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).

 

Earnest 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/2018/01/15/577371750/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.

 

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.

 

Margolick, David.  “Through a Lens, Darkly.”  Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007.  Web.  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709.

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.