Harold Titus's Blog, page 29

Civil Rights -- Little Rock Nine -- Elizabeth and Hazel -- Part Two

What the local black newspaper wrote about Elizabeth [Eckford] in September 1957—that her fateful walk to school would leave an impression on her that "only death will erase"—has proven to be prophetic. The eight others quickly moved on. They left the South and, in a couple of instances, the country. Four of them married whites. They have had successful careers and families. Elizabeth, by contrast, has never strayed all that far from Little Rock, psychologically or physically. She lives in the house she left on the morning of September 4, 1957. And she has struggled with the legacy of Little Rock in a way the others haven't. Keen and unsentimental, and at times undiplomatic, she alone says she would not do it again, though she's pleased she did it once. The others regard Elizabeth as the most vulnerable among them, and have always looked out for her. But they know, too, that as stationary as she appears, it is she who's come the furthest.

…

At summer's end, her mother lost her job—retaliation, surely, for her daughter's role in the Little Rock drama. And then, in the final paroxysm of the segregationists, all of Little Rock's public high schools were closed the 1958–59 year. A tutor taught Elizabeth, leaving her a few credits short of graduating. Like all the others of the Little Rock Nine, she would flee the South, moving in the summer of 1959 to St. Louis. There she got the remaining credits, and there she made the first of several suicide attempts, with over-the-counter sleeping pills. She then continued her education, enrolling first at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, then at Central State University, in Wilberforce, Ohio. Again, she tried killing herself, though in more novel ways: hitchhiking far from campus, for instance, half hoping someone would pick her up and murder her (Margolick, Lens 12).

Living in Little Rock during the summer of 1963, Elizabeth received a telephone message from Hazel Bryan.

At 16, Hazel had married a schoolmate, Antoine Massery, then dropped out. But Hazel, by now the mother of two and living off a gravel road in South Little Rock, had an intellectually curious, independent streak: she chafed at the regimentation and racial intolerance of her church, for instance, and was eventually kicked out of it. Seeing Martin Luther King and the civil-rights protesters on television made her think of Elizabeth, and what she'd done to her six years earlier. Never mentioning it to her husband, she called the first Eckford in the phone book—Elizabeth's grandfather—and left several messages for her. Finally, Elizabeth got back to her. "I just told her who I was—I was the girl in that picture that was yelling at her, that I was sorry, that it was a terrible thing to do and that I didn't want my children to grow up to be like that, and I was crying," Hazel says.

Honestly, Elizabeth wasn't sure just which girl Hazel was. Far from studying the picture, she avoided it; all those white people in it had merged. But she accepted Hazel's apology, because she seemed to be sincere, because her grandfather and father urged her to, and because Hazel so clearly craved forgiveness. Predictably, the two then resumed their very separate ways; this was, after all, the South in 1963. But thereafter, Elizabeth felt protective of Hazel—white people back then paid a price for extending blacks even the slightest courtesy—and whenever reporters asked her for the name of that white girl with the hateful face, she wouldn't say.

Despite the occasional interview, Elizabeth largely laid low. When she attended the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, taking a bus from Little Rock, few there would have known who she was. But she could not escape her past. Watching a production of the play In White America one night in St. Louis, she heard her own voice: an account of her walk she'd once given to a newspaper. Totally unprepared, she ran to the bathroom and cried. Briefly, she moved back to Little Rock. But a broken engagement, her failure to get a college degree, the difficulty finding a teaching job, and her mother's nagging led her, in September 1967, to escape again, this time by joining the Army (Margolick, Lens 13-15).

Hazel [had] never stopped thinking about the picture and making amends for it. She severed what had been her ironclad ties to an intolerant church. She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize. She’d argue with her mother on racial topics, defending relatives who’d intermarried.

… Secretly, Hazel [had] always hoped some reporter would track her down and write about how she’d changed. But it didn’t happen on its own, and she did nothing to make it happen. Instead, again and again, there was the picture. Anniversary after anniversary, Martin Luther King Day after Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month after Black History Month, it just kept popping up. The world of race relations was changing, but to the world, she never did.

Finally, on the 40th anniversary of Central’s desegregation in 1997, Will Counts returned to Little Rock and arranged for Elizabeth and Hazel to pose for him again. Hazel was thrilled, Elizabeth, curious. Their first meeting was predictably awkward, but the new picture, showing the two women smiling in front of Central, revealed only the barest hint of that. It all but took over the next day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and very nearly upstaged President Clinton’s speech the next day, in which he worked in a reference to them both. Soon, a poster-sized version of the picture was available: “Reconciliation,” it said. Everyone rejoiced; Thanks to Elizabeth and Hazel, Little Rock, maligned for 40 years, bathed in instant absolution.

