Civil Rights Events

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. <https://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/education/2018/04/06/little-rock-nine-members-terrence-roberts-iowa-city/494262002/ .

 

“Choices People Made: The Little Rock Nine and Their Parents.”  Facing History and Ourselves.  Web.  https://www.facinghistory.org/for-educators/educator-resources/resource-collections/choosing-to-participate/choices-people-made-little-rock-nine-and-their-parents.

 

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 Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979.  Web.  < http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/gre0015.0329.043ernestgreen.html.

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/smithsonian-institution/member-little-rock-nine-discusses-her-struggle-attend-central-high-180958870/.

 

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/smithsonian-institution/youngest-little-rock-nine-speaks-about-holding-onto-history-180964732/.

 

“Little Rock Nine.”  History.  Web.  https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/central-high-school-integration.

 

“'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.

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-nine-anniversary/.

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/60-years-after-little-rock-a-qa-with-terrence-roberts.

 

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-texts/executive-order-10730-little-rock-nine/gloria-ray.html.

 

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-texts/executive-order-10730-little-rock-nine/thelma-mothershed.html.

Smith, David.  “Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation.”  The Guardian.  September 24, 2017.  Web.  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/24/little-rock-arkansas-school-segregation-racism.

Thursby, Keith.  “One of the Little Rock Nine.”  Los Angeles Times.  September 7, 2010.  Web.  http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/07/local/la-me-jefferson-thomas-20100907.