ... attempted to go through the guards and had the mobs behind her. So that was the first day… at Central (Eyes 1-2)
The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.
Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention (Little 1-2).
Elizabeth Eckford
As southern states went 50 years ago, Arkansas was racially open-minded. Its governor in 1957, Orval Faubus, had been elected three years earlier as a moderate. Little Rock (population 100,000 at the time) was considered one of the most progressive cities in the region. Five days after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling ordering school integration, the local school board pledged to comply. But beneath the city's tolerant façade, Jim Crow was alive and well. …
For all its professed good intentions, the school board moved tentatively and begrudgingly, taking three years to enroll only a token number of blacks in one school: Little Rock Central High School, the most prestigious in the state. Administrators looked for black students strong enough to survive the ordeal but placid enough not to make trouble. The superintendent told Elizabeth she'd have to be like Jackie Robinson, turning the other cheek, never talking or fighting back. Improbably—mistakenly, really—sensitive, brooding Elizabeth somehow made the cut. And even more improbably, her worrywart mother agreed to let her go. There'd be only eight others, in a student population of roughly 2,000.
Among Little Rock's black community, the Eckfords were known for their intelligence and seriousness. They thought of themselves as special—as "something on a stick," Elizabeth's mother once said. The patriarch was Elizabeth's grandfather Oscar Eckford Sr., a large and formidable man—his wife, and even some white people, used "Mr." when addressing him—who ran a small grocery store. From him, Elizabeth always understood she would go to college, even though it was never clear how they'd pay. Elizabeth's father, Oscar Jr., worked nights at the train station and weekends cleaning white peoples' houses; her mother, Birdie, did the laundry at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro, five blocks from the modest home the Eckfords bought in 1949 and moved into on Elizabeth's eighth birthday, later that year. Birdie Eckford's job allowed her to look out for her badly handicapped son, one of her six children, who went to school there. Elizabeth's grandfather was the only man she knew who spoke to white people without fear, but her mother had her Uncle Tom ways. "I have never had trouble with white people," she once said. "I always gave in, if necessary." The Eckfords had no phone but did have a television, the better to keep the children in Birdie's sights. "The Queen of No," Elizabeth still calls her mother, 15 years after her death.
A 10th grader at the segregated Horace Mann High School in the spring of 1957, Elizabeth read habitually and got good grades. She especially loved history. She was essentially a loner, prone to sitting and daydreaming on the big rock in her backyard for hours at a time, thinking that wherever she was, she didn't quite belong. No one had yet diagnosed her as depressed, but there was a history of the condition in her family.
Inspired by the example of Thurgood Marshall, who'd just argued the Brown case before the Supreme Court, she wanted to become a lawyer. She preferred Central not out of some burning desire to mix with whites, but because it offered courses that Horace Mann didn't. While underfunded, Little Rock's black schools had a distinguished tradition, teaching black pride before the term existed and black history before there were any texts. So whatever benefits Central conferred on its first black students would come at a cost: the loss of friends, community, and teachers who cared, as well as the chance to participate in extracurricular activities, since the school board, fearing white outrage over racial mixing, had barred the nine black students from them.
… the director of the Arkansas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Daisy Bates, instructed the black parents to bring their children to her home the following morning. From there, the students, accompanied by a few ministers—white and black—would proceed to Central as a group. But the Eckfords didn't have a phone, so Bates never notified them.
…
Elizabeth left the house and, four blocks away, boarded the bus heading downtown.
Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She'd often walked by Central—it was on the way to her grandfather's store—and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. "They're coming!" someone shouted. "The niggers are coming!" Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. "Don't let her in!" someone shouted.
Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"
One white girl in the throng stood out: she was "screaming, just hysterical," as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central—like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made light bulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel's dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she'd always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents': her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.
Marching alongside Hazel, chanting "Two, four, six, eight—we don't want to integrate!" were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel's right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann, the girl carrying the purse at the far left, was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel—her friends called her "Kitty"—this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: "Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!" Click. Will Counts had his picture.