Then, quietly, Elizabeth and Hazel discovered something quite miraculous: They actually liked each other. For all their differences—Elizabeth was better-read, Hazel’s life far better-balanced—they shared a good deal. Both were introspective, skeptical, a bit isolated; neither fit in anywhere, including in their own families. They visited one another’s homes, took trips together, spoke to schools and civic groups. In the process, Hazel helped pull Elizabeth out of her shell, then to blossom. Unemployed, on mental health disability for years, Elizabeth soon returned to work, as a probation officer for a local judge. Two years after they’d first met, the pair even appeared on Oprah.

Winfrey hadn’t bothered hiding her incredulity, even disdain, that day: Of all people, these two were now friends? But as rude as both felt her to have been, she’d been on to something. The improbable relationship had already begun to unravel.

A student of, and stickler for, history, Elizabeth looked for—and, she thought, spotted—holes in Hazel’s story. How, for instance, could Hazel have undertaken something so cruel so casually, then remembered so little about it afterward? And why, after all these years, did she absolve her parents from any blame? At their joint appearances, Elizabeth could treat Hazel impatiently, peremptorily. Meantime, others in the Little Rock Nine either shunned Hazel or complained of her presence at various commemorations.

But resentment came as well from whites, particularly whites who’d attended Central, particularly those from better families, who’d thought that, even by always looking the other way, they’d done absolutely nothing wrong during those dark days and, truth be told, considered Hazel and her ilk “white trash.” Forty years earlier she’d given them all a black eye; now, she was back, more conspicuous, and embarrassing, than ever. At a reunion she foolishly, or naively, attended, she felt their cold shoulder, and could hear their snickers. None of them had ever apologized for anything they’d done or not done, and, as far as Hazel could tell, they’d been none the worse for their silence.

Ultimately, it grew too much for Hazel. She cut off ties with Elizabeth—for her, Sept. 11, 2011, marked another anniversary: 10 years had passed since they’d last spoken—and stopped making public appearances with her. Her interviews with me—granted only with great reluctance—will, she says, be her last. When I asked the two women to pose together one last time (Elizabeth turned 70 last Tuesday; Hazel will in January) Elizabeth agreed; Hazel would not. Hazel was poised to vote for Obama in 2008; after all, even her own mother did. But so deep was her hurt that she found some excuse not to (Margolick, Lives 11-13).

Hazel had helped coax Elizabeth out of her shell, but she was also a crutch. Without her around, Elizabeth's renewal intensified. Her appearances before students grew more frequent, though they were never easy: she would not eat or drink beforehand, and would make sure a lined wastebasket and paper towels were on hand just in case she threw up. She would read off cue cards, her hands shaking. She would not wear her glasses, so she could not make out any disapproving faces. She would speak fast, the better to exit quickly. And never would she allow pictures; after all, she was ugly.

…

In the First Division of Pulaski County Circuit Court, Elizabeth's clients are mostly black, often semi-illiterate, pinched for hot checks or credit-card fraud or taking or selling drugs. Many couldn't afford lawyers; few are hardened criminals. She spends her days hearing the same stock sob stories and, frustrated writer that she is, inventing her own, matching a new face with whatever she can conjure up. She keeps peanuts around for prisoners who have to skip breakfast to come in, but she's no soft touch. "Aren't you ashamed of showing your underwear?" she might ask some unkempt man. "How are you going to get a decent job looking like that?" she'll ask someone with glittering gold grills on his teeth. Some clients prefer to wait for her colleague Curtis Ricks: he's easier on them. Once in a while, after something's been on television, someone will say, "Miss Eckerd, I didn't know that was you." Treat her the way they always have, she tells them.

…

… she was positively ebullient, even chatty; at one point Ernest Green practically had to wrestle the microphone from her. She enjoys seeing the other eight, but they're spread out; even the two of them who now live in Little Rock—Minnijean Brown Trickey and Thelma Mothershed Wair—she seldom sees. Minnijean, who was as outspoken as Elizabeth was meek—she was suspended midyear for dumping chili on the head of a student, then expelled for calling another "white trash"—admires Elizabeth unabashedly. But asked whether she knows Elizabeth well, she says, simply, "Well enough to leave her alone." To Elizabeth's eyes, even the other eight are not beyond reproach. She contends that Green, the group's de facto spokesman over the years—he was the oldest, the first to graduate, and, as an official in the Carter administration, the most prominent—has always dished out feel-good, triumphal, "Good Negro" "top spin" rather than describe the Central experience as it really was. And she considers Melba Patillo Beals's memoir, Warriors Don't Cry, a staple on high-school reading lists, unreliable and hyperbolic. (Some of the others do, too, but only Elizabeth says so.)

