Freedom's Children (7 page)

The car pulled up, and there were mobs of people saying, “Niggers go home!” and shouting obscenities. All these vicious-looking people saying things you hadn't heard before out loud. It didn't make sense to me to get out of the car with all those people surrounding us. But Daddy was going to try to do it anyway.

They started to attack him. Then my mother got out because he was being attacked, and that's when she got stabbed in the hip. She was trying to tell us to stay in the car, but we didn't want to hear. We were going to go out to help our father. There was just so much confusion. Even though he had been beaten, Daddy had enough strength to work his way around and get back in the car. We sped off. Ricky got her foot slammed in the door. I never got out at all. At the hospital when we saw there was blood, we knew my mother had been stabbed. The hardest part was when my father was on that stretcher in the hospital, and he was telling us to be brave and that you have to forgive people.

I don't look at it now when it's on TV because it's painful. I can't watch it. I get angry all over again. I don't like crowds to this day.

It was just another day at school for me until I got back. When I got home, they were all there. My father was in bed with all these people around him. I guess it was the first time white folks had been in our house. News reporters and so forth.

On TV there was this man getting beat up with chains, not just ropes. It was happening right next to our car. I said, “Who is this?” and my father said, “That's me. It's all right, Junior.”

It was shocking. I mean, at the same time I saw Daddy in the bed, I saw him beaten on TV.

I felt tremendous anger at these people who had hurt them. The thought that nothing was going to be done about it was just devastating to me. There is something wrong when you actually stab a lady for no apparent reason other than the fact that she wanted to go into a school.

I felt a rage. I wished I could just go out and get a gun and kill them all because they really didn't deserve to live. I thought, If I was God, I would just wave my hand and say, “Away with all the white people who hated black people.”

The time Reverend Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his daughters in Phillips High School was the most frightening day. I believe it was the worst day that I can remember. We actually saw hundreds and hundreds of white people standing around watching others beat a black man with chains just because he wanted to enroll his children. And no one was going to his defense. They felt justified in what they were doing. To actually witness something as brutal as that went real, real deep with me.

Although the Supreme Court had ruled in the
Brown
school case that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, many communities ignored the ruling. Supporters of integration then had to go to court to sue individual school systems that were segregated. In Arkansas, as in other southern communities, the NAACP, which had originally brought the
Brown
case, began to plan for school integration. Daisy Bates, who with her husband published the black newspaper the
Arkansas State Press
in Little Rock, was the president of the Arkansas NAACP.

Little Rock appeared to be a progressive southern city. The school board had worked out a desegregation plan, and nine black children were selected to attend Central High School beginning September 3, 1957, three years after the Supreme Court integration decision. But Arkansas governor Orval Faubus moved to block the integration plans. He called out the Arkansas National Guard. Troops surrounded the school, admitting only white students and blocking the black students at bayonet point.

Eight of the black students had met at Daisy Bates's house and gone from there to the school as a group. Elizabeth Eckford, the ninth, hadn't gotten the message to meet at Mrs. Bates's house. She went to Central High School alone and was surrounded by a raging mob of whites, screaming racial epithets. Some yelled, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” Elizabeth described one moment: “I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”

Young black people throughout the country watched the events unfolding in Little Rock. In Detroit, Gwen Patton watched the Little Rock riots on television:

Mary Gadson was in Birmingham, Alabama, at the time.

In the spring of 1957, the Little Rock school board finally agreed to desegregate grades ten through twelve. It was going to occur at Central High School [an all-white school].

We all knew Central. And in many cases the course books that we used were hand-me-downs from Central. You could tell because they had Central students' names in them. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the building, the course curriculum, the laboratory facilities, all of that was significantly different from what we had at Horace Mann, the black high school.

In Little Rock you never thought of yourself as being “Deep South.” Deep South was going to Jackson, Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama. The year before we went to Central, both the city buses in Little Rock and the public libraries were integrated without any problems. The university had accepted some black students, and while it was difficult, they were surviving and doing their course work. So my expectations were that there would be words and taunts, but over a period of time that would blow over. I didn't think there'd be anything I couldn't handle.

And it seemed to me an opportunity to participate in something new. I knew it was going to be a change in Little Rock—I was smart enough to figure that out—but I didn't realize it was going to have impact beyond Little Rock.

In the spring of ‘57, before we left school for the summer, each teacher gathered names of interested students. I put my name in, and that's where I left it. I don't think anybody really focused a great deal on it. If I got in, fine. I talked with my mother about it. She said if I wanted to go and I was accepted, she would support me.

