Freedom's Children (8 page)

When we'd come back to the locker room to shower, the students would always steam up the room and snap wet towels at us. It was a daily ritual. You just dreaded having to go to phys. ed.

You'd be crazy not to have fear. You kept fear in the back of your mind at all times, a fear that somebody was going to come over and physically harm you, and that nobody would come to your rescue. But we had to be nonviolent. Our nonviolence was an act of logic. We were nine students out of a couple of thousand.

 

The girls got it the most. There were six girls, three boys: Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Carlotta Walls, Ernest Green, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas. With a couple of the girls, people took their femininity as a weakness and attempted to take advantage of that. The segregationists, the Citizens Council, were trying to figure which one of us they could break.

Then they really took after Minnie. The incident with Minnie and the chili happened in the student line in the cafeteria. This was right before Christmas. We were all looking forward to the holidays because this was tough duty. We just wanted to get a break.

A small band of students had really raised the level of harassment with Minnie. I'll never forget this kid. He was like a small dog snapping at Minnie with a steady stream of verbal abuse. He had figured out how many ways he could say “nigger.” This kid just touched Minnie's last nerve. He was in front of her on the cafeteria line. I was behind her and I could see it coming. Before I could say “Minnie, don't do it. Forget him...” she had taken her bowl of chili and dumped it on his head. The chili just rolled down his face.

The cafeteria help in Central was black. They all broke into applause. The school board used the incident to suspend Minnie [but not the ones who harassed her], and then finally to expel her. And so coming back from Christmas, we were eight students. It was southern justice. They did what you'd expect them to do. In school, some students passed out little cards: “One down, eight to go.”

 

Initially there were some white kids who attempted to be friendly with us, but they were pressured. The roughest period was after we came back for the second semester and the troops were withdrawn. The more avid racists really turned up the heat on other whites. If any of them were seen talking to us, they would get phone calls. They were called “nigger lover.”

I remember doing a couple of radio programs with white kids interested in presenting a different point of view. Right after they appeared on the show, they received a great deal of hate mail and calls and pressure. I appreciated them trying to step forward, but we didn't have any sustained social relationship with them.

After the Christmas break, there was a great deal of pressure by the school authorities and business community to “normalize” conditions inside the school. There were still troops outside the school, but not in the halls and corridors. Well, of course, as the troops were withdrawn, the hostility increased. While the school authorities always talked about “normalizing” conditions, that year they just were never going to be normal.

I decided after the segregationists started coming back that I was going to make it through that year. Short of being shot, I could outlast anything they could give. I think it was a combination of the family support at home and the relationship that grew between the nine of us.

We each had different strengths and helped each other. I was probably the most stoic. As Terrence said, I only had to do it for one year. But I also thought that victory really was within our grasp. I thought we were probably driving them crazier than they were driving us. This really was a war of nerves, endurance. If we kept all that in front of us, we could win. Our personalities tended to complement each other. We were nine different people, nine different approaches to solving problems. We were a good fit.

We also got a burst of energy from the black part of Little Rock, which really began to rally around us. They showed support in lots of different ways. One of the black sororities provided concert tickets for us. And the black leadership in Little Rock was with us. My minister and a number of others continually made public statements about how important and brave they thought we were. Everybody was saying very encouraging things. While you were in there fighting those battles daily by yourself, it helped that other people thought very positively about what you were doing.

Loads of letters came in. We heard from everywhere. The New York Post ran a series on us and described my interest in jazz. One fellow who was living in New York wrote me, and we carried on a correspondence for a number of years.

 

Over six hundred students were graduating, and there were honors and scholarships and all that. It's the irony of my class that no matter what any of the others did that night, they were all going to be overshadowed by one event—my graduation. I mean, they could be magna cum laude and have 59,000 scholarships, but that wasn't going to be the hook that people were going to remember.

We sat in these seats, and I had a space on both sides because nobody wanted to sit next to me. To get your diploma, you had to walk up a set of steps, across a platform, and back down. I had on this cap and gown. When they called my name, I was thinking, With all this attention, I don't want to trip. I just wanted to make sure I could stick my hand out to receive it and not fall on my face. No cosmic thoughts. Just very, very micro.

There was applause for every student. When they called my name, there were a few claps in the audience, probably from my family. Mostly there was this silence. It was eerie, quiet. But it was as if none of that mattered. I think the fact that it was so silent was indicative of the fact that I had done something. And really all nine of us had. Even though I was the one receiving the diploma, I couldn't have done it without the support of the others.

Afterward I went to where my mother, my aunt, and my brother were. Dr. Martin Luther King was sitting with my family. I knew he was speaking in Pine Bluff at the black college, but I didn't know he was going to come up to Little Rock for my graduation. I had never met him before that. He had a plane to catch, so we just spent a brief period of time together.

At this point, I'm a high school graduate of sixteen. I've gotten a load off of my shoulders, and I clearly was not interested in cosmic issues. I wanted to go meet my friends. We were having a party over at the house and celebrating.

I had the broader view a few days before. I remember reading in the paper that my graduating was going to be a real milestone. I thought to myself, This is great, but I want to do something else in life besides graduating from Little Rock Central High School. What do I do from here?