…

Much as she'd like to leave the whole commemoration thing behind, it's gotten so she can't; her modest speaking fees have paid for a new heating system for her house, a new roof, new awnings. She says she does not expect ever to talk to Hazel again. But when I asked Elizabeth if she missed her, she nodded her head. "I wish I could tell her how much she helped me," she says. "I don't think I ever told her that" (Margolick, Lens 13-15).

So the famous photograph of 1957 takes on additional meaning: the continuing chasm between the races and the great difficulty, even among people of good will, to pull off real racial reconciliation. But shuttling back and forth between them, I could see that for all their harsh words …, they’ve only dug in their heels—they still missed one another. Each, I noticed, teared up at references to the other. Perhaps, when no one is looking—or taking any pictures—they’ll yet come together again. And if they can, maybe, so too, can we (Margolick, Lives 14).


Works cited:

Margolick, David. “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.” Slate, October 11, 2011. Web. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an....

Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/...

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/....

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....

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....

Civil Rights -- Little Rock Nine -- Elizabeth and Hazel

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5...


Who doesn’t know that face?

It’s the face of a white girl—she was only 15 years old, but everyone always thinks her older than that, and judges her accordingly—shouting at an equally familiar, iconic figure: a sole black school girl dressed immaculately in white, her mournful and frightened eyes hidden behind sunglasses, clutching her books and walking stoically away from Little Rock Central High School on Sept. 4, 1957—the date when, in many ways, desegregation first hit the South where it hurt.

It’s all in that white girl’s face, or so it has always appeared. In those raging eyes and clenched teeth is the hatred and contempt for an entire race, and the fury of a civilization fighting tenaciously to preserve its age-old, bigoted way of life. You know what the white girl’s saying, but you can’t print it all: commands to get out and go home —“home” being the place from which her forebears had been dragged in chains centuries earlier. That what that white girl was actually doing that day was more grabbing attention for herself than making any statement of deep conviction doesn’t really matter. Of anyone with that face, you simply assume the worst. You also assume she is beyond redemption, especially if, symbolically, she is more useful as is than further understood or evolved.

…

The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine. Moments earlier, she’d tried to enter Central High School, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard placed there by Gov. Orval Faubus. A mob baying at her heels, Elizabeth is making her way, fearfully but determinately, toward what she hoped would be the relative safety of the bus stop a block away.

The face belongs to Hazel Bryan. Hazel, the daughter of a disabled war veteran, was largely apolitical, even on matters of race; while sharing the prejudices of her parents, she cared far more about dancing and dating. Being in that crowd that morning, making a ruckus, out-shouting all of her friends, was a way of getting noticed, and far more exciting than going into class. She’d thought nothing would come of what she’d done, and nothing ever would have had she not been captured in mid-epithet by Will Counts, a young photographer for the Arkansas Democrat (Margolick, “Lives” 1-2)

About Hazel Bryan, Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby recalled: she was "rather pleased with herself"—so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as [her friends] Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.

Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years—except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled (Margolick, “Lens” 6-7).

If anyone in the picture, which reverberated throughout the world that day and in history books ever since, should feel aggrieved, it’s of course Elizabeth Eckford. What Counts had captured both symbolized and anticipated the ordeals that Elizabeth, a girl of unusual sensitivity and intelligence, would face in her lifetime. First came the hellish year she and other black students endured inside Central, and then decades in which the trauma from that experience, plus prejudice, poverty, family tragedy, and her own demons kept her from realizing her extraordinary potential.

With enormous courage and resiliency, Elizabeth ultimately made a life for herself and has largely come to peace with her past. Paradoxically, it’s been Hazel, who has led a life of far greater financial and familial security, who now feels wounded and angry. Someone who once embodied racial intolerance feels victimized by another form of prejudice, in which good deeds go unappreciated, forgiveness cannot possibly be won, and public statements of contrition breed only resentment and ridicule.

Concerned over her sudden notoriety, only days after the infamous photograph appeared, Hazel’s parents transferred her from Central to a rural high school closer to home. She never spent a day in school with the Little Rock Nine and played no part in the horrors to which administrators, either lax or actually sympathetic to a small group of segregationist troublemakers, allowed them to be subjected. And she left her new school at 17, got married, and began a family.

But Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective. Tuning in her primitive Philco with the rabbit ears her father had bought her, she heard the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and saw those black protesters getting hot coffee and ketchup poured on their heads at segregated lunch counters or being routed by fire hoses and German shepherds. Such scenes brought home to her the reality of racial hatred, and of her own small but conspicuous contribution to it. One day, she realized, her children would learn that that snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.

Sometime in 1962 or 1963—no cameras recorded the scene, and she didn’t mark anything down—Hazel, sitting in the trailer in rural Little Rock in which she and her family now lived, picked up the Little Rock directory, and looked under “Eckford.” Then, without telling her husband or pastor or anyone else, she dialed the number. Between sobs, she told Elizabeth that she was that girl, and how sorry she was. Elizabeth was gracious. The conversation lasted a minute, if that. In the South, in the ’60s, how much more did a white girl and a black girl have to say to one another (Margolick, “Lives” 3-7)?


