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as time moves forward, our significant life events become a series of snapshots in our minds.
the Ku Klux Klan had gathered in their white robes back in 1957 to plan our demise.
When we nine are together, we become one, falling into lockstep, anxious, happy to be together once more.
Until I am welcomed everywhere as an equal simply because I am human, I remain a warrior on a battlefield that I must not leave.
I am a former NBC television news reporter and have been a working journalist for twenty years.
In 1957,
I was escaping the hanging rope of a lynch mob, dodging lighted sticks of dynamite, and washing away burning acid sprayed into my eyes.
Savages on the loose
Some of the police sent to control the mob threw down their badges and joined the rampage.
I became an instant adult, forced to take stock of what I believed and what I was willing to sacrifice to back up my beliefs.
“Why do the white people write ‘Colored’ on all the ugly drinking fountains, the dingy restrooms, and the back of the buses? When will we get our turn to be in charge?”
tall mahogany bookcases that held the cherished volumes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Emily Dickinson, and of James Welden Johnson and Langston Hughes
You don’t want to be white, what you really want is to be free, and freedom is a state of mind.”
It’s time you started keeping a diary so’s you can write down these thoughts
the lone black man who was trying to integrate the law school. In the classroom, he was forced to sit confined by a white picket fence erected around his desk and chair.
It felt as though we always had a white foot pressed against the back of our necks.
when a white person came into our house, children and adults alike would all stand at attention, staring, waiting for them to give orders.
my father stood silent in the next room peeking through a crack in the door and listening to those men insult Mother.
Patience is for the complacent
May 17, 1954, the day the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas,
Those white police are liable to do something worse
She said I had to pray for that evil white man, pray every day for twenty-one days, asking God to forgive him and teach him right.
The oppressed do not have a duty to wish well upon the evil doers.
Little Rock school board had adopted a plan to limit integration to Central High School. They weren’t going to allow it to actually begin, however, for two years—not till September, 1957.
August 27, 1956, Federal Judge John Miller dismissed the NAACP suit for immediate school integration, saying it was all right for the school board to integrate gradually.
Daisy Bates, a petite and smartly dressed, steely-eyed woman who was the Arkansas state president of the NAACP.
she and her husband owned the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper that was the sole voice for our community.
Ernest Green,
Terrence Roberts
Jefferson Thomas
Elizabeth Eckford
Thelma Mothershed
Minnijean Brown
Carlotta Walls
Gloria Ray
“He’s stirring up trouble by talking about trouble,”
those voices had growled at me. “Niggers don’t belong in our schools. You-all are made for hanging,”
Grandma went directly to her room, where she took the shotgun she called Mr. Higgenbottom from its leather case in the back of her closet. That night, she set up her guard post
Go ‘head Grandma, shoot back!
“You’re not gonna let white people make you nervous, are you? They’re the same as us,
The women of this family don’t break down in the face of trouble. We act with courage,
if nobody takes responsibility for being the first, it will never get done.
All my life I had felt unprotected by city officials. If some major crisis took place, like a fire in our community, white firemen had always taken their time coming to help. They didn’t fight to save our lives and property, as if neither had any value to them, so we had set up our own systems of summoning each other for help.
Suddenly I felt it—the sting of a hand slapping the side of my cheek, and then warm slimy saliva on my face, dropping to the collar of my blouse.
a group of women some distance away, jumping over the rear fence as they shouted obscenities at me.
the brigade of attacking mothers within striking distance, shouting about how they weren’t going to have me in school with their kids.
Gene Smith, Assistant Chief of the Little Rock Police Department.”
he would rather get all of us out than hang one to save the others.
The people running beside us accelerated their pace, hurling rocks and sticks at the car.
Armed with guns, ropes, and clubs, the report said, they surged toward the school, in the doors and through the halls, dancing and shouting, “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”
beating three black reporters, James Hicks, Alex Wilson, and Moses Newsom,
Fifty-two planeloads—C123’s and C130’s have brought 1200 battle-equipped paratroopers to Little Rock to see that integration is carried out at Central High School without further violence.
Planeloads of the men of the 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky,