People like my mother and my grandfather, who was a postman and had attempted to vote in the Democratic primary, really are the backbone of the southern resistance. They didn't take a high public position, but in many ways expressed their indignation, their anger, and attempted to turn things around. My mother and my aunt were part of a lawsuit in the 1940s that filed for equal pay for black and white teachers.

We kids did it mainly because we didn't know any better. But our parents were willing to put their careers, their homes on the line. To me that says a lot.

Some time before school started, we learned there were limits on what black students were going to be allowed to do. You knew that you weren't going to play football, be in the band or the class play, go to the prom. I had been in the school band for five years from seventh grade through eleventh. Tenor sax. But this was an important enough breakthrough that all of these other activities, well, you could give them up.

I never expected it to be life-threatening, which it was initially. I didn't have any real sense of how dangerous it could have been until we got home. We were in this huge school. I didn't hear any of the mob outside. When we were whisked out of school back to our homes, we sat there and watched it on TV. This is real, I thought. This is no day at the beach.

The whole period has been cast in such a monochrome color that you don't get any of the tension and discussions going on in the black community. I'll never forget that afternoon. There were lots of black people who didn't think this was such a terrific idea. They saw it as disruptive, upsetting their personal lives. This neighbor of mine said, “You kids are crazy. The federal government is never going to support you. You're going to be out there by yourself and never get back into the school.” Now that was a real fear because I wanted to graduate that year.

President Eisenhower sent in the troops that night. There is an air force base about ten or fifteen miles from Little Rock. They were flying in a thousand paratroopers and support equipment. Lots of planes, probably a hundred or better, because they sent them in with all of their support materiel and jeeps and helicopters. I slept through all of that. Some people go hyper at crises. I usually get calm before and then I get hyper after I realize what I have done. So that night I didn't hear anything.

The next day we were picked up by the army at our individual houses and taken to Mrs. Bates's house, which was our gathering spot. From there we got into a station wagon. It was a convoy. They had a jeep in front, a jeep behind, and armed soldiers in each of them. I think there were machine-gun mounts on the back of the jeeps.

There were nine of us, and a station wagon was not very big. You had the driver, an officer in charge, and then us. We were all kind of squooshed in, riding along making jokes about it. There was no traffic, and no people were in front of Central. They had blocked off the school at least a half a block away. Nobody could enter without appropriate passes. I guess in army terms, they really had secured the area.

A helicopter was hovering overhead. You could see the news cameras across the street. And as we got out of the station wagon, a cordon of soldiers surrounded us. They marched, and we kind of strolled along, walking up the steps. Central is big, really built more like a college campus. The school is a couple of blocks long. A series of steps lead up to the front, which is very imposing. It was real drama going from the station wagon to the front door of the school. It probably took us four or five minutes just to walk up to the front of the steps.

Most people didn't believe Eisenhower would ever use that much force to get us back in school. I thought that that was important, but I had no idea of the importance of it beyond my particular situation. Also, we had been out of school for three weeks, so all of us were getting a little itchy about getting further behind in our course work.

Every day the troops would bring us to the school. Initially we each had a paratrooper who would wait outside the classroom to escort us to the next class, so that we were never alone. All the troop personnel at the school were white, even though the army was integrated at that time. The black men were kept back at the air force base. I've run into both black and white men who were in that 101st Airborne Division assigned to Little Rock. Each of them that I met has said how proud he was to be assigned to that duty.

The officers had sidearms in the school. The first day or so they had rifles inside the school. When Governor Faubus said Arkansas was occupied, that was true.

The first month with the troops and all of the media attention had been the point of high euphoria. In fact, conditions in the school were fairly tranquil. You had this great show of force. And also the most avid of the segregationists were boycotting classes at that point. When the segregationists realized that we weren't leaving, they started coming back. And when they came back, all hell started breaking loose. From around Thanksgiving until about March or April, it really was like having to fight hand-to-hand combat. It was trench warfare.

As they withdrew the troops from inside the corridors, you were subjected to all kinds of taunts, someone attempting to trip you, pour ink on you, in some other way ruin your clothing, and at worst, someone physically attacking you. I never had ink thrown on me. I got hit with water guns. We got calls at all times of the night—people saying they were going to have acid in the water guns and they were going to squirt it in our faces.

The biggest problems were in the halls and in physical education. In both places you had large numbers of students. The most difficult place for me was phys. ed., and that class was a requirement. The instructors just didn't want us there, and they didn't hide it a lot. When we were playing soccer or another activity, they didn't make any effort to pair you with students who were supportive. You got the feeling they deliberately put you with the most hostile kids.