Works cited:

Margolick, David. “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.” Slate, October 11, 2011. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...

Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web.

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.

Civil Rights Events -- Montgomery Bus Boycott -- Victory

On December 5 approximately 40,000 African-American bus riders—the majority of the city’s bus riders—boycotted city transportation. The Montgomery Improvement Association [MIA] had hoped for a 50 percent support rate among African Americans. To their surprise and delight, 99 percent of the city's African Americans refused to ride the buses. People walked to work or rode their bikes, and carpools were established to help the elderly. The demands that the MIA had announced were simple: Black passengers should be treated with courtesy. Seating should be allotted on a first-come-first-serve basis, with white passengers sitting from front to back and black passengers sitting from back to front. And African American drivers should drive routes that primarily serviced African Americans (King 1-3).

At a mass meeting that evening, MIA leaders decided to continue the boycott. Thousands walked or found other means of travel for work, school and shopping, and a system of carpools was created. The city’s African-American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents for African-American riders – the same price they paid to ride the bus. Drivers and passengers were often ticketed or arrested, and many boycott supporters were threatened with the loss of their jobs and harassed by local government officials (Rosa 1).

Montgomery officials stopped at nothing in attempting to sabotage the boycott. King and Abernathy were arrested. Violence began during the action and continued after its conclusion. ... The bus company suffered thousands of dollars in lost revenue. … The Montgomery bus boycott triggered a firestorm in the South. Across the region, blacks resisted "moving to the back of the bus." Similar actions flared up in other cities (King 3).

Earlier in the year the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission had banned segregation on interstate trains and buses. On February 1, 1956, the MIA filed suit in the U.S. District Court challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation in Montgomery. The suit -- Browder v. Gayle -- named four Black women including Claudette Colvin but not Rosa Parks as the plaintiffs.

Later that month, over 100 protestors, including Dr. King, were arrested for “hindering” a bus (Rosa 1-2).

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, guarantees all citizens—regardless of race—equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws.

The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision on December 20, 1956. Montgomery’s buses were integrated on December 21, 1956, and the boycott ended. It had lasted 381 days.

Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops. Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African-American passenger.

In January 1957, four black churches and the homes of prominent black leaders were bombed; a bomb at King’s house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan … The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott victory is viewed by many today as a feel-good story. Indeed the boycott was significant on several fronts. First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.

Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. King’s approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.

Shortly after the boycott’s end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington in August of that same year, during which King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The boycott also brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles occurring in the United States, as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery during the boycott to profile the effort and its leaders (Montgomery 3-6).

Participants in the boycott paid a substantial economic and psychological price. Rosa Parks was red-baited and received death threats and hate mail for years in Montgomery and in Detroit for her movement work. Though the righteousness of her actions may seem self-evident today, at the time, those who challenged segregation — like those who challenge racial injustice today — were often treated as unstable, unruly and potentially dangerous by many white people and some black people. Her writings show how she struggled with feeling isolated and crazy, before and even during the boycott. In one piece of writing, she explained how she felt “completely alone and desolate as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”

Despite the boycott’s successful end, the Parks family still faced death threats and could not find steady work. In August 1957, they left Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived — “the promised land that wasn’t,” as she called it. There, in Detroit, she remained active in various movements for racial, social, criminal and global justice in the decades to come. Mountains of fliers, programs, letters, mailings, meeting agendas and conference programs document the span of her political activism there — though very few writings have survived in her personal papers from these later years.

The few that remain tell us that her radicalism never weakened. “Freedom fighters never retire,” she noted in a testimonial for a fellow activist. As she had for decades, Parks drew sustenance from the militancy and spirit of young people, working in and alongside the growing Black Power movement. Understanding the impact that years of activism with limited results can have on a person, she continued calling for rapid and radical change. In a 1973 letter posted at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit, she noted the impact that years of white violence and intransigence had on the younger generation:

The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. …

Writing this after what many mark as the successful end of the modern civil rights movement, Parks clearly believed that the struggle was not over. In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, she continued to press for change in the criminal justice system, in school and housing inequality, in jobs and welfare policy and in foreign policy. She worked in U.S. Rep. John Conyers’s office and spoke out against Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, dismayed by his poor record on civil rights. Sometime in the 1990s, an older Parks doodled on a paper bag (preserved in the collection): “The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues…. The Struggle Continues” (Theoharis 3-4).


Works cited:

“King, Abernathy, Boycott, and the SCLC.” U.S. History Online Textbook. Web.