"This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves" was how Benjamin Fine later described the scene. Once she reached the bus stop, Elizabeth sat herself down at the edge of the empty bench, as if not wanting to take up too much space. "Drag her over to this tree!" someone shouted. A small group of reporters—Jerry Dhonau and Ray Moseley of the Arkansas Gazette, Paul Welch of Life—formed an informal protective cordon around her; it was all that they, as professionals, felt they could do. But Fine sat himself next to Elizabeth and, at a time and place in which whites simply didn't do such things, put his arm around her, then lifted her chin. "Don't let them see you cry," he said. The move inflamed the crowd, made Fine a target for the rest of his stay in Little Rock, and probably hastened his departure from the paper. Years later, he was asked if he'd stepped beyond his assigned role. "A reporter has to be a human being," he replied.
By now, the other eight black students had been rebuffed en masse, and dispersed. One of them, Terrence Roberts, spotted Elizabeth, and offered to walk her home. But he would have accompanied her only part of the way, and she worried what could happen once he'd left her. Daisy Bates's husband also offered assistance, pulling back his jacket to show Elizabeth the gun he was wearing beneath his belt. But her mother would never have approved of her going off with a strange man. Then a white woman named Grace Lorch, wife of a professor at the local black college, tried to help, taking Elizabeth with her to the drugstore across the street to call for a cab. When they reached it, the owner locked the door in their faces. After 35 minutes the bus finally came and, through a barrage of abuse, the two boarded. (The Lorches were old radicals—Grace's husband, Lee, had lost his job at City College in New York for agitating to integrate Stuyvesant Town, the massive housing complex on New York's East Side—and one Arkansas official later charged that Grace's "Communist masters" had directed her to protect Elizabeth that day.) As for Elizabeth, she hadn't wanted Grace Lorch's help—her admonishments to the crowd (she told them that one day they'd all be ashamed of themselves) had only riled it up more—and she was relieved when, after a brief time, Lorch got off the bus.
There are times, as Elizabeth puts it, when you just know you need your mama. She went directly to the basement of her mother's school, where the laundry was located. Elizabeth found her looking out the window; simply from her posture, she could tell she'd been praying. When her mother turned, she could see she'd been crying too. Elizabeth wanted to say she was all right, but neither of them could speak. Instead, they embraced, then headed home. Meantime, Elizabeth's father had gone looking for her, carrying a .45-caliber revolver along with the only three bullets he could find.
…
… the Nine gathered at the Bates home. It was the first time Elizabeth had ever met Daisy Bates. Segregationists, reporters, and Faubus were to accuse her of sending Elizabeth into the mob deliberately, to garner sympathetic publicity. Now Elizabeth let her have it, too. "Why did you forget me?" she asked, with what Bates, who died in 1999, later called "cold hatred in her eyes." To this day, Elizabeth believes that Bates, now lionized by everyone (a major street near Central High School has been named for her), saw the black students as little more than foot soldiers in a cause, and left them woefully unprepared for their ordeal (Margolick 1-3).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web.
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. <
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web.
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair. September 24, 2007. Web.
Until the court’s decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, requiring African-American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”
In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.
The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.
Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: the Capital Citizens Council and the Mother’s League of Central High School.
Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African-American newspaper.
Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations (Little 1-2).
Years later in an interview Melba Pattillo said: Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine 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 (Davies 1).
The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.
On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African-American students’ entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students’ own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if black students were allowed to enter the school.
The Mother’s League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Richard Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.
The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.
Elizabeth Eckford’s family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone (Little 1-2)
Interviewed years later, Ernest Green divulged the following.
