In September 1957, no black children were allowed to enter Arkansas high school
This month, Little Rock, Arkansas, will commemorate the date, 50 years ago, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort black children to Central High. In that moment, Little Rock became a synonym for hate. After claiming that desegregation would lead to violence, Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to keep black children from attending the school.
Meanwhile, the black students designated to integrate Central High made plans to enter as a group. Elizabeth Eckford‘s family had no phone, so she never got the message. She came alone, only to be sent away by Faubus‘s soldiers and left to the angry mob. Now a 65-year-old woman, Elizabeth Eckford still bears scars from that long, lonely walk as one of the Little Rock Nine: teenagers charged with integrating that city‘s finest high school in 1957.
Come in, by side door
No black child got in on the appointed day. Three weeks later, armed with a judge‘s order prohibiting Faubus from interfering, the students were spirited in through a side door (the mob was so unruly, however, police decided the Nine could not stay). In the weeks that followed, they endured unrelenting abuse. They never believed the task would be easy, but they had no idea how hellish it would become.
Minnijean Brown Trickey was expelled for a fight she didn‘t start. “If we knew what it was going to be, we would have been too scared to go,Ž says Trickey. Decades later, Eckford realized she suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. For years, she could not work. In her current job at the Little Rock courthouse where she works as a probation officer since 1999, she has found a measure of peace: it has taken “a long time getting there, a long time to talk about the past without crying.Ž Mostly, the Nine have flourished. Many got advanced degrees. All moved away and Little Rock tried to move on.
Mayor Mark Stodola says it‘s time to put the past aside. He says Little Rock never deserved its racist reputation and that “the people who want to continue to look to the past are an impediment to where we want to go for the future.Ž Ralph Brodie, a Central High football player and student-body president at the time of the crisis, says the reputations of many were unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few. Most people at Central were receptive to the black enrollees, he says, yet the world focused on “problem students - 25 maybe, a minuscule percentage.Ž The rest “did everything they could to make that schoolyear work,Ž says Brodie, a lawyer and member of Central‘s 50th Anniversary Commission.
A tale of two colors
Today, like much of the rest of America, Little Rock grapples with a continuing achievement gap in its schools, economic distress in disproportionately minority neighborhoods and mistrust among competing communities and public officials. Earlier this year Central High student Brandon Love drew a straight line from the past to the present. In an article in the Arkansas Times and elsewhere, he observed that his Advanced Placement classes were overwhelmingly white: “As an African American and the student body president, I have encountered A Tale of Two Centrals. As the only African American in most of my classes, I experience firsthand what some dismiss as ‘subtle’ racism,Ž he wrote. Nancy Rousseau, principal at Central, acknowledges that more whites than blacks take AP classes - but she blames differences in preparation and achievement, not discrimination.
The Supreme Court agrees that focusing on past racial wrongs will not yield solutions for the future, as made clear in June by its ruling against voluntary schooldesegregation plans. But there is still a point in remembering how we got here and how determined some people were to keep Americans apart.