“Montgomery Bus Boycott.” History. Web.

“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Wesleyan University. Web. < http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/r...

Theoharis, Jeanne. “How history got the Rosa Parks story wrong.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.

Civil Rights -- Montgomery Bus Boycott -- The Boycott Begins

Arrested December 1, 1955, for violating the Montgomery city ordinance that required black riders of city busses to give up their seats to whites when the section of seats reserved for whites was full, Rosa Parks was fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. She immediately called E. D. Nixon, who, assisted by activist lawyers Clifford and Virginia Durr, had her released on bail.

Clifford Durr wanted to get the case dismissed, but E.D. Nixon saw the opportunity to use Mrs. Parks’ case as an ideal middle class, respectable plaintiff to challenge segregation. Raymond Parks didn’t agree. After much debate, she and Raymond made the difficult, courageous choice knowing they’d probably lose everything as a result (Schmitz 7).

Mrs. Parks was “a faithful member of St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery. She taught Sunday school during the 9:30 morning hour and helped prepare the Lord’s Supper during the 10:30 hour.

According to James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, what set Parks apart was that she had an almost “biblical quality.” “There was,” he recalled, “a strange religious glow about Rosa — a kind of humming Christian light” (Taylor 1).

Rosa and Raymond, however, were not middle class blacks. We have this myth that she's middle-class. They're not middle class. They're living in the Cleveland Courts projects when she makes her bus stand. Their income is cut in half. … She loses her job; her husband loses his job. They never find steady work in Montgomery ever again. … In fact, it takes 11 years for the Parks to post an annual income equal to what they're making in 1955. They will move to Detroit in 1957 because things are so tough in Montgomery (NPR 2).

Questioned about Mrs. Parks’s selection to be the public face in the black citizens’ challenge to the city ordinance, Claudette Colvin said that the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because "she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."

She also says Parks had the right hair and the right look.

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

After Colvin's arrest, she found herself shunned by parts of her community. She experienced various difficulties and became pregnant. Civil rights leaders felt she was an inappropriate symbol for a test case (Adler 1).

Released from jail, Mrs. Parks called Fred Gray, who she had had lunch with that day, and asked him to represent her. Mr. Gray called Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of The Women’s Political Council, a group of African American women who had been calling for a bus boycott. Ms. Robinson called E.D. Nixon, and they agreed to call a bus boycott for Monday, the day of Mrs. Parks’ arraignment. Along with another staff member and two students, she [Robinson] used the mimeograph machine overnight at Alabama State College to print more than 15,000 fliers. Can you imagine doing that many fliers today, let alone on 1955 technology? This was especially risky since the university was funded by the segregationist state legislature. The Women’s Political Council members met her at dawn and fanned the community with the fliers Friday morning (Schmitz 8). The fliers read: “Don’t ride the bus to work, town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5. . . . Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M. at the Holt Street Baptist Church for further instruction” (Montgomery 1).

At 6 AM, E.D. Nixon phoned Rev. Ralph Abernathy of First Baptist Church and suggested pulling the pastors together that night for a meeting. Rev. Abernathy suggested that he call the newest pastor in town Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church because he had no set alliances, enemies, and had little to lose if things didn’t work out. Dr. King was reluctant at first, but eventually agreed with prodding from Rev. Abernathy. About 50 pastors met Friday night with Mrs. Parks and Ms. Robinson. They agreed to support the boycott from their pulpits on Sunday and announce a mass meeting for Monday night.

On Saturday, Mrs. Parks went to Alabama State College where she was conducting a leadership training for the NAACP. She was discouraged when only 5 students attended. She was no longer discouraged on Monday, when she and other leaders marveled at the empty buses and the streets filled with African American citizens walking to school and work. The boycott was on.

Leaders gathered Monday afternoon before the mass meeting to plan an organization to sustain the boycott effort, The Montgomery Improvement Association. Rufus Lewis was a business man and rival of E.D. Nixon’s. He did not want Nixon to lead the new organization, so he nominated his pastor, Dr. King, to lead it, arguing that he was a neutral choice (and hoping he could pull strings from behind). That is how Dr. King was drafted into movement leadership. That night, 15,000 people attended a mass meeting and new 26 year old MIA President Dr. King’s prophetic oratory inspired them to commit to the boycott (Schmitz 9-10).

“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” King explained … “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time” (Taylor 2).

Mrs. Parks never spoke or was consulted on strategy. Sexism and a desire to make her sound more sympathetic converted the experienced activist into a “tired seamstress” (Schmitz 10).


Works cited:

Adler, Margot. “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.” NPR. March 15, 2009. Web. < https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719...

“The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Khan Academy. Web. < https://www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...

“No Meekness Here: Meet Rosa Parks, 'Lifelong Freedom Fighter'.” NPR Books. Web. < https://www.npr.org/2015/11/29/457627...