Daisy [Bates] called us all up and told us that we were going to go to school as a group … and to arrange to meet at her house and there were a number of ministers … that … I was not aware of [that] … had been involved in trying to lay a groundwork to have … the integration of the schools reasonably accepted … by the people … in the city. So that morning, eight of us gathered at … Daisy's house, Elizabeth wasn't there. And … we went by car to Central, to the corner of 14th Street and Park. Uh… it was about eight o'clock that morning. And we made an attempt to go though the troops and … were denied access to the front of the school. And … we went home after that. Elizabeth had missed the call … she didn't have a phone I think. And that morning she was at the other end, two blocks down 16th, where there was nobody, no supporters at least, none of the ministers, none of the people that …had helped us … provide transportation up to the school and that she was down there facing the mob by herself. None of us knew that until we got home after school.
…
We just made a cursory kind of attempt to, to enter school that morning. Elizabeth ... attempted to go through the guards and had the mobs behind her. So that was the first day… at Central (Eyes 1-2)
The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.
Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention (Little 1-2).
Elizabeth Eckford
As southern states went 50 years ago, Arkansas was racially open-minded. Its governor in 1957, Orval Faubus, had been elected three years earlier as a moderate. Little Rock (population 100,000 at the time) was considered one of the most progressive cities in the region. Five days after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling ordering school integration, the local school board pledged to comply. But beneath the city's tolerant façade, Jim Crow was alive and well. …
For all its professed good intentions, the school board moved tentatively and begrudgingly, taking three years to enroll only a token number of blacks in one school: Little Rock Central High School, the most prestigious in the state. Administrators looked for black students strong enough to survive the ordeal but placid enough not to make trouble. The superintendent told Elizabeth she'd have to be like Jackie Robinson, turning the other cheek, never talking or fighting back. Improbably—mistakenly, really—sensitive, brooding Elizabeth somehow made the cut. And even more improbably, her worrywart mother agreed to let her go. There'd be only eight others, in a student population of roughly 2,000.
Among Little Rock's black community, the Eckfords were known for their intelligence and seriousness. They thought of themselves as special—as "something on a stick," Elizabeth's mother once said. The patriarch was Elizabeth's grandfather Oscar Eckford Sr., a large and formidable man—his wife, and even some white people, used "Mr." when addressing him—who ran a small grocery store. From him, Elizabeth always understood she would go to college, even though it was never clear how they'd pay. Elizabeth's father, Oscar Jr., worked nights at the train station and weekends cleaning white peoples' houses; her mother, Birdie, did the laundry at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro, five blocks from the modest home the Eckfords bought in 1949 and moved into on Elizabeth's eighth birthday, later that year. Birdie Eckford's job allowed her to look out for her badly handicapped son, one of her six children, who went to school there. Elizabeth's grandfather was the only man she knew who spoke to white people without fear, but her mother had her Uncle Tom ways. "I have never had trouble with white people," she once said. "I always gave in, if necessary." The Eckfords had no phone but did have a television, the better to keep the children in Birdie's sights. "The Queen of No," Elizabeth still calls her mother, 15 years after her death.
A 10th grader at the segregated Horace Mann High School in the spring of 1957, Elizabeth read habitually and got good grades. She especially loved history. She was essentially a loner, prone to sitting and daydreaming on the big rock in her backyard for hours at a time, thinking that wherever she was, she didn't quite belong. No one had yet diagnosed her as depressed, but there was a history of the condition in her family.
Inspired by the example of Thurgood Marshall, who'd just argued the Brown case before the Supreme Court, she wanted to become a lawyer. She preferred Central not out of some burning desire to mix with whites, but because it offered courses that Horace Mann didn't. While underfunded, Little Rock's black schools had a distinguished tradition, teaching black pride before the term existed and black history before there were any texts. So whatever benefits Central conferred on its first black students would come at a cost: the loss of friends, community, and teachers who cared, as well as the chance to participate in extracurricular activities, since the school board, fearing white outrage over racial mixing, had barred the nine black students from them.
… the director of the Arkansas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Daisy Bates, instructed the black parents to bring their children to her home the following morning. From there, the students, accompanied by a few ministers—white and black—would proceed to Central as a group. But the Eckfords didn't have a phone, so Bates never notified them.
…
Elizabeth left the house and, four blocks away, boarded the bus heading downtown.
Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She'd often walked by Central—it was on the way to her grandfather's store—and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. "They're coming!" someone shouted. "The niggers are coming!" Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. "Don't let her in!" someone shouted.
Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"
One white girl in the throng stood out: she was "screaming, just hysterical," as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central—like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made light bulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel's dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she'd always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents': her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.
Marching alongside Hazel, chanting "Two, four, six, eight—we don't want to integrate!" were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel's right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann, the girl carrying the purse at the far left, was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel—her friends called her "Kitty"—this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: "Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!" Click. Will Counts had his picture.
"This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves" was how Benjamin Fine later described the scene. Once she reached the bus stop, Elizabeth sat herself down at the edge of the empty bench, as if not wanting to take up too much space. "Drag her over to this tree!" someone shouted. A small group of reporters—Jerry Dhonau and Ray Moseley of the Arkansas Gazette, Paul Welch of Life—formed an informal protective cordon around her; it was all that they, as professionals, felt they could do. But Fine sat himself next to Elizabeth and, at a time and place in which whites simply didn't do such things, put his arm around her, then lifted her chin. "Don't let them see you cry," he said. The move inflamed the crowd, made Fine a target for the rest of his stay in Little Rock, and probably hastened his departure from the paper. Years later, he was asked if he'd stepped beyond his assigned role. "A reporter has to be a human being," he replied.
By now, the other eight black students had been rebuffed en masse, and dispersed. One of them, Terrence Roberts, spotted Elizabeth, and offered to walk her home. But he would have accompanied her only part of the way, and she worried what could happen once he'd left her. Daisy Bates's husband also offered assistance, pulling back his jacket to show Elizabeth the gun he was wearing beneath his belt. But her mother would never have approved of her going off with a strange man. Then a white woman named Grace Lorch, wife of a professor at the local black college, tried to help, taking Elizabeth with her to the drugstore across the street to call for a cab. When they reached it, the owner locked the door in their faces. After 35 minutes the bus finally came and, through a barrage of abuse, the two boarded. (The Lorches were old radicals—Grace's husband, Lee, had lost his job at City College in New York for agitating to integrate Stuyvesant Town, the massive housing complex on New York's East Side—and one Arkansas official later charged that Grace's "Communist masters" had directed her to protect Elizabeth that day.) As for Elizabeth, she hadn't wanted Grace Lorch's help—her admonishments to the crowd (she told them that one day they'd all be ashamed of themselves) had only riled it up more—and she was relieved when, after a brief time, Lorch got off the bus.
There are times, as Elizabeth puts it, when you just know you need your mama. She went directly to the basement of her mother's school, where the laundry was located. Elizabeth found her looking out the window; simply from her posture, she could tell she'd been praying. When her mother turned, she could see she'd been crying too. Elizabeth wanted to say she was all right, but neither of them could speak. Instead, they embraced, then headed home. Meantime, Elizabeth's father had gone looking for her, carrying a .45-caliber revolver along with the only three bullets he could find.
…
… the Nine gathered at the Bates home. It was the first time Elizabeth had ever met Daisy Bates. Segregationists, reporters, and Faubus were to accuse her of sending Elizabeth into the mob deliberately, to garner sympathetic publicity. Now Elizabeth let her have it, too. "Why did you forget me?" she asked, with what Bates, who died in 1999, later called "cold hatred in her eyes." To this day, Elizabeth believes that Bates, now lionized by everyone (a major street near Central High School has been named for her), saw the black students as little more than foot soldiers in a cause, and left them woefully unprepared for their ordeal (Margolick 1-3).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web.
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. <
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web.
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair. September 24, 2007. Web.
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....
