CHAPTER 3

Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine

hen the African American youths who had been selected to desegre- gate Central High in Little Rock arrived for the first day of school on WSeptember 4, 1957, they immediately became targets of white segre- gationists. The varied and numerous reactions to these students clearly indicate that they were not targeted as individuals but as symbols; their personal identities were considered insignificant, but they were seen to represent a challenge to the tradition of legal segregation of races where African Americans constituted a sub- ordinate group and white supremacy prevailed. When in 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled on Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, the attitudes and activi- ties of dyed-in-the-wool segregationists had been unleashed. The nation, follow- ing the developments of the crisis, became cognizant of the difficulties that would be faced in altering the hearts and minds of the gatekeepers of racism. The Little Rock School Board, in its token compliance with Brown, chose the Nine who would join Central High. Their selection was resonant of Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson, an African American, to the Montreal Royals’s all-white baseball team in 1946. Robinson’s passive, non-retaliatory, non-violent disposition was a factor in his selection, and it was required as he faced massive, debilitating, violent resistance. Similarly, “[t]he Little Rock School board had selected the nine Negro children carefully, considering intelligence, achievement, conduct, health—even the shade of their skins.”1 They were given instructions on how to behave at Central High. Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Nine, records:

We were well aware that school officials were waiting for any excuse to kick us out. That point was hammered home to us during meetings with the NAACP. Repeatedly we were told, “Don’t give anyone the slightest opportunity to accuse you of being out of line. Don’t be late, don’t talk back, watch your decorum, watch your grades. Complain only when something is injurious to your health, or life-threatening.”2

R. K. Perry et al., The Little Rock Crisis © Ravi K. Perry and D. LaRouth Perry 2015 36 ● The Little Rock Crisis

According to another of the Nine, Carlotta Walls LaNier, “73 other black students [upward of 80 according to some estimates] signed up to attend Central that fall. But as tension increased over the summer, the number dwindled.”3 Some with- drew because they knew they wouldn’t be able to participate in extra-curricular activities. Others were dissuaded by whatever dubious rationales Superintendent Blossom could muster. The Nine, however, had their sights on a better public school education than could be had at the segregated African American school, Horace Mann High. That desire was insignificant to those opposing desegregation. To them, the Nine were epochal symbols of destruction. They were unwelcome transformers of the established system. They were destroyers of long-cherished traditions. They were threats to the segregationists’ identities. The precise number of African American youths selected to desegregate Central High was of little import, as well. Based on the opinions of one school board member4, some news accounts reported there were seven selected young people. Melba Pattillo’s family averred that a television report announced that seventeen had been selected.5 The earliest news coverage included a picture of ten students. Mrs. E. Huckaby, the vice principal of Central High, and author of Crisis at Central High, mentions the tenth student, Jane Hill.6 In a telephone interview, Jane, who now lives in California, recalled that when her parents learned of the treatment she received at the hands of the National Guard on the first day, and could get no assurance of her future safety, they withdrew her appli- cation to Central High and enrolled her at Horace Mann. That the names of the Nine are not to be found in many early accounts of Little Rock’s desegregation crisis, is revealing of people’s tendency at the time to simplify things, to label, to group particularities into singularity. Superintendent Blossom, for example, mentions the names of only three of the Nine in his book, It Has Happened Here, two in the context of acts against these students perpe- trated by antagonistic whites, and the third in the context of the graduation of the first African American student from Central High. Neither the names, personalities, goals or talents of the nine youths, nor even their existence as individuals, was of any import to their opponents. In the film version of Crisis at Central High, the names of the Nine have been changed, more than likely owing to lack of their consent. Perhaps another reason is the film’s schema of presenting the sympathetic white lone ranger, Mrs. Huckaby, at center stage, with the Nine as a backdrop to her humanitari- anism. The phrase “The Little Rock Nine,” then, has become the way to refer to these unique young African Americans, all of whom were between 14 and 16 years of age. Three events seem to sufficiently encapsulate the Little Rock desegregation crisis: Elizabeth Eckford being turned away by Arkansas National Guardsmen with bayonets on the first day of the attempted public school desegregation, the expelling of Minnijean Brown in February 1958 after a series of incidents where she retaliated against her oppressors, and Ernest Green becoming the first African American graduate of Central High in May. These events, which incidentally are also the only ones in Superintendent Blossom’s account where names of Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 37 the students are mentioned, suggest that public interest was limited to the spectacular. The hourly ordeals of these three students and the other vulnerable young ones—Thomas Jefferson, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, and Carlotta Walls—would have been too much, too unnerving, for a culture to absorb, and America opted for amnesia to quell such disturbing memories. These students’ day-to-day school life involved coping with extraordinary, even life-threatening, events; figuratively, they wore what James Baldwin described as “iron corsets” to survive.7 At many points they doubted they could withstand another day of such existence. Still, the achievements of the Nine did not merit mention of their names. These youths often thought about their namelessness, their insignificance, their invisibility that only changed when their antagonists wanted to attack what they represented. The Nine won- dered why people acknowledged them with epithets, without bothering to use the names by which they preferred to be called. Without exception, the motivation for the Nine in accepting the challenge of desegregating Central High was to get the best education their home city could afford, to achieve the life goals they had for themselves. Central High, besides being closer to their homes, offered a larger variety of courses, and was better equipped than Horace Mann High. However, after the very first day of facing a hate-filled mob of adults, out-of-towners, jeering fellow students, and the Arkansas National Guard who barred their entrance, they had to rethink their initial motivation. Once within the school building, a second motivational prod of commitment to racial parity cemented their persistence. Their return on September 23, after the horrifying September 4 experience, demanded of each a perceptual and cog- nitive appraisal of the situation, which led to their discovering various individual means to endure the “daily gauntlet of insults and punches . . . in the school’s corridors.”8 For nine months they were in a virtual fishbowl, or perhaps more accurately a cauldron, expressing their “desire to be rid of the victimizing circum- stances and concomitantly the desire for economic, political, and social equity.”9 That they endured, attests to the fact that each discovered some efficacious means to get the best formal education Little Rock had to offer, to make real the written mandate of Brown, to unleash strategies for coping with circumstances “poten- tially deleterious to the well-being” of their psyches.10

Preliminary Note by D. LaRouth Perry This chapter aims to examine how, individually, the Nine got through that awful school year of 1957–1958. Conversations with them and their families are the major sources of this examination. Seeking the interviews met with varied and enlightening reactions; I had mistakenly assumed that pre-desegregation African American family relationships remained unchanged after the crisis. I quickly learned that the fact that the Nine knew me and my family was not sufficient reason for them to agree to meetings and conversations. I respected, and remain sensitive to, their positions. 38 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Mrs. Pattillo, the mother of Melba, advised me that this research would get nowhere because she, the other parents, and the Nine had been “raped by bounty hunters” so much since 1957 that they now preferred to remain close-mouthed. She was unequivocally convinced that the bounty hunters— most of them people from the media—were more concerned about their per- sonal careers than about their human subjects who were the pioneers of desegregation: “They got money, prestige, publications, job promotions. What did we get?” Forging ahead anyway, I sent a letter to each family (in the case of Gloria Ray, a relative relayed my request). The letters were intended to refresh their memory of my family (the Smiths), and to offer options of place, date, and time for person-to-person interviews. A week or so later, I followed up each letter with a phone call. Melba was of the impression that everything that needed to be said was in her book, Warriors Don’t Cry. She asked, “Are you reinventing the wheel?” and regretted to inform me that “my personal attorneys have urged me not to complete your consent information form.” Additionally, viewing the research as interloping, she strongly urged me never again to disturb the Quaker McCabe family in California, with whom she had lived since completing high school, and whom I had called three days prior to the telephone conversation with Melba. It made sense for me to respect this hands-off instruction, particularly since the father of the McCabe family was ailing. Moreover, Melba told me, in the vein of an American capitalist, that the Nine had formed a “pact of silence” (which I later found not to be so). The impression I garnered from this statement about a pact was that, if no monetary recompense was forthcoming, no information would be dispensed. Thelma Mothershed Wair’s concerns were different. Her characteristic warm nature and willingness to be interviewed ensured that there was no problem other than scheduling. In one of the two telephone interviews, she spoke of someone who had been attempting to make a movie about the Little Rock desegregation crisis and wanted the Nine to raise money for the production. Thelma expressed her view about the impropriety of such a proposition. Dr. Terrence Roberts politely replied to my letter, but declined an inter- view. Elizabeth Eckford’s mind was willing, but her emotions wouldn’t coop- erate. No response came from four of the others. Minnijean Brown Trickey, however, knew nothing of a pact, and wasn’t bound by these constraints. Nor were the parents, acquaintances and relatives of the Nine. By the time the interviewing process was actually underway, Mrs. Pattillo was residing in the same nursing home as my mother; both were afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Consequently, interviews were conducted with only three of the Nine. None of these conversations was as thorough as it should and could have been. Nevertheless, a wealth of data is available, that provides an abundance of raw material for an analytical study of the motivations for the Nine’s endurance in the cauldron of the 1957 desegregation crisis. Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 39

Models for Analysis One model for identifying the motivational factors for each of the Nine after September 4, 1957, is the “vignette measurement strategy” employed by sociologists Norma J. Sheplak and Duane F. Alwin, who authored “Beliefs About Inequality and Perceptions of Distributive Justice” in the American Sociological Review. The methodology of their research, though concentrating on “household income,” provides a model for identifying the individual motivations for the Nine to stay committed, in the satyagraha mode of passive resistance, to the arduous ordeals of the Little Rock desegregation crisis. They each drew on their inward psychological resources to adhere to their ethical principles, and to endure discrimination and deprivation. Considerable reliance is also placed on Leonard I. Pearlin and Cormi Schooler’s article, “The Structure of Coping,” in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Here, psychological resources are defined as “personality characteristics that people draw upon to help them withstand threats posed by events and objects in their environment . . . Coping responses represent some of the things that people do, their concrete efforts to deal with the life strains they encounter in their different roles.”11 The authors, who are psychologists, also state that “coping refers to behavior that protects people from being psychologically harmed by problematic social experience, a behavior that importantly mediates the impact that societies have on their members.”12 At the outset of their article they posit:

At the very heart of this concept [of coping] is the fundamental assumption that people are actively responsive to forces that impinge upon them. Since many of these impinging forces are social in their origins, the understanding of coping is a prereq- uisite for understanding the impact that societies come to exert on their members.13

These two articles have been instrumental in developing our modified vignette measurement strategy, for two reasons. One, because “relatively little has been done to examine the consequences of institutional discrimination at the indi- vidual level.”14 And two, because of the unfortunate fact that, as late as 1986, the social sciences had given limited attention to coping in circumstances in which “motivations toward culturally prized goals . . . are frustrated by limited opportu- nity structures.”15 In essence, without definitive research available on the impact institutionalized racism has on its victims, the significance of what victims do to cope with that social phenomenon requires examination and interpretation. When the labels in the Pearlin and Schooler article didn’t parallel the vignette of any of the Nine, the crux of M. Brinton Lykes’s article, “Discrimination and Coping in the Lives of Black Women: Analyses of Oral History Data,” was useful:

Examples from these accounts [of American black women 70 years of age and older] are presented and analyses discussed which suggest that direct instrumental coping may not be the strategy of choice in coping with experiences of discrimination. 40 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Rather, selected situational variables (the racial composition of the workplace and the type of discrimination identified) and personal factors (perceptions of the con- trol of the outcome and of the source of the problem) interact and differentially predict either direct instrumental coping or flexibility in coping styles. The findings suggest further that in some contexts a less direct coping strategy may be more effec- tive than a direct instrumental strategy in creatively confronting discrimination.16

The overall grounding for our analysis is provided by Clifford Geertz, whose book, The Interpretation of Cultures, offers guidelines for analysis of social behavior. Numerous quotes provide direction for discerning what makes a person act as he does, and the impact of his culture on his actions. Metaphors consistent with the Nine’s recollections of their experience come either out of war and battlefield imagery, or the analogy of doing or going to a job. On their battlefield, these nine footsoldiers were unarmed and unprepared for physical and verbal attacks. They were initially stymied by shock at the aggressive acts against their presence, and had to learn to bring a change of clothes to school. Being subjected to a pretense of military protection, and thereafter, through May 1958, being treated as an anathema, required them to muster up coping strategies they had not previously known to be within them. So, the cauldron of the Little Rock desegregation crisis operated as a catalyst for self-revelation. These were just ordinary children who, hurled into the movement for desegregation of Little Rock’s public schools at the decree of Brown, had to forego their carefree teenage years and devise ways to come out of the lion’s den in one physical piece and with a sane mind. A quote from Pearlin and Schooler regarding “coping as inseparable both from the life-strains experienced by people and from the state of their inner emotional life,” and the genesis of varied sorts of coping strategies, tests true among the Nine.17 In circum- stances where coping does not succeed in changing the situation, and thereby fails to eliminate the problem, the stressful impact may nevertheless be buffered by responses that function to control the meaning of the problem. The way an experi- ence is viewed, and the meaning that is attached to it, determine to a large extent the perception of the threat posed by that experience. Thus, the same experience may seem highly threatening to some people and innocuous to others, depending on how they perceptually and cognitively appraise the experience.18

The Nine, Collectively Each of the Nine had a personality makeup that dictated how they would respond to Central High and its active segregationists. With us all, certain buttons when pushed cause us to react in ways that often surprise ourselves. So, the Nine employed various self-appropriate mollifying buffers against the loneliness of being pioneers. And each of them created a region in their mind for the memory of 1957 in Little Rock. In varying degrees, they dealt with the memories after 1957; in varying degrees, their sanity marvelously remained intact. At some point, each considered giving up. Each cried more than they care to remember. Each experienced fear for their life. Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 41

Among the varied modes they adopted to deal with the negative memories were refusal to talk about the episode for nearly forty years, self-imposed exile, sinking into severe depression or bouts of alcoholism, applying for citizenship outside America, immersing the self in the white culture, working “the system” to personal advantage, marrying a white person, adopting as normal a life as possi- ble, getting psychiatric help, and considering suing the state of Arkansas for caus- ing emotional trauma. Before peering into their individual cases, some summary of their collective psyche is relevant. All Nine came to the cauldron believing in the myths about American justice, that laws were made for everyone, and that assertion of one’s individualism was a hallmark of American citizenship. They still struggle to make sense out of the crisis that didn’t have to occur. All possessed and demonstrated nerves of steel throughout the gruesome school year of 1957–1958. The Nine sensed that those responsible for the bulk of the harassment “had been assigned the task.”19 They were in a situation that they, individually and collectively, were powerless to change. Fortunately, the segregationists did not realize how weary the Nine had become with the daily assaults, even before the first semester’s end, or they might have succeeded, with just a little more pressure, in pushing each of the Nine over the edge, and out of Central High. The Nine each confessed that they chose not to share with their parents every detail of the potentially dangerous experiences they faced on a day- to-day basis at Central High, for fear of worrying them. Each of the Nine came from a cohesive family. Ernest Green’s father had died the year before Brown, and his maternal aunt, Mrs. Treopia Gravely, was vital to his family life. Again, though Melba Pattillo’s father did not live in the household, three generations of her family resided there. All the others had both parents pres- ent. The number of family members in their homes ranged from four to nine. Each of the Nine had at least one sibling. Ernest Green and Melba Pattillo each had a younger brother, their only sibling. Carlotta Walls was the only one without a brother. The families of Jefferson Thomas and Terrence Roberts had the most children—seven each. Three families of the Nine belonged to Bethel A. M. E. Church: Ernest Green’s, Melba Pattillo’s, and Gloria Ray’s. Minnijean Brown’s and Elizabeth Eckford’s families were affiliated with Union A. M. E., which was one block from the Dunbar junior high school for African Americans. Carlotta Walls’s family were members of White’s Memorial, Jefferson Thomas’s of Arch Street Baptist, and Thelma Mothershed’s of Mt. Sinai Christian Church; Terrence Roberts’s church affiliation was not determined. Three of the Nine’s fathers were military veterans: Terrence’s, Carlotta’s and Ernest’s. And three mothers were teachers: Ernest’s, Melba’s, and Elizabeth’s. None of the households escaped unscathed from the Little Rock crisis. “The real heroes,” Carlotta would reflect, “were the parents.” They let us go to school every day, not knowing if we’d come home bloodied-or dead.”20 Those parents didn’t share with their high-schoolers all of their difficulties in displaying superfi- cial heroism, hiding suffering, and camouflaging worry. In 1957, three parents 42 ● The Little Rock Crisis were faced with economic reprisal for allowing their children to participate in desegregation: Elizabeth Eckford’s mother was fired from her job at the State School for the Blind; Gloria Ray’s mother pre-empted the inevitable firing by resigning from the state’s Welfare Department; and Melba Pattillo’s mother was threatened with dismissal for being too involved in her daughter’s activities at Central High—however, garnering some influential support, she escaped the firing. In 1958, Carlotta Walls’s father, finding he couldn’t get building contracting jobs, was compelled to leave the state for employment. The union blackballing network followed him. Jefferson Thomas’s father was fired after having worked ten years for International Harvester. Generally, the parents most vulnerable to a loss in economic means for providing for their families were those employed in some capacity by the state. Ernest Green’s mother and aunt somehow escaped that wrath. Those parents who were either federally, self-, or privately employed, were less subjected to economic reprisals. On a brighter side, collectively, because of their exceptional visibility in the news, the Nine were the recipients of many pleasant surprises. They felt very special on September 24, 1957, when messengers from President Eisenhower came to their homes to implore them to return to Central High, assuring them of protection.21 Throughout the year, Central High’s administrators were expected to relay to the military intelligence the reason for any African American student’s absence—which they did, rather offhandedly.22 A few amenities, a smile, a hand- shake, all made the days of the Nine go better. Organizations in and outside Little Rock sponsored dinners, awards, and traveling experiences for them. Today, each of the Nine is sought as a guest speaker to describe and comment on what the ordeal of school in Little Rock in 1957 and 1958 was like. Their perceptions on the progress and changes needed in race relations are always appreciated. History cannot forget them. Among the Nine was one senior, Ernest Green, who became the first African American graduate of Central High. Five were juniors: Terrence Roberts, Melba Pattillo, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, and Thelma Mothershed. Three were sophomores: Gloria Ray, Carlotta Walls, and Jefferson Thomas. At the end of the first year of school desegregation, only five remained in Little Rock. Minnijean Brown would graduate from New Lincoln School in New York, in 1958. Terrence’s family would move to California because the “Land of Opportunity” was not living up to its promise. The year that the public schools were closed, Melba, Elizabeth, Thelma, Jefferson, and Carlotta took correspon- dence courses sponsored by the University of Arkansas. Carlotta’s family then arranged for her to attend summer school in Chicago. Melba, Elizabeth and Thelma rejoined Central High, but would have their diplomas mailed to them; they would find some discrepancies in their high school credits as they applied for college admission. Jefferson and Carlotta, like Ernest, would have their pictures in Central High’s yearbook, “The Pix,” and would march across the stage to receive their diplomas at a graduation ceremony. None of the Nine attended college in the South. Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 43

All the Nine got married, five of them to whites. Two of these five later explained that decision, both of their marriages having ended in divorce—as have two other marriages of the Nine where race wasn’t a contributing factor. Ernest Green attributed his first marriage, which was interracial, partly to the fact that once “the Little Rock Nine graduated from Central High, all went to college, and many went away to big, ‘white’ schools where most of their interactions were with whites.”23 Melba’s experience was similar: when she “attended the mostly white San Francisco State University for two years, I found myself living among an enclave of students where I was the only person of color. I was doing it again, integrating a previously all-white residence house, even though I had other options.”24 After the 1957–1958 school year ended, it would take thirty years for all of the Nine to once again be together in one place, for a thirtieth reunion in 1987. A few unpublicized reunions took place after that. And since the nationwide trauma of the desegregation crisis could never be forgotten, a gala affair was organized for the fortieth anniversary in 1997, and again in 2007 for the fiftieth anniversary.