Schmitz, Paul. “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks & The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” HUFFPOST. Web.

Taylor, Justin. “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.

Civil Rights -- Montgomery Bus Bpycott -- Rosa Parks

There had been numerous instances of Blacks refusing to obey the segregation laws on public transportation [in Montgomery, Alabama] throughout the 1940s. The Women’s Political Council (WPC) was formed in 1949, after Jo Ann Gibson was made to leave an almost empty bus for refusing to move to the back . By 1955, the WPC had members in every school, and in federal, state and local jobs, and according to Gibson, its President, “we knew that in a matter of hours, we could corral the whole city”. The WPC had met with the mayor of Montgomery in May of 1954, and followed it up in writing, asking for changes to the bus segregation practices and informing him that if conditions on the busses did not change, citizens would stage a boycott. She stated that with three-fourths of the riders being African American, the busses would not be able to function without their patronage. When conditions did not change, the WPC waited for the right event to serve as the catalyst for the boycott. Three opportunities arose in 1955 when, at different times, a woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person (Rosa 1).

You have read about Claudette Colvin’s experience March 2, 1955.

On October 21, 1955, 18 year-old Mary Louise Smith, another member of Rosa Parks’s Youth Council, refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested. Like Claudette Colvin, she, too, was considered by the WPC too poor and too young to be presented as a responsible, mature, sympathetic victim.

Then came Rosa Parks. Before we read an account of her experience, we need to know the following:

Though Parks later wrote an autobiography, her notes from decades earlier give a more personal sense of her thoughts. In numerous accounts, she highlighted the difficulty of navigating a segregated society and the immense pressure put on black people not to dissent. She wrote that it took a “major mental acrobatic feat” to survive as a black person in the United States. Highlighting that it was “not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting,” she refused to normalize the ability to function under American racism.

For her, the frustration began in childhood, when even her beloved grandmother worried about her “talking biggety to white folks.” She recounts how her grandmother grew angry when a young Rosa recounted picking up a brick to challenge a white bully. Rosa told her grandmother: “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’ ”

Parks viewed the power of speaking back in the face of racism and oppression as fundamental — and saw that denying that right was key to the functioning of white power. Parks’s “determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured,” led her to “search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship.”

Parks carried that determination into adulthood, though she made clear the impossible mental state it required. She lyrically described the difficulty of being a rebel, the ways black children were “conditioned early to learn their places,” and the toll it took on her personally: “There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take…. The line between reason and madness grows thinner.”

In the longest piece of the collection, an 11-page document describing a near-rape incident, Parks decisively uses the power of speaking back. When the document became public in 2011, there was controversy around its release and questions about whether it was a work of fiction. But it does not appear that Parks wrote fiction, and details of the story correspond to Parks’s life. Like the narrator of the story, Parks was doing domestic work during the Scottsboro trial, during her late teens in 1931. It’s written in the first person, though the narrator is unnamed.

In the account, a young Rosa is threatened with assault by a white neighbor of her employer, who was let into the house by a black worker, “Sam.” The heavy-set white man she aptly called “Mr. Charlie” (a term black people of the era used for white people and their arbitrary power) gets a drink, puts his hand on her waist, and attempts to make a move on her.

Furious and terrified, she resolved to resist: “I was ready and willing to die, but give any consent, never, never, never.” When Mr. Charlie said he’d gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she replied that Sam didn’t own her, that she hated the both of them, and that nothing Mr. Charlie could do would get her consent. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”

…

After years of activism, Parks had reached her breaking point on the bus that December evening: “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more.” Her writings reveal the burden that this decade of political activism — which, with a small cadre of other Montgomery NAACP members, had produced little change — had been on her spirit. Describing the “dark closet of my mind,” she wrote about the loneliness of being a rebel: “I am nothing. I belong nowhere.”

Repeatedly in her writings, Parks underscored the difficulties in mobilizing in the years before her bus protest: “People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did not support it and give strength enough.” She found it demoralizing, if understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, “the masses seemed not to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo,” noting how those who challenged the racial order like she did were labeled “radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers” (Theoharris 2-4).

The account.

Shortly after 5 p.m., on a cool Alabama evening 60 years ago Tuesday, a 42-year-old woman clocked out from her job as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store. Rosa Parks walked westward along Montgomery Street to Court Square to board the Cleveland Avenue bus to make the five-mile, 15-minute trek back to her apartment at Cleveland Courts to cook supper for her husband, Raymond.

Encountering a standing-room-only bus and having been on her feet all day operating a huge steam press, Parks decided to cross the street and do some Christmas shopping at Lee’s Cut Rate Drug while waiting for a less crowded bus. Around 6 p.m., as she boarded bus number 2857 at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton streets, Parks was about to change the course of the 20th century.