 

Little Rock, I think, became symbolic for a lot of things. It was one of the most televised of the desegregation cases. It was made for TV. It was good and evil. It was about as black and white as you could make life. You had nine kids who were innocent enough they couldn't have harmed a lot of people, and you had Governor Faubus playing the heavy. You had real drama.

One thing that I think is very important is this: while the nine of us may have been preselected, there really are nine, ten, thirty, forty, fifty kids in every community that could have done that. It wasn't that nine people fell out of the sky in Little Rock. We were all ordinary kids. You really do have the ability to do a lot more than either you've been told or you've been led to believe by your surroundings. If given the opportunity, you'd be surprised at how much you can do, how much you can achieve.

I remember being very young and going by Lanier High School. I didn't understand it was a high school. I just knew it was a school and that it looked pretty. I told my mother I wanted to go to that school. She didn't say anything then. I guess it was hard for her to actually tell a child who's four or five, “You can't go to that school because you're black.”

After the school integration in Little Rock, they started integrating in different places. In Montgomery, attorney Fred Gray was trying to get people to bring a lawsuit to integrate the whole school system. When I was in the eighth grade, my mother said we would do it. Another lady who had a son also agreed. There was a Methodist minister who had a lot of kids. He was going to be a part of it too. When word came out that the suit was going to be filed to integrate the schools, the Methodist church very abruptly moved that minister to Mississippi. I mean, snap, just like that.

After they moved the minister, the other lady became nervous and said she didn't want to participate. That left us. My mom asked me if I still wanted to do it. I said, “Can I go to Lanier if I do it?”

She said, “Yes.”

So I said, “Let's do it.”

The suit was filed on a Thursday. On that Friday, they had a big article in the paper with my name and address, who my parents were—the whole works. There had been bombings of churches and homes in Montgomery. A lot of friends called my mother and said they could come over and guard our house. My mother told them, “No.”

That Friday night after the lawsuit was filed, we started getting phone calls. People would say ugly things, or hang up. My mother said, “I'm going to watch the news until 10:30, and then I'm going to take the phone off the hook. When I get up, I'll put it back on, but I'm not going to get up all night long and answer the phone.”

The only thing we did was my parents moved into my bedroom because their bedroom was right on the corner. My mother said, “If something happens, it happens. I'm just going to put it in the hands of the Lord.”

That was 1964, the year after President Kennedy was killed, and the lawsuit was
Arlam Carr v. Montgomery County Board of Education.
I was the lead plaintiff. The suit was to desegregate the schools so we could go to whatever school we wanted. When the ruling came down, we won. I felt good.

Judge Frank M. Johnson ruled that for the first year, only the first, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades would be integrated, and the next year, all of the grades. I was going into the ninth grade in the fall of 1964, so I didn't go that first year. I went in 1965 in the tenth grade.

 

The year I started at Lanier, the school system said they didn't want us to come the first day. There were thirteen of us. They told us to come the second day after classes started. We went to the principal's office, and they divided us up into groups and walked us to our homerooms. We were all in separate classes. We waited until one person in the group went into a class. Then we'd go to the next class. I was the last.

You know how kids are the first days of school—talking a lot, making noise. I was standing outside the door of my class where the kids couldn't see me. The principal called the teacher to the door and said, “He's going to be in your homeroom.” When I stepped around the corner and the kids saw me, you could have heard a pin drop. The noise was cut just like that.

I'll never forget how you could be walking down the hall, and they'd just part. The first time I was a little intimidated, but then I felt like a king—everybody's parting the waters for the black kids. That's fine with me. Got no problem with that.

After a while their attitude was, “Well, they're here, we gotta accept them. We got to go to school, so let's make the best of it.” At first the kids that I tended to get friendly with had parents at Maxwell Air Force base. They had lived in different parts of the country and had been around black kids.

Senior year I asked this white guy if he'd sign my yearbook. I had known him from the tenth grade on, and we had become pretty good friends. He wrote that at one time he had been a bigot and had hated black people. Now he realized that people are people, black or white. Meeting me and knowing me had changed him. He ended it by saying, “We shall overcome.”

By the time I left junior high school, I was more than ready to be in the group to go to the desegregated schools. I knew that white students at public schools were taking Latin, French, and Spanish. I knew that no black student had that. I knew that at some schools white students were taking sciences that were not offered to us. And I wanted to go to the best high school.

I can't remember having a big powwow with my family. It just seemed natural. There was no doubt in my mind that I would go when it was time for high school. And that was 1965.

My memory of that first year comes in bunches. I remember my history teacher. I knew she despised me. She never would say “Negro.” She would always look at me directly and say “nigger” or “nigra.” It was almost as if she dared me to say something about it. What was there to say? She was a mean old woman who grudgingly gave me an A.

Nobody would sit behind me in biology class. I know that was typical because the black students compared notes. Teachers would let the white kids sit where they wanted. The kids would just move their chairs to distance themselves from me. Nobody would ever sit behind me, unless it was a classroom with a teacher who required seating alphabetically. My English teacher was like that, and I salute her to this day. She was the fairest teacher I had. Everybody had to sit alphabetically, so no one could run away from me.