Civil Rights Events
The 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).
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