Montgomery municipal buses each had 36 seats. The first 10 were reserved for whites only. The last 10 seats were theoretically reserved for blacks. The middle 16 seats were first-come-first-serve, with the bus driver retaining the authority to rearrange seats so that whites could be given priority.

Parks was sitting in an aisle seat on the front row of this middle section. To her left, across the aisle, were two black women. To her right, in the window seat, was a black man.

A few minutes later, when the bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, several white passengers boarded, and driver James E. Blake (1912–2002) noticed a white man standing near the front. He called out for the four black passengers in Parks’s row to move to the back, where they would have to stand, as all of the seats were now taken.

They did not respond. Blake got out of his seat and instructed the four to move, saying, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” Three of the black passengers reluctantly proceeded to go and stand in the back of the bus. Parks, however, refused to get up, sliding from the aisle seat to the window seat, which would have allowed for the white passenger to sit in any of the three seats in her row.

The bus driver asked: “Are you going to stand up?” Parks looked him in the eye and responded with a quiet but resolute, “No.” She explained that she had gotten on board first, that she paid the same fare and that she wasn’t sitting in the white section.

She didn’t think it was fair that she had to stand for someone else to sit who arrived after her and that she was not violating the city ordinance. (She didn’t complain how nonchivalrous it was that a supposed gentleman would make a woman stand so he could sit, or how irrational it was that he wouldn’t even want to sit in the same row with her.)

“Well,” Blake responded, “I’m going to have you arrested.” Parks gave him the permission he did not request: “You may do that.”

Blake called his supervisor, who advised him that after warning the passenger he had to exercise his power and put Parks off the bus. He then radioed the police, who sent officers F.B. Day and D.W. Mixon.

As they boarded the bus while several passengers exited through the rear, the officers debriefed Blake and then peacefully arrested Parks. “Why do you all push us around?” she asked the tired beat cops. Officer Day responded, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.” They drove her in their squad car to the city jail, booked her and held her in a dank and musty cell.

Parks’s boss and friend, NAACP president E.D. Nixon, bailed her out that evening. …

If Rosa Parks had been paying attention, she never would have gotten on the bus driven by the tall, blond, 43-year-old Blake. He had a reputation for spitting his tobacco juice, using derogatory language toward blacks (and black women in particular) and making black passengers pay their fare in the front of the bus but reenter in the rear, only to pull away before they could get back on.

A dozen years earlier — in November 1943 — Blake had tried to make Parks exit and reenter his bus through the crowded rear entrance after she had already boarded his bus in the front. Parks refused, so Blake grabbed her sleeve to push her off the bus. She intentionally dropped her purse and sat down in the white section to retrieve it. As she looked at Blake, she warned him: “I will get off…. You better not hit me.”

For the next 12 years, Parks intentionally avoided riding on Blake’s bus, walking whenever she could, despite her chronic bursitis. But on Dec. 1, 1955, she absentmindedly boarded without noting that she was once again entering a bus driven by Blake. It proved to be a serendipitous mistake.

Parks sought to set the record straight: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I was at the end of a working day…. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had given in and stood up (Taylor, 2-5).


Works cited:

“Rosa Parks and The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Wesleyan University. Web. < http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/r...

Taylor, Justin. “5 Myths about Rosa Parks, the woman who had almost a ‘biblical quality’.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.

Theoharis, Jeanne. “How history got the Rosa Parks story wrong.” The Washington Post. December 1, 2015. Web.

Civil Rights -- Montgomery Bus Boycott -- Claudette Colvin

Let’s begin with Rosa McCauley Parks, born in 1913. She was the granddaughter of slaves, whose grandfather taught her courage during a wave of racial violence in 1919. He sat on his porch with a shotgun telling young Rosa that he dared the “Ku-Kluxers” to come. She was soft-spoken but strong-willed and a great student. When a white boy on roller skates tried to push her off the sidewalk, she pushed back. His mother threatened to have her arrested. Another time she threatened a white boy who taunted her on the way to school with a brick. Mrs. Parks reflected later, “I’d rather be lynched than run over by them.”

In 1931, she met Raymond Parks, a self-taught, politically active barber, and she married him in 1932. He was known for his willingness to stand up to racism, and was the first man she deemed radical enough to marry. He was active in the Scottsboro Nine case, in which nine young men had been falsely accused of rape and eight were sentenced to death. The Communist Party of America financed their defense and Mr. Parks became an activist in the effort, delivering food to the young men in prison and organizing protests.

She and Raymond had thought the NAACP was too elitist and cautious, but after learning a friend was involved she went to her first meeting in December, 1943. She was the only woman there, was asked to take notes, and was elected group Secretary that day, a position she’d hold for the next 12 years. As secretary, she recorded countless cases of unfair treatment, brutality, sexual violence, and lynchings, absorbing the pain of her community.

