Little Rock Nine
Surviving the Year
The crisis at Central
High School in Little Rock , Arkansas
The
soldiers escorted the students single file into the school for their first full
day of classes and dispersed the demonstrators. The US
…
… 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
"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 Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth Elizabeth
The list could have been much longer: Elizabeth Elizabeth
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
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 Elizabeth
complained about her, she was informed that Miss Penton not only was a graduate
of the University
of Chicago
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
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 Elizabeth
Terrence Roberts, one of the “Little Rock
Melba Pattillo would eventually write about her
experiences in a book titled “Warriors Don’t Cry.” Elizabeth
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
"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
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
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
"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
Chadwick, Alex and Proffitt, Steve. “Revisiting the Little Rock
“Choices People Made: White Students and Teachers at Central High School
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/2018/01/15/577371750/they-didn-t-want-me-there-remembering-the-terror-of-school-integration.
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green.
“ Washington University
Harvey, Lucy. “A
Member of the Little Rock
“'Little Rock Nine' member Jefferson Thomas dead at 67.” CNN. September 6, 2010. Web. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/06/obit.thomas.little.rock.9/index.html.
Margolick, David.
“Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity
Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Thelma Mothershed in Executive Order
10730: Little Rock
Smith, David. “Little
Rock
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