Minnijean Brown Trickey Alphabetically, by their surnames while they were teenagers in Little Rock, Minnijean Brown Trickey comes first among the Nine. She is articulate, percep- tive, frank, and has a flair for description. Little escapes her analytical acumen. She is multi-talented, with a complex personality that some would erroneously characterize as fickle. As a youngster, she considered becoming either a nurse or a singer. “I love all kinds of music from classical to rock and roll. I thought one time that I’d like to be a singer. I’ve never made a paid appearance, but I sang on TV here once or twice.”25 Two telephone conversations with Minnijean in February 1995 revealed that she possesses a curiosity about what makes people tick, like oral historian Studs Terkel. Her Master’s degree in psychology, there- fore, is no wonder. While some of her family still reside in Little Rock, Minnijean lives in Canada. For a while she was in Toronto, where one of her daughters still stays, but she left the city life to live on a farm in North Ontario, where she has been for over twenty years. She has six children whom she has home-schooled. She enjoys pre- serving the vegetables, pickles, and tomatoes that she raises, but she hates to open the pretty jars of these and use the contents, even though they are prepared for consumption. On the subject of being “selected” as one of the Nine, she adamantly recalled in a telephone interview that:

There were more than nine—I remember eleven, for some reason. We picked ourselves. Mrs. Bates and the NAACP had nothing to do with our decision to go to Central. We discussed it with our parents. When I told my mother that I thought I wanted to go to Central, she swallowed, and replied, “If you want to.” We took several tests—some personality tests. An I.Q., maybe the PSAT. I don’t know who 44 ● The Little Rock Crisis

made the final evaluations. Many of the Nine were very bright, particularly Carlotta and Gloria. I don’t know why I was chosen—part of the criteria was that you’d never been in trouble with the school or in the community. I never was.

In-print data on Minnijean unveils an ordinary teenager with a desire for social inclusion. Having friends was of great importance to her: “. . . And already she has begun her social contact at Central High. ‘I have one real friend among the white kids up there,’ she said, ‘and many others who are very nice. But this girl and I help each other with our lessons and walk to classes together. We’d eat lunch together too, but she has a different lunch period.’”26 Examples recorded by Mrs. Huckaby and Mrs. Bates illustrate Minnijean’s desire for peer acceptance and a particular interest in socializing activities. For example, she was effervescent at first in the glee club at Central High, until the Mothers’ League of Central High, an organization of white women opposing integration at the school, protested her scheduled solo on a school musical program.27 Their protest was founded on the portion in the agreement between the school board and the Nine that during the initial desegregation “Negro” students weren’t supposed to participate in extra-curricular activities— Minnijean’s strong suit. On another occasion in the glee club class, some white students showed an interest in learning some jitterbug dance steps from Minnijean.28 When a local newspaper got wind of this, what it published was a less than subtle interpretation of that sort of interaction as black-inspired vulgarity. Then, on October 10, Color Day at Central High, Minnijean, fol- lowing what others were doing, wore one of the streamers provided by the student council. “When one segregationist girl challenged Minnijean’s right to wear her streamer as she entered the cafeteria at noon, Minnijean tore off the streamer, threw it down, and stepped on it. She could do nothing to please her classmates.”29 In late November, “one of the few white girls who continue[d] to walk down the hall with Minnijean,” Mary Ann Rath, brought Minnijean in tears to Mrs. Huckaby’s office. The vice principal wrote:

Some girl whom Minnijean believed to be her friend had cut her as they passed in the hall. “I guess it was because she was with her boy friend, and he doesn’t want to be friends with Negroes,” Minnijean sobbed. “I’m just tired of it all.” I gave my sympathy, but told her that being tired of it all was not reason enough to give up now. Poor Minnijean: affectionate, impetuous, undisciplined, she needed so much help, and there were so few to help her.30

In her heart of hearts, Minnijean didn’t welcome the proscriptive ban on extra-curricular activities: “At Horace Mann, I was in everything, all the extra- curricular activities. At Central, none of that is open to us yet . . . Of course, it may be different later. I’m taking Glee Club up there . . .”31 Added to the teenage yearning for social inclusion, was Minnijean’s indomi- table nature: “I got a lot of my spunkiness from my mother who has always been Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 45 my hero. Some I got from my aunt, Sis Addie, who though always a domestic, had mannerisms that informed that you can push me so far.” The inherited spunkiness of Minnijean is not very different from “rugged individualism,” a complimentary term made popular by President Herbert Hoover, as descriptive of Americans who, by their ingenuity, brain, or brawn, made this newfound land viable for living. That admirable ruggedness or spunkiness has never been consid- ered applicable to African Americans, however. For an African American to exhibit it entails the sacrifice of conformity, of blind compliance with the status quo, and of meekness. Those oppositional traits did not gel with Minnijean’s self- assertiveness. “So Minnijean, vulnerable for those very extrovert qualities that make other teenagers popular, was becoming the prime target” of the segrega- tionist students.32 To those students, rugged individualism in an African American peer equaled “show-off or braggart.”33 Minnijean’s spunkiness generated comments the likes of, “You think you’re smart?”34 and “Nigger-looking bitch.”35 However, she was not the sort to accept, without a counter-challenge, the appraisals others made of her based on their racial prejudices. She was intolerant of them and of the social structure that formed their conduct toward her on the basis of their limited beliefs, ideas, and knowledge. If we knew nothing more about Minnijean, we could probably at this juncture make some accurate predictions of how long she could remain at Central High in the volatile climate of the desegregation crisis of 1957. As Mrs. Huckaby would observe in the first week of February 1958: “I was sure that Minnijean’s contin- ued presence in Central High would have been a hazard to the other Eight. . . It was not volatile, natural Minnijean that was our difficulty. It was just that she and our impossible situation would not mix.”36 What Mrs. Huckaby deliberately chose not to mention, but was made known later by Jefferson Thomas, was another volatile incident in the fourth-floor bell tower of Central High. In his 1997 lecture on the campus of the University of Toledo, Jefferson recalled, with restrained humor, how Minnijean and another female choir member came too close to a window as they engaged in a physical altercation. She and Central High’s “impossible situation” were not mixing. She had to go. However, another interpretation, following Geertz, results from a plunge into the midst of the symbolic messages of Minnijean’s and her antagonists’ social actions, and from drawing “large conclusions from small, but very densely tex- tured facts.”37 Though the evidence overwhelmingly supports the generalization that the volatile, natural, impetuous, undisciplined Minnijean was herself the cause of the numerous occurrences that were labeled “failures” in Crisis at Central High, we’ll re-look at those failures that climaxed with Minnijean’s February 1958 expulsion from Central High. As already established, Minnijean wanted to be a part of the social milieu at Central High and, in fact, anywhere she happened to be. She needed to be accepted for herself, without alteration in her personality. In the Central High atmosphere, that need to be accepted amounted to her first failure. 46 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Among the first of her responses to pejorative conduct toward her was to make frequent trips to her teacher’s desk to question such conduct and to accuse others of not treating her fairly. Her doing so was equated a second failure. Finding no support in her homeroom environment, she learned to fend for herself in other ways. In French class, when she either stumbled over a boy’s out- stretched foot or he refused to remove his foot for her to pass, the two of them would exchange unkind remarks. Not one to mince words, Minnijean would speak precisely what was on her mind, and unhesitatingly do what her inclina- tions directed. In October, for example, she was reported to the vice principal’s office for saying “Go to hell” to five students who walked abreast to prevent her passage in the hallway. She spewed the slur “white trash” on another group of female antagonists. In response to a very short girl’s persistent taunts, Minnijean called her a midget. The girl was known for antagonistic behavior that stemmed from a dysfunctional home life. Minnijean was cautioned to curb her tit-for-tat language because those verbal responses made it difficult to censure the culprits who were trying to get her and the others out of school. Her lack of verbal control constituted failure three. For Minnijean to criticize her personal guard, even though she didn’t relish his watchful eye, can be interpreted as a fourth failure, while a fifth resulted from her reaction to her twenty-one-year-old teacher who told her to handle problems herself. Minnijean demonstrated that she would aggressively rectify any undesir- able situation. Central High teachers thought she was not achieving up to her academic abil- ity. Even though her reading level was above that of her grade, her second quarter results were four Ds, and a B in glee club. The glee club teacher thought she might do better to return to Horace Mann to be in Mr. Arthur Porter’s a cappella choir. She was suspected of cheating on a spelling test in her English class, and generally didn’t do well, preferring memory work and reciting poetry. In history class, she was not performing well at all. She would parrot what other students said, rather than giving evidence of her own studying. In typing, she didn’t want to sit next to the good typists. She displayed a defensive attitude when required to present a speech, and would either bite her nails or cry when it was her turn, as she was insecure about how her words would be received. One teacher observed that Minnijean seemed to have come to Central High more to get attention than to get an education. Her dilatory unresponsiveness and dreaminess in class seemed to justify this observation. Notice also was taken of her convenient absences on test days, either due to “illness” or being in the principal’s office. Attempts to skirt classwork made for a sixth failure. The seventh perceived failure was Minnijean’s expulsion from Central High, after two suspensions (one resulting from her upturning a bowl of chili over two of her tormentors) and a second chili-throwing incident in which she was the victim. She was adamant when she reflected on the expulsion: “To consider me as being in non-compliance with non-violence needs reinterpretation. At that Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 47 time, non-violence was a growing, not yet blossomed tactic. I had never before, nor have since been in a fight.” And she failed an eighth time in her own eyes, feeling she had let down the other eight by getting expelled. When looked at through a less sharply critical lens, Minnijean’s first failure— wanting to make friends—brings to view an ordinary young girl, like so many others who in their formative years are vulnerable and sensitive to reproach. Simply put, being friendless hurts. Being betrayed by someone one considers a friend hurts. Having a friend is comforting. The teenage years are a prelude to adulthood. Behavior commensurate with this stage of development must be allowed, tolerated, and encouraged. Teenage adolescence is a stage in life when maturity should neither be mandated nor expected. Choosing friends, keeping friends, losing self in following what others are doing, dressing alike, talking on the phone, are more important to many youngsters than anything else. If Minnijean had a problem, the problem was that she couldn’t be herself. Thrust into an interracial setting, Minnijean was to forget her level of maturity and don combative postures to cope with race hatred. To fault Minnijean for wanting friends, whether white or black, is to expose the essence of racism. Being African American in a white environment at Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, meant you would be friendless. That was an enormous pill for an ado- lescent to swallow. A second failure of Minnijean was that of tattletaling and seeking support from others. She could not be included among those who coped most effectively— who, according to Pearlin and Schooler, would be “those who have the capacity to gather support from others without having to solicit it.”38 A person who is “impetuous” by nature, however, has that to learn, which is taught through expe- rience at school, the place for academic and social development. Minnijean, being the oldest of four siblings, was accustomed to giving directives, and having the approval of her parents. She carried to Central High her accustomed way of receiving rewards and punishments, perceiving the adult teacher as the authority figure who would ensure fairness and justice. Tattletaling as a form of seeking support from whites in positions of authority was anachronistic in the 1957 situation, because of the conception of African Americans as dumb brutes who physically could withstand any sort of abuse, and who deserved the wrath of the superior whites. Mental abuse of African Americans did not strike segregationists as wrong or harmful, because their misguided conception of African Americans negated the possibility that the likes of a Minnijean would have human feelings. Minnijean’s failure was in expecting human decency from whites who held these hateful views. Fighting fire with fire, racial slur with racial slur, Minnijean learned she could achieve nothing but more torment in Central High’s classrooms and hallways. When slurred with “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger,” for Minnijean to retort with “Po’ White Trash!” gave cause for reprimand from those in authority. She, the victim; she, the cursed; she, the unwanted; she, the abused; she, out-numbered; she, an African American; she was not to fight back. How would she be able to prove the veracity of her complaint if the white student claimed she had initiated the 48 ● The Little Rock Crisis tit-for-tat exchange? Did she expect that her word would be believed over that of a white person? How foolish of her to think that witnesses would corroborate her side of any of those stories if a white person were guilty! She was supposed to be a strong, resilient, non-human punching bag. She hadn’t read William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim, but she instinctively knew that those who mistreated, dis- counted, taunted, abused, yelled and whispered epithets at her, had been “misled by an ideology, a mythology, a set of officially-certified nonfacts and respected untruths” regarding African Americans. She intuitively knew that “the injustices and inequalities in American life can never be understood (and, therefore, can never be eliminated) until that ideology [of blaming the victim] is exposed and destroyed.”39 Or, as Geertz puts it, “Some things are, for all intents and purposes, entirely controlled intrinsically: [Minnijean] need[ed] no more cultural guidance to learn how to breathe than a fish needs to learn how to swim.”40 Minnijean failed a third time because she challenged “intrinsically” her reception in a his- torically hostile all-white setting. This third failure was due to her exposing ugly, unjust, illogical truths. By overtly challenging the status quo, she wasn’t doing “the job with the poise of a diplomat.”41 The crux of Minnijean’s fourth failure rests in her refusal to trust someone who had demonstrated little or no respect for her as a person. She had witnessed the other African American students tripped, kicked, hit in the head, thrown into lockers, and spit on, in full view of the military supervisors, who at times smiled at the brutalities, and did nothing for the attacked or against the attackers. She had heard the white students flagrantly mocking and threatening the guards. Should she be expected to respect such overseers? Was she supposed to smile when taunted? Was she expected to thank the guards for watching her take physi- cal blows to her body? Minnijean’s instincts said, “NO!” She was not willing to be a contender in an entertaining “Battle Royal” as depicted in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. The vice principal tried to explain to Minnijean why she should be kinder to the National Guardsmen:

I reminded Minnijean that she was in no position to criticize the guard, for she did not know what orders he had been given. In whatever role the National Guard had been here this fall, they had taken an oath to obey their commanders. I also reminded her that, although she, personally, was not the cause of this man’s being away from his home and normal occupation, it was her safety he was guarding.42

This turned-around logic that sounded as if the blame were Minnijean’s brought tears to her eyes. The reprimand took the form of an argument for her to offer an apology to the nation’s “unskilled” National Guardsmen, whom she knew were selectively, reluctantly, and inadequately protecting her. She was made to feel she was being insensitive to the hardships and inconveniences of America’s military, there by executive order. She evidently misunderstood what “guard and protect” meant. But she did know what “tin-soldiering” was. What she had understood as the significance of the guards’ behavior, conflicted with what the white authority figure explained to her. For the sake of self-preservation, she had taken to Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 49 soldiering herself.43 She failed to see her presence at Central High as others saw it. She cried out of utter confusion. She was being told to apologize for being a victim. Advised to handle her own problems instead of tattling, Minnijean obeyed. From the French class where daily, unchecked taunts occurred, Minnijean opted to transfer to a speech class, where she would feel less threatened. Had she been a white person, removing herself from an undesirable environment would have been lauded as what in the early ’60s came to be known as “white flight.” Her failures were in escaping a racist environment, rather than consenting to be a non-retaliating object of racist torment, and having the audacity to act as though she had the means, the right, and the wherewithal to distance herself from the privileged group. Her failure as interpreted by her detractors was one of African American “flight”: being non-receptive to a white-oriented education, unwilling to accept an academic challenge, retreating from a setting where she was miserable, and thereby providing evidence of African Americans as weak and powerless. The sixth failure was an outcome of the unusual, impossible school situation in 1957. Student absences, particularly of the persistent agitators on the same day, were monitored closely by Central High’s administrators and the military intelligence. The seemingly genuine concern about an African American’s absence, however, grew out of a suspicion that the student had been so harmed as to be unable to come to school, or that the student had given up the desegrega- tion task. If Geertz is right when he avers that “small facts speak to large issues,” the concerns about absences were ironic, as Minnijean clearly recognized. Apparently, she and the other eight were expected to be present to provide targets for the hate-mongers. If they weren’t present, the hate-mongers would not get their thrills. Minnijean’s retaliations were often viewed as “small” insurrections needing to be nipped in the bud. For white supremacists, those cast in subordinate roles were stepping beyond their “place” if they retaliated or defended themselves against arbitrary mistreatment from anyone of the dominant group. Severe pun- ishment and quite often death was meted out in return. History is replete with examples: the blow to the head that injured Harriet Tubman for life, the alarming number of lynchings that Ida B. Wells Barnett reported on in the early 1900s, the whippings suffered by Frederick Douglass because his “massa’s” wife was teaching him to read (which she was ordered to stop), the eventual murder of Nat Turner, the newspaper clippings of Emmett Till’s supposed drowning that were mailed as reminders to families in Hoxie, Arkansas, of what would happen to them if they complied with desegregation. Historical memories would serve as clarion calls for what must be done to squash the resistance of Minnijean. One small insurrection occurred on the day before the school’s Christmas break. Minnijean was not one to be the victim for those who, in order to make themselves feel superior, needed to put someone else down. She was not willing to fall prey to bullying, to be too fearful to fight back, for she realized that this would only increase the persecution. The Harriet Tubmans, the Nat Turners, 50 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Toms were heroes of the distant past. Minnijean was a product of the present, of her mother’s and her aunt’s spunkiness, and had to act in ways that the present prescribed. Audaciously, she dumped a bowl of chili on two eleventh-grade boys following a series of chairs being shoved in her path while she was taking her tray to a seat in the cafeteria. Based on the comments of the victims, they did not totally blame Minnijean for her behavior: “Neither boy was angry—merely sheepish looking . . . Both boys made an effort to excuse Minnijean, saying that she had been annoyed so frequently that they didn’t blame her for getting mad, and that she might have dropped the tray accidentally.”44 She was suspended for three days and had to get Superintendent Blossom’s permission for reinstatement. “The boys were sent home to clean up.”45 While Minnijean’s seventh failure may be considered a cumulative result of her earlier ones, also the result of her was having feelings. She had failed at trying to absorb taunts and abuses without showing human emotion. She was so dis- mayed with herself for displaying rugged individualism that she failed also to hear the loud cheers from the African American cafeteria workers. She was deaf to the shouts of joy in the African American community over some racists getting a semblance of their due deserts. Once her efforts to control her self-defensive nature “changed to resentment,” she couldn’t see herself as so many other African Americans did—as a celebrated one who stood up to racists.46 The two boys excusing her for legitimately “getting mad,” however, was little compensation for the interpretations of other non-African Americans who heard of the chili incident. To make her fit the mold of their image, stories were fabri- cated to depict her as a degenerate—for example, her being so insensitive as to throw out an obscene gesture at a boy who “had been highly emotional since his bout with rheumatic fever last year,”47 or an accusation of her stealing a coat out of a girls’ locker.48 What’s even more revealing about these fabrications is that they exemplified “large issues,” since they were reported and re-reported by the students’ parents, who were seeking verification of their false images of African Americans. The chili-throwing incident was repeated when Minnijean returned from her suspension. This time, the chili was dumped on her, and the boy got suspended. This time, Minnijean heard cheers of “Fifteen for David Sontag.” This time, he tripped over Minnijean’s chair in the cafeteria.49 After his suspension, the boy returned to the school to take the dare to kick her, and “to get her” as she left school.50 Then in February, Minnijean was “souped” again. “The boy justified his act only by saying, ‘I remembered that she had poured soup on some white boys and went over and dumped some on her.’ He was expelled.”51 But prior to the last soup episode, Minnijean had engaged in more tit-for-tat with a constant heckler. Her reinstatement after the last suspension had been contingent on her not engaging with, but ignoring, the harassing tactics of the segregationist students. As a result, Jess Matthews, Central High’s principal, said he would have to sus- pend Minnijean—not of course, for getting souped again, but for violating her probation by calling the girl names and getting involved in the exchange of purse Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 51 throwing. “The truth, of course, was that we could no longer run the school if Minnijean was there. There were plenty of marginal youngsters who would be glad to be put out of school to gain the approval of their group by souping Minnijean week after week—or even day after day. Their target had been selected. Or perhaps, she had selected herself. After all, she had dumped the chili first.”52 Minnijean’s final failure was in thinking she had let the other eight down. It would take some convincing for her to believe that they understood. They were sympathetic and empathetic. They all had considered giving up. But, disgusted with herself, Minnijean couldn’t hear or see the underlying rally for her displace- ment in the white students’ cheers for the boy who souped her.53 She was only Minnijean, a teenager. She was not all of the African American people. She could not be a human sponge, absorbing persistent victimization. The New York Post series of articles on “The Nine Who Dared” captured Minnijean in the way she knew herself to be,54 and again in an editorial after she arrived in New York to complete high school, as “a Negro girl . . . so drastically penalized for reacting as a human being under fire” that Superintendent Blossom “recommended exiling.”55 In her adult life, Minnijean would view those four months at Central High (five months by the calendar, but less than four months of actual school presence when holidays and suspensions are counted) as a period of self-development. She was not unaware that others viewed her as too impulsive, too ready to come back at people, too unprepared to accept the heavy responsibilities of her difficult situation. She knew that the gym captain who reported her for not dressing properly for class considered her too touchy. She wasn’t quite convinced, but recognized the perspective of others who thought she was hypersensitive because she often felt she was being picked on when no slight was intended. Ironically, she could accept the description of herself as “that uppity nigger girl” without rebuff;56 in fact, she was apt to say “thank you,” when the intended derogatory word “uppity” was thrust at her. She could smile with approval at it because, in the African American view, to be accused by a white person of being uppity was praiseworthy. An uppity African American refuses to be treated or recognized as a “pair of hands.” Uppity is the opposite of “shuffling,” “skinning and grinning,” or “tomming” in the presence of white people. It’s the opposite of submissiveness, fearfulness of whites. It says, “I will assert my racial self boldly.” Minnijean failed because she was a rugged individual who happened to be African American. She failed because her boldness was a major component in her “webs of significance.” Her innate personality rebelled against being pushed aside and made to feel insignificant, or being used as a human punching bag. At the base of the conflicts she experienced were the decade-long racist practices legal- ized by Plessy. Her history told her that Plessy was unjust and that it had no place in Central High. Minnijean failed because her behavior anticipated the strategies of the 1960s which frowned on the usual advice given to African Americans to “go limp” when they were abused or arrested. Minnijean’s endurance level was not the same as those of the other eight. 52 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Elizabeth Eckford Scales. Lofty scales. Sometimes they tipped downward on the right side. Fewer times would they tip down on the left. On this side was idealism, righteousness, fairness. On the other was actuality, rejection, the whites’ historic indoctrination. Elizabeth Eckford wished for some mystical rock to balance the scales, especially when the side of actuality weighed down most heavily. Her preference for the idealistic side was part of her motivation to enroll at the all-white Central High. Her decision to seek admission to Central High was last-minute and didn’t come until mid-August, after she had characteristically weighed the advantages and disadvantages. She possessed a mental disposition that constantly sought resolution to warring polarities. She loved the idea of the ideal. She wished to find common ground between her private life and thoughts, and her public ones. She believed there was a middle ground between racism and human justice. She wanted Little Rock and America to establish a balance between white hegemony and the democratic principles of America’s constitution. Her “second sight,” though keen enough to make a distinction between white racists and other white individuals, fell short of identifying some leveling device for the disparity between the way things were and the way they could or ought to be. She longed for a time when devastating historical memories could be erased by a healthy present. Whereas Minnijean Brown would criticize Jesse Jackson for being so in search of a headline, Elizabeth admired his slogan “Keep Hope Alive.” But externals persistently clouded that hope. The Little Rock crisis, unfortunately, verified her mother’s fears that stemmed from her terrible experience in 1927:

When I was a little girl, my mother and I saw a lynch mob dragging the body of a Negro man through the streets of Little Rock. We were told to get off the streets. We ran. And by cutting through side streets and alleys, we managed to make it to the home of a friend. But we were close enough to hear the screams of the mob, close enough to smell the sickening odor of burning flesh. And, Mrs. Bates, they took the pews from Bethel Church to make the fire. They burned the body of this Negro man right at the edge of the Negro business section. Mrs. Bates, do you think this will happen again? Mrs. Bates didn’t think so.57

This narration could have been attributed solely to Mrs. Eckford’s memory, and lost in oblivion, were it not for references made to that very 1927 lynching dur- ing the desegregation crisis. It was on the day when the Arkansas National Guard had been released and Little Rock’s police force was in charge of control- ling the mob.

While the cops watched with kindly detachment, the crowd grew. Some rough- necks began drifting in. The police uneasily tried to make friends. “Do you think I like this?” asked one. “I’m just trying to do my job.” An old man turned his dry, grass-fire eyes on Central High School, worked his bare gums in pleasure over the time “we burned a nigger in ’27.”58 Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 53

The thirty-year-old memory was revived in a different context by an African American newspaper in its appeal to African American voters to pay the poll tax in order to vote:

It is true that your rights are restricted due to the biological difference in the color of your skin, but if your poll tax is paid in great numbers, you can bet your life that no reflection will ever be cast on your vote because it is cast by a black hand. Don’t be too appeasing, just remember a few years ago a Negro was mobbed and dragged thru the streets of Little Rock and burned in the middle of the street that was a thorofare for Negro businesses. Let’s prevent this from happening again. It can only be done by qualifying yourself and doing your battles at the polls.59

Elizabeth’s first day at Central High came very close to a repeat of that 1927 atrocity. She escaped the mob with the assistance of Mrs. Grace Lorch, a white professor at the predominantly African American Methodist college, Philander Smith, and stoically boarded a city bus to go to her mother’s place of work. Only once she was in her mother’s consoling arms did her fear find expression in tears. She also cried because she was thoroughly shocked at the violent behavior of the right-wing hatemongers. She was beginning to shut out the idea of hope. When her ideal wasn’t forthcoming, she clammed up. Unlike the Man of La Mancha, she didn’t try to fight windmills. Rather, she intellectually wished for them to turn and turn and turn for some good purpose. However, she knew she wasn’t that change mechanism. Nearly forty years after the September 4 mob abuse, she, unlike most of the other Nine, knowing what she knows now, asserts that she would not apply to Central High again.

Let me be very clear. . . . Absolutely, positively not. I would not and could not. . . . I’m not that kind of person. I don’t have the strength that it would require. . . And I don’t have the naivete to think that it was going to work and it would get better that year.60

It took nearly forty years for Elizabeth to realize her naivete. She had expected that Brown would be a panacea. That it was fair. That it was right. That it was a long overdue ideal. That her color didn’t matter. Her saying, “I went to Central because I thought it would be a greater opportunity for me. It was a selfish act. I did not do it for my people,”61 at one of her few public appearances, is representative of much about her. Like all of the Nine, “a greater opportunity” for a good education was the initial motivation for deciding to be among the desegregationists. But September 4, with its Arkansas National Guards and anti-desegregationist mob, demanded another look at this motivation. Along with the others, she asked herself if a better education at Central High, with the clause of no extra curricular activities, and the ripping of ties with friends, acquain- tances, and teachers at Horace Mann, was worth all the havoc of the first day. Elizabeth’s response to that question is clear. The national recognition she earned has not been a sufficient enough reservoir in which to submerge her 54 ● The Little Rock Crisis

“selfish” motive. She doesn’t concur with the heroic attributes assigned to her. In 1957 she had been stunned. Surprised. Afraid. Alone. She had made the decision by herself, with the selfish intention of bettering her own economic condition, not anyone else’s. Like all of the Nine, she had been influenced by her parents’ repetitive allusions to education as a key to success. She was on a quest for that key for herself. Elizabeth wasn’t thinking about race, heroism, her people, or about making history. She was surprised by newspaper and electronic media accounts of her conduct on September 4. Courageous, innocent, undaunted, brave, heroic, determined, strong, lonely, exemplary, having guts, proud, dignified, a hero, Herculean, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, reminiscent of Nathan Hale. “Were they talking about me?” she had to ask. Would her mother resist the feeling of deja vu and saying, “I told you so,” as she recalled the lynching she had witnessed thirty years ago? Elizabeth did experience an outburst of feelings and emotions new to her. They exuded from her private self and were not intended as a display to merit those accolades that were attributed to her in the news. But indeed she did merit the tributes that were paid to her. So vividly appropriate were the accolades, that photographs of her lonely walk out of a maelstrom of terror to a bus stop caused America to face acute embar- rassment and international disgrace. Still, she could not consider herself a hero; she was simply being Elizabeth. The psychological characteristics that she exhib- ited on that day “may be related to one’s family environment.”62 Assuming as much, the “thick description” analytical process of Gifford Geertz helps to explain how the “symbolic action”63 of her behavior during the desegregation crisis was an extension of her family orientation. The storehouse of pooled learning and the social legacy that an individual acquires, when interpreted, aids in the search for meaning.64 The eight-member Eckford family in 1957 had not reached middle-class economic standards. They had no telephone. They didn’t have many store-bought things. Their home had six rooms. Both parents were employed with less than modest incomes. A personal interview with the father revealed him to be a mixture of frankness and joviality, but it was clear that his kind nature was not to be taken lightly. It was quite evident that the Eckford children were encouraged to achieve whatever they chose to. But, whatever their choice, also apparent was the expectation that they would see it through to completion and personal fulfillment. They were required to respect their elders, to act in the Christian-like manner they were taught, and to believe that they were as good as anyone else. The six children knew that even though they always had a bulwark of support from their parents, they were expected to fly on their own. With that style of child-raising, the behavior of Elizabeth during the 1957–1958 school year at Central High is no surprise. She didn’t question the guards’ non-verbal pointing her in a direction other than toward Central High’s entrance stairway. She didn’t yell back at the jeerers and hecklers. She listened to advice from Mr. Benjamin Fine (a white reporter from The New York Times) to hold back her tears. In the midst of the cultural conundrum of September 4, she pulled out all the personal Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 55 strength she could find, just to walk to the bench and wait for a bus. That was her public self. Her private self didn’t survive as wholly, but she kept this to herself. Only she can tell, for example, what she was thinking when she obeyed Mrs. Huckaby on October 12, and if the cooperation stemmed from a family orientation of respect and blind obedience to adults:

After the eleven o’clock tardy bell, Elizabeth Eckford came into my office, red-eyed, her handkerchief a damp ball in her hand. I motioned her to the chair beside my desk, where she was screened from view, and reached for the middle lefthand drawer of my desk for the Kleenex. But Elizabeth refused the proffered kerchief with a shake of her head. “I want to go home,” she said. Her story was one that became too familiar during the rest of the year from all the black children: at first the name-calling, thrown objects, trippings, shavings, kickings were done by strangers. Later on they could recognize their assailants, for most of them were repeaters. It would not do for one of the Nine to leave. It would make it harder for them to return; it would prolong the necessity for armed guards; it would put pressure on everyone involved, from the president on down, I argued. I appealed to Elizabeth’s courage, the courage I knew she possessed. Pictures on September 4 of this lone, proud child, turned back by the Arkansas National Guard and followed and screamed at by the insane mob, had received international attention. I finally persuaded Elizabeth to stay and walked with her to her history class.65

Elizabeth complied, not because she wanted to, but because she was led to see the logic in trying to reach the middle ground in the Little Rock crisis. She absorbed, though reluctantly, the reminder of the gap between reality and expectations. Her personal perspectives were secondary. So, belittling her predicament, downplay- ing her position as a major player in this unexpected scenario, and not wanting to be the source of a problem became parts of the modus operandi she developed to sustain herself in the cauldron of desegregation. She apologized for going to the vice principal’s office so often.66 “Since 1996, she’s become content with her objectivity of viewing the Little Rock ordeal as a mere footnote in the annals of history.”67 She sees herself as just one of many, throughout the country, who helped throw off the ugly blanket of segregation. Elizabeth’s formidable nature is quite apparent. To defend her physical self at Central High was one thing, but the protection of her emotional, mental self was most difficult. “She suffered the most and complained the least.”68 In 1992, she was described as being very selective about the audiences she would talk to about the Little Rock crisis. She would shift the subject of conversation and talk about others or other things, or politely or emphatically shut down. On the other hand, with the racial issue as yet unresolved, “She hopes that as she is able to open up to a church group, a group of young people or women, she can make the small contribution that might prevent anyone else from experiencing the terror she lived in 1957.”69 56 ● The Little Rock Crisis

In 1996, she accepted an invitation to a high school in Washington, DC:

[W]hen reporters interviewed her about Little Rock, she was evasive. She would ask television crews to film her from behind when she was giving talks to school- children. She avoided crowds, which sometimes triggered flashbacks. She discarded or ignored the memorabilia of Little Rock like the stamps she’d saved from the letters of well-wishers around the world. She couldn’t bear to look at black and gold, Central’s colors. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic depression, stopped working and has lived on disability pay. For decades she was, as she describes it, “emotionally dead” on every subject other than Little Rock. Even today she can’t complete a sentence about her experiences without tears. . . . As for Eckford, the trip represented another step in a long process of recovery from that traumatic year. New drugs are helping her control her depression. She now says she is planning to go to a reunion of the Little Rock Nine in Las Vegas this summer. And, she says, a lot of the clothes she packed for those trips were gold and black.70

It sounds as if Elizabeth is healing herself by turning toward young audiences. Apparently she has acquired a pessimistic view of adults as bridge-builders over the gulf of conflicting histories. She prefers to lend her stories where they may stimulate hope and healing.

Ernest G. Green Whereas Elizabeth recognized that racial inequality was a by-product of white hegemony, and felt paralyzed and unable to resist it effectively, Ernest Green plunged in with both feet despite the viciousness of his antagonists. Whereas “they” sapped Elizabeth’s energy, Ernest Green was energized enough to carve a niche for himself, regardless of “them.” Whereas Elizabeth deliberated on making it through a day at a time, Ernest

saw it [the school year] as a job from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon. It was not the most pleasant job, but I was going to this job and I was going to last out the job. You learned to live for the weekend and for holidays. My salvation was that I could put things in perspective. If I lasted until Christmas break, then I had a breather. And if I lasted until Easter there was another breather. And then from Easter on it would be clear sailing because that was the last quarter mile. All I had to do was get this diploma in May, and after that they could do whatever they wanted to. But one thing they couldn’t do was say nobody black had ever graduated from Central. And I guess that’s been one of the motivating things for me.71

The possibility of succumbing to taunts, or of something tragic befalling him, “If I lasted,” cannot be brushed aside as insignificant. Up until the absolute last day of the 1957–1958 school year, Ernest Green posed a threat to Little Rock’s Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 57 history. To his credit, he was ever mindful of that unique position. A portion of a letter urging him to not participate in the graduation ceremony illustrates the situation:

At present there is a great deal of conversation among Centralites over the trouble that will most probably arise if you should decide to be present to receive your diploma. Naturally you deserve sheepskin as much as anyone else, and I would not stop you from getting it. . . . Therefore, I am asking you, Ernest, to please refrain from attending these exercises. It will be a time that I and hundreds of others do not wish to have marred. For the sake of your classmates and good common sense, please give your utmost consideration to this. I hope that you will let your unself- ishness and good judgement dominate your decision.72

What Ernest thought and felt about the letter is condensed in Mrs. Huckaby’s words: “Ernest had no intention of acceding to the request of the ‘worried senior.’”73 This statement is exemplary of most accounts of Ernest’s ordeal in the cauldron. He as a subject of victimization was of less importance than he as object. Significantly, only in the case of one incident where he was a target is there elaboration on his reaction. And that episode, involving another of the Nine, was related by himself and retold by his mother to Mrs. Bates:

Carlotta and I had just finished eating lunch today and were going up the steps when a boy tried to trip Carlotta. She twisted aside, causing him, to fall. Then a friend of this boy, who is nearly always with the gang, rushed up the steps behind me and hit me twice on the jaw. As soon as he clouted me, he ran down the steps, but I chased after him and told a guardsman about it. The boy tried to get away. He ran outside the school and attempted to sneak into the cafeteria through the back door, but the officer caught him and I identified him to a sergeant of the guards.74

Though capable of retaliatory action when “at the breaking point,” Ernest was essentially the epitome of non-violence.75 Keeping foremost in his mind his specific goal of graduation, he endured a school year of rampant chastisements by playing down in his mind the aggressive physical and emotional attacks he faced. He possessed an optimistic attitude of looking on the bright side, and was able to hide “his own anger and fear so as to encourage the others.”76 In Pearlin and Scholler’s terms, “cognitively neutralizing” was the basis of his admirable emer- gence from the cauldron relatively unscathed.77 While Ernest was quite capable of recognizing falsity in others’ behavior, he would resist publicly applying negative readings to racist behavior, as if to assert without saying so that nothing he could do now would alter anything, so it would be futile to react angrily. He remarked about the girl who yelled after Elizabeth on September 4: “I think that seeing her picture like that in the papers the next day must have done something to her . . . For she is unusually quiet in class. I turn and find her staring at me occasionally and she always blushed and looked away.”78 What he didn’t add was that she had become uncertain about 58 ● The Little Rock Crisis what her personal response to the presence of African Americans ought to be. What Ernest didn’t say, was said for him years later. The yelling girl, Hazel Bryant, would reveal on an Oprah Winfrey segment how her family had indoctrinated her with atrocious stereotypes of African Americans. Her staring, her looking away, her blushing at Ernest, her yelling at Elizabeth, suggest a search for clarification of her behavior, for which she apologized thirty years later. The bigger picture of segregationist youngsters acting out expected, taught roles, and perhaps not following their hearts, is found in a gesture of Hazel’s friend, Sammie Dean:

When The Ernest Green Story was being filmed at Little Rock in 1992, Sammie Dean Parker and her sister owned a restored 1957 Chevrolet convertible. Sammie Dean’s sister offered to let it be used in the film. Sammie Dean, who happened to be in town, went with her sister and the sister son’s to take it to the Disney repre- sentative. Sammie Dean said, “My nephew was telling him, ‘Why is it they’re always telling the Ernest Green story, or the Mrs. Huckaby story? My Aunt Sammie was there. She had a good handle on what was going on.’”79

The fact that Ernest’s emotions, feelings, and specific responses to the abuses remained so suppressed, explains why, of the Nine, he has been the most featured in books, newspapers, magazines, lectures, films, and interviews. A combination of motivating factors kept him aware of the larger picture of desegregation. He stayed focused on the goal of desegregating Central High and graduating from the school, disallowed any deterrents to publicly surface, and stayed in con- trol of himself by redefining the stress after it occurred. His reactions to his approaching graduation day illustrate this. To the rumors “that had it that anyone who assassinated him would be paid ten thousand dollars,”80 and to the letters requesting him to not destroy the memories of the white graduates, he turned a deaf year, neutralizing the entreaties, ignoring the threats, and keeping his eyes of the prize of the brass ring of desegregating Little Rock’s public schools. Many of his private feelings have yet to surface. Ernest’s strategy of practical acceptance of distasteful experiences can be explicated as an extension of the supportive role he played in his family. In turn, his family bolstered him with indomitable backing. Reportedly, and understand- ably, his uncle in Oklahoma, T. E. “Tobe” Gravelly, died on September 25, 1957, of a sudden heart attack while listening to news that involved his nephew.81 Ernest more than fulfilled his role as male head of the family and enjoyed the independence it afforded him, despite the presence of two strong matriarchal figures in the household. Accepting responsibilities, for Ernest, meant living up to expectations other had for him, standing up when extraneous situations threatened a downfall, and following through with commitment. The attributes of Ernest that motivated him to endure the arduous school year of 1957–1958 lend themselves, as did Elizabeth Eckford’s conduct on September 4, to a definition of who can be an American hero. Those people whose social behavior is deemed commendable by a large segment of onlookers, Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 59 exhibit characteristics that are unconsciously embodied by the onlookers. The case of Andrew Jackson is one such apt parallel. In analytical retrospect, Andrew Jackson was not the “architect of his own fortunes.”82 Others described him as having an iron will, as being a self-made man.83 What the people of his era wanted to be a part of, then, was infused into their president:

The massive emotions and psychological sanctions of ideas, nature, providence, and will converged in the image of Andrew Jackson. The result was a symbolic figure. The symbol was not the creation of Andrew Jackson from Tennessee, or of the Democratic Party. The symbol was the creation of the times. To describe the early nineteenth century as the age of Jackson misstates the matter. The age was not his, he was the age’s.84

Sammie Dean Parker’s nephew didn’t understand the symbolism then, but hope- fully, as he matured, he would have learned to recognize the irony of antagonistic social conduct. Ernest was made a hero by Sammie Dean, because his responses to Jim Crowism symbolized what is admirable in us as individuals, and at the same time brought to notice what is despicable in us. Ernest Green’s 1988 commencement address for Central High was titled “Thirty Years Later—I Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now.” Incorporating African American vernacular (the double negative), quoting from the lyrics of a negro spiritual, and reflecting on what, for all intents and purposes, was to have been his and the other eight’s personal destruction, Ernest Green described how his Central High experience “opened many doors for him and afforded him the opportunity to make a host of political and social contacts, contacts that he still uses today.”85

Thelma Mothershed An in-print comment of Thelma’s was the initial stimulus for this book’s attempt to search for meaning in the stories of Little Rock’s 1957 desegregation cauldron. In an article, “A Quarter Century Later . . .” Thelma quipped, “We have a black history week in our school, and this year Scott’s teacher talked about me and he came home and said, ‘Mom, are you black history?’”86 Her son Scott was only in the second grade, and it was hard for him to connect her with such a significant and ugly occurrence in America’s cultural history, that once exposed should have prevented any likelihood of recurrence. To acquaint our children with the past is the task of parents and teachers, and an intent of this book. Thelma, being both a prime maker and living informant of history, had the ability to fulfill that task. Mr. Little’s shoe shop on Sixteenth and High Streets is just six blocks from Thelma’s childhood home. A sign posted there reads: Live and Let Live. Whether she frequented Mr. Little’s shop or not, Thelma always followed this motto. She found objectivity and acceptance a way to get from day to day. Her way of living was OK; everyone else’s way of living was OK. Her view of the world was OK; everyone else’s view of the world was OK. Humans must coexist. Her schooldays, 60 ● The Little Rock Crisis marriage and family, career from which she retired in 1994, and her new vocation of service, all point to this character trait. Also apparent in what motivated Thelma’s conduct was her attitude that, since she would pass this way but once, she must do whatever she could to make this life pleasant and meaningful for herself and others. Her awareness of her mortality probably accounts for her cool, calm, and collected posture through the months of the Little Rock crisis. The cardiac condition and mild heart attacks that she suffered from an early age, which necessitated three years of tutoring while her family was in Texas,87 doubt- lessly contributed to her fortitude and determination to present herself always warmly and civilly. Her early Texas upbringing also accounts, in part, for her never losing her thick Southern intonation, which was not characteristic of any of the other Nine. In her public interviews, Thelma repeatedly reflects that the Little Rock expe- rience “gave me an extra dimension . . . I simply know more about differences between people and I’m able to put myself in their position.”88 Of the Nine, Thelma’s adult professional pursuit remained closest to her youthful aspirations. She aspired to be a teacher as early as when she was in sixth grade,89 and she became a school counselor. The “extra dimension” generated a sensitivity that extended beyond her individual self. She had the propensity to anticipate, feel, and sense tenseness and cruelty even before it touched her. In one case, in the Central High building on September 23, the aura of violence so overwhelmed her that she had to be attended by a nurse for an irregular pulse.90 The shy, frail, ninety-pound junior was the smallest of the Nine—“so tiny and timid that she didn’t invite difficulty.”91 Moreover, because of her cardiac condi- tion she was excluded from physical education class where much of the physical abuse occurred. In a telephone interview on February 2, 1995, Thelma relayed that she “suspected that school officials, knowing of her heart condition, alerted the students.” This suspicion was unfounded and unlikely, and indicates her innocence of the odd capabilities of humankind. That she was the recipient of the least severe and least frequent physical and verbal attacks informs us that something individuals exude determines how others respond to them. Could it be that those perceived as weak are left to remain weak, while the strong ones must be weakened? The answer is clear in the Little Rock desegregation crisis that displays so many characteristics of warfare. Thelma brought other histories to the cauldron. When she debating about whether to attend Central High, “Mama,” as Mr. A. L. Mothershed affection- ately addressed his wife, and “Poppa,” as Mama addressed him, called for a family conference as they were wont to do when major decisions had to be made. Thelma’s father’s caring for mentally ill patients whom he attended as a psychiat- ric aide at the Veteran’s Hospital, her mother’s diligent church work, and her siblings’ non-prejudicial mindsets meant that Thelma was unsuspecting of the ill-treatment she and the other eight would have to endure. Her preparedness was limited. She reluctantly admits she is still amazed at the dark side of humans. Thelma had difficulty finding rational answers to, “Why should anyone want to harm us when we’re not mad at anybody?” She would attempt to thrust Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 61 some sense into her answer with “Maybe they don’t like us because they don’t know us.”92 Was she, at sixteen years of age, realizing that maybe there were other motivations for fellow teenagers wanting to harm the Nine? But Thelma had the benefit of being the middle child, with two older sisters and two younger brothers. One sister had already matriculated in an integrated setting. Lois, the first African American to attend Disciples of Christ Seminary in Enid, Oklahoma, came home for the conference as did “her eighteen-year-old sister Grace, who was attending the University of Arkansas.”93 Lois dated African American as well as white guys, and married a white one. Later in the year, she would put a humorous spin on the situation in Little Rock by repeating a joke that Charles Patchen, an African American seminary student from Denver, had told: “I heard that Faubus killed his wife. Why? She bought a color TV.” Lois would elect to distance herself from an environment that frowned on the Live and Let Live motto, choosing to live away in the Netherlands instead. Thelma Mothershed Wair’s various histories have blended to help her see American realities. As she revealed in a telephone interview, she retired early in 1994 “so that younger people could be hired,” and so that she could begin to counsel women incarcerated in prison two hours a day. “They tell, at times, too much of their personal, intimate lives. I guess they just need for someone to listen.” Thelma’s current occupation represents her motivation throughout life that pushed her to be the sort of person she has always been: Everybody can do something to make this world an OK place to go through life. In the same tele- phone interview, she shared her disgust over young African Americans killing each other and how she is reluctant to go out after dark. “I know it’s better than it was, and I’m sure the Nine of us helped to make this country better. Don’t tell me anything about the white man keeping you from doing what you want to do. Too many of these young folks go around with a chip on their shoulders. They don’t seem to have any direction. Not enough kids are in the church. Their par- ents don’t bring them. They won’t even drop them off at church.” She has identi- fied where the gaps are and who is sloughing off in doing his part for a cohesive American culture, just as she inadvertently identified the gaps that made the desegregation cauldron of Little Rock get so heated as to boil over.

Melba Pattillo Melba, like all of the Nine, embodies a complex personality: she “is an animal suspended in webs of significance [s]he [her]self has spun.”94 Her spinning stems from a hungering for stardom. Her natural pose in absolutely every photograph, particularly at the outset of the crisis, gives the impression that she is saying, “This is the snapshot that will get me recognized for an Academy Award.” As the desegregation crisis unfolded, she rewrote her inner dialogues to direct outward responses that suppressed the debilitating effect of the personal and demeaning attacks on her. Her overwhelming desire to be an actress or professional enter- tainer was a significant factor in her modus operandi for enduring her time at Central High. 62 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Her quest for stardom was wishfully predicted and warmly nurtured by her mother: “From the time she could think of things,” the mother said, “we’ve both known that was what she wanted to do so I saw to it that she got ballet lessons, singing lessons, music lessons, and anything she wanted in that line. “Maybe as a mother I shouldn’t say it. But you are going to be reading about this child. She’s really going places.”95

While Melba’s book, Warriors Don’t Cry, shows her unusual closeness with her mother Lois and grandmother India, an unsympathetic attitude toward her father seeps through the same pages. His acceptance of harsh reality, of having to “kowtow” to keep himself economically solvent, made him discourage Melba from attending Central High. The conflict between him and his wife, that stemmed from his not finishing college and opting to eke out a living, was never resolved.96 Melba preferred to follow Mother Lois’s visions for her future. Being groomed for stardom has its consequences. One is a low tolerance for rejection. Melba’s “I/me”-ness in 1957 caused her to place precedence on main- taining a public facade. Her concern about how she appeared to others surpassed her need to present her true identity. Thereby, though perhaps not consciously or vaingloriously, she made every effort to be perceived in accordance with her unre- alistic self-perception. She relished the belief “that others thought she was differ- ent from the other eight.”97 When her false perception of herself conflicted with that others had of her, she felt rejected. She would write, thirty years later: “They don’t see me as a real person . . . So many times I wanted to shout, ‘I’m Melba, don’t you see me? I play the piano, I can make blouses, I can write poems . . . and I sing.’”98 Each rejection was a blow to her “I/me”-ness, causing her to constantly attempt to reconstruct herself. It was almost incomprehensible, for example, to Melba that girls should come from behind her, push her down, and run away. She had difficulty accepting that the girls she suspected of those heinous cowardly acts would mistreat her. Upon hearing one of them bragging about it at lunch, she reluctantly had to swallow the fact that “the blond girl” could be vicious toward her.99 Unlike Ernest, she would willingly describe the day-to-day physical attacks of the few persistently vile high-school students who harassed her. Perhaps so that she wouldn’t forget the dates and particularities of this unwanted treatment, or perhaps to chronicle her suffering for future publicity, having a premonition that historians would one day benefit from her documentation of “a teenager’s worst nightmare,”100 she, unknown to the other eight, kept a diary “[f]rom the begin- ning” of the Central High ordeal.101 Like the other eight African American students, at the beginning of the 1957–1958 school year, fifteen-year-old Melba would report to the deans about the frequent and devious physical and emotional attacks aimed at her. Chairs were shoved into her back in homeroom.102 In October “two boys from home- room waited almost daily outside the door and cursed her as she entered.”103 Outstanding in her memory were the times she was kicked in the shins and Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 63 stomach and received neither assistance from a guard, nor medical attention.104 She was frustrated that she couldn’t escape

the “heel-walking committee.” Groups of students would walk close up behind me and step on my heels, generating the most excruciating pain. I would walk faster, but they would catch up and continue doing it. After a while my heels were bleed- ing through my socks. When I went to the office for Band-Aids, the woman on duty turned up her nose and sneered, “If you can’t stand an occasional tap on the heel, why don’t you leave.”105

Finding no immediate support from school officials or from the “Arkansas National Slobs”106 her survival instincts kicked in. She pulled from her reservoir of comfort instilled by her family and church environment. “To keep my focus, I began saying the Lord’s Prayer. I continued to whisper the words under my breath.”107 Those who would denote this coping strategy as transcendence, would readily concur that had the lyrics and videotape of R. Kelly, an R&B vocalist, been recorded in 1957, they would have been quite an appropriate mantra for Melba. She loved to listen to music on the radio. But Kelly’s lyrics were no more than another version of lessons from her home: “I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky, Think about it every night and day, Spread my wings and fly away, I believe I can soar, I see me running through an open door, I believe I can fly.”108 At home, she was encouraged, even compelled, to soar to the limits that opportunity allowed. At home, she was urged to knock down any door that, for irrational reasons, prevented her entrance. In Pearlin and Schooler’s vocabulary, Melba, with a considerable degree of success, used the device of “selective ignoring” to control the meaning of her stressful experiences after they occurred so as to buffer herself: “which is typically attained by casting about for some positive attribute or circumstance within a troublesome situation . . . in ignoring that which is noxious by anchoring his attention to what he considers the more worthwhile and rewarding aspects of experience. One’s ability to ignore selectively is helped to trivializing the importance of that which is noxious and magnifying the importance of that which is gratifying.”109 Melba had to keep foremost in her mind that the Central High experience was a stepping-stone to a glorious future. Because she saw the situation as an open curtain for her performances of utmost importance, she was willing to play the game of hard knocks, and even endure physical attacks that she interpreted as blows to her poise and beauty more than to her self. It is more embarrassing for one on center stage or on the model’s runway to trip, to fall, to have a blemish. What Melba was uniquely able to do was to construct and reconstruct reality. She treated the incidents of antagonism as temporary interruptions in her quest for success and fame in life. That capability of “trivializing the importance of that which is noxious and magnifying the importance of that which is gratifying” accounts for what several fellow Little Rockians had to say about her and her “ fiction” in Warriors Don’t Cry. Mrs. Abrams, Little Rock civil rights legend, has concluded that Melba is “out for profit and self-promotion.” That personality 64 ● The Little Rock Crisis quirk probably accounts also for the fact that Mrs. Bates’s book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock has the least data on Melba, of all the Nine. To Mrs. Abrams, Mrs. Bates and many others, Melba gave the impression that she was posturing herself in a fictive present role in order to attain her future goal. Her actions were based on her belief that, through short-term crisis endurance, long-term payoffs would result. Physically, Melba was at Central High, but in her imagination, she was on a stage receiving personal applause. Melba’s penchant for twisting facts to suit her story turned her companions away from meaningful personal relationships with her. Two of the Nine expressed dismay over “too much fiction and too many lies” in Warriors Don’t Cry. Questions were raised about her claims. “When did she become a Civil Rights Activist?” “If I’m a ‘friend,’ how did [that] escape our telephone conversations?” It was apparent to one interviewee that Melba’s dreams were realized in her daughter—tall, sleek, fair-skinned, with a model’s figure. Nevertheless, thirty years after 1957, Melba would bitterly describe the sadistic treatment she and the other eight received, comparing their lives to jello—worthless and dispensable. Those understandably angry and bitter recollections have been slightly made less painful as she is now quite receptive to requests for autographs, speaking engagements and praise for her heroic endurance of Little Rock’s 1957 school year. Her current way of breaking down the racial barriers is to immerse herself in the white community, arguing that that marginalized people have a more criti- cal view of American culture. For Melba, the Little Rock integration experience “forced me to live my life as a marginal woman, in two worlds—white and black—by virtue of my early experience with the McCabes [the white Quaker family in California with whom Melba lived after 1959] and my marriage. But I see that as a distinct advantage, for it has allowed me to know for certain that we are all one.”110 More recently, she adopted two boys with whom she may share her experiences, pass on her view that the fight for civil rights can now be shifted “to a more dignified battlefield,”111 and explain why she, retrospectively, would “unequivocally” jump into the cauldron again. Melba’s resolution to make the best of an awful situation parallels the game of reaching for the elusive brass ring. With strategized energy she grabbed at it while on the merry-go-round of desegregation in Little Rock. She, like any American, sought access to whatever her native land had to offer in her quest for personal success.

Gloria Ray If it were not for The Long Shadow of Little Rock and Crisis at Central High, Gloria Ray, as one of the Nine, would be, in Elizabeth Eckford’s words, a mere “footnote.” That very absence of data, however speaks loudly about the youngest of the Nine. Her disappearance, as it were, from Little Rock at the end of the tumultuous 1957–1958 school year at Central High, the fact that nearly nothing in those books speaks to any semblance of closeness with the other eight (not that that should have been expected), and her quiet attitude despite the assumption Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 65 that the first year of desegregation thoroughly traumatized her, are treated as symbolic of her “dancing an attitude of calmness.” As an excerpt from The Philosophy of Literary Form clarifies:

I know of a man who, going to a dentist, was proud of the calmness with which he took his punishment. But after the session was ended, the dentist said to him: “I observe that you are very much afraid of me. For I have noted that, when patients are frightened, their saliva becomes thicker, more sticky. And yours was exception- ally so. Which would indicate that, while the man in the dentist’s chair was “dancing an attitude of calmness” on the public level, as a social facade, on the purely bodily or biological level his salivary glands were “dancing his true attitude.” For he was apprehensive of pain, and his glandular secretions “said so.”112

Gloria’s appearance of calm during the 1957–1958 school year does not dis- count her astute awareness of Little Rock as a setting of institutionalized rac- ism. She looked at the Central High young bigots as simply products of their environment. Recognizing she too was a product of her environment, know- ing her own values, beliefs, weaknesses and talents, she readily understood what made them do the things they did. All she had heard, secondhand, from her home and community, about the behavior of white people, didn’t pene- trate until she met it, felt it, tasted it for herself. Once at Central High, she was able to see firsthand how a vile tradition cherished by a society could trickle down to its teenagers. Her relatively quiet attitude didn’t often make the news, because she wanted no parts of situations where emotion replaced reason. She was studious. She had a roadmap laid out for her life and future. Her prag- matic parents had groomed her, her brother, and her sister for self-sustaining careers. The brother was exceptionally brilliant in math and science. Calculus was mastered by him while a junior high school student. Gloria had learned to accept his eccentricities. He once put snakes down neighborhood girls’ backs to frighten them. Everyone knew he was able to use a knife, and that a gun or two were to be found in the Ray house. Gloria’s older sister had domestic talents and an affinity for young people. Those gifts steered her into teaching Home Economics, and the education of elementary children in Little Rock. In the late forties, she would also be one of Gloria’s Sunday School teachers at Bethel A. M. E. when the church was on Ninth and Broadway. The Ray children benefitted from the wisdom of a father who had reached retirement age as Gloria, his “baby,”113 was entering junior high school. The “ serious-minded”114 Mrs. Ray displayed a no-nonsense demeanor. Both parents encouraged their children to strengthen their individual wings so they would soar, become independent and productive citizens. They expected that the lessons they taught at home would reflect in their children’s conduct away from home. They hammered in day-to-day precepts, the likes of: “Be neat. Be clean. Dress nicely and appropriately. Do your homework. Cultivate your God-given 66 ● The Little Rock Crisis abilities. Be respectful. Be punctual. Do your best.” From this environment developed Gloria’s pragmatic success-oriented personality. Gloria, the youngest sibling, the selected sixth-grade princess of May Day festivities, the consistent academic honor roll student, was not one to annoy or disobey adults. She was “[d]elicate in stature, . . . as meticulous about her attire as she was about her studies,”115 self-sufficient, and exceptionally bright. And then she was assigned to Central High for her sophomore year of high school. She had unswerving expectations of mastering all the science classes offered. But there she met The Big Lie. There the princess was a pariah. There, the Ray “baby” was a “Nigger bitch,” an anathema. What happened? How could these people have such a different attitude to her? What was the reason for them to despise her? How dared they treat her so rudely? In mid-October, a boy who had been calling Gloria a nigger in her homeroom for over a week, and had even threatened to kill her, shoved her as an assembly was adjourning. Her homeroom teacher saw to it that he didn’t bother her again in or near the classroom.116 But in December, “the boy from her homeroom who had given her trouble before had again bumped her, this time as she went to her locker, slamming into her hard enough to knock her across the hall and into the lockers on the other side of the hall.” Once identified and brought before the dean, the boy’s reasoning was that he had been “fighting niggers” since he was five years old.117 Another boy “attempted to lasso Gloria with a rope fashioned into a hangman’s noose.”118 Gloria resented the gall of these people whose behavior could well destroy her goals. Who were they to humiliate her by twisting the latch off her locker, spraying water into her eyes, pushing her down a stairway, daily blocking her passageway to classes, shouting imprecations at her? Several positive responses to Gloria manifested themselves at Central High as well. At least twice teachers came to her rescue during an altercation. Her biology teacher would intercede, requesting permission for Gloria to take her final exami- nation earlier, since the “tempo of harassment” was increasing as the school year was coming to a close.119 And one senior girl described Gloria as “very sweet. We asked her to play on our softball team.”120 Studying in the midst of all the disruptive, unwarranted personal turmoil, Gloria excelled:

In January