In 1942, E.D. Nixon came to the Parks home to register them to vote. A member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, he had led a voter registration drive in 1940 when he increased the rolls of African American voters from 31 to more than 700. In 1945, he ran for President of the NAACP, the first working class man to do so. Mrs. Parks said that while he was not formally educated, he was sophisticated in ways that matter. She considered him the first person beside her family and Raymond who was truly committed to freedom.

Through the NAACP, Mrs. Parks attended NAACP events in Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. where she received leadership training from legendary organizer Ella Baker, the NAACP’s Director of Branches. Ms. Baker became a role model and mentor to her, and encouraged her to create an NAACP Youth Council in Montgomery.

She did, engaging teens to directly challenge segregation in the libraries and write letters to elected officials. And she also took on a larger role in the NAACP. In 1947, she joined the executive committee of the state NAACP, in 1948 spoke at the state convention, and she was elected State Secretary. In 1949 with her support, E.D. Nixon was elected President of the State NAACP. When the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling came down in 1954, Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Parks marched 23 African American students to the white school in town. They also took the lead on a Voter Registration drive in the 2nd Congressional District in 1954.

… Claudette Colvin, the 15 year-old secretary of her [Rosa’s] Youth Council, was on her [Rosa’s] mind. On March 2, 1955, Ms. Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested. Her arrest outraged the community. While Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Durr raised money for her case, the male leaders in town were concerned that she was too dark skinned, poor, and young to be a sympathetic plaintiff to challenge segregation. The police also charged her with assaulting officers rather than with violating segregation laws, which limited their ability to appeal (Schmitz 2-4).

Few Americans who know that Rosa Parks’s refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.

[Claudette] Colvin was the first to really challenge the law. … She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday.

It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.

The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.

"We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up" (Alder 2).

Here is Claudette Colvin’s account of her terrifying experience, as told by Phillip Hoose.

CLAUDETTE: One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, "Who is it?" The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, "That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that 'thing' before." He called me a "thing." They came to me and stood over me and one said, "Aren't you going to get up?" I said, "No, sir." He shouted "Get up" again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right!" I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, "It's my constitutional right!" I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me "nigger bitch" and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day.

But we were going in the wrong direction. They kept telling me I was going to Atmore, the women's penitentiary. Instead, we pulled up to the police station and they led me inside. More cops looked up when we came in and started calling me "Thing" and "Whore." They booked me and took my fingerprints.

Then they put me back in the car and drove me to the city jail—the adult jail. Someone led me straight to a cell without giving me any chance to make a phone call. He opened the door and told me to get inside. He shut it hard behind me and turned the key. The lock fell into place with a heavy sound. It was the worst sound I ever heard. It sounded final. It said I was trapped.

When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I fell down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn't know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before.

…

MEANWHILE, schoolmates who had been on the bus had run home and telephoned Claudette's mother at the house where she worked as a maid. Girls went over and took care of the lady's three small children so that Claudette's mother could leave. Mary Ann Colvin called Claudette's pastor, the Reverend H.H. Johnson. He had a car, and together they sped to the police station.

…

CLAUDETTE: When they led Mom back, there I was in a cell. I was cryin' hard, and then Mom got upset, too. When she saw me, she didn't bawl me out, she just asked, "Are you all right, Claudette?"

Reverend Johnson bailed me out and we drove home. By the time we got to King Hill, word had spread everywhere. All our neighbors came around, and they were just squeezing me to death. I felt happy and proud. I had been talking about getting our rights ever since Jeremiah Reeves was arrested, and now they knew I was serious. Velma, Q.P. and Mary Ann's daughter, who was living with us at the time, kept saying it was my squeaky little voice that had saved me from getting beat up or raped by the cops.

But I was afraid that night, too. I had stood up to a white bus driver and two white cops. I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. Wetumpka Highway that led out of Montgomery ran right past our house. It would have been easy for the Klan to come up the hill in the night. Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch. Probably nobody on King Hill slept that night.

But worried or not, I felt proud. I had stood up for our rights. I had done something a lot of adults hadn't done. On the ride home from jail, coming over the viaduct, Reverend Johnson had said something to me I'll never forget. He was an adult who everyone respected and his opinion meant a lot to me. "Claudette," he said, "I'm so proud of you. Everyone prays for freedom. We've all been praying and praying. But you're different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery" (Hoose 1-3).


Works cited:

Adler, Margot. “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.” NPR. March 15, 2009. Web. < https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719...

Hoose, Phillip. “Excerpt: 'Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice'.” NPR. March 15, 2009. Web. https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719....

Schmitz, Paul. “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks & The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” HUFFPOST. Web. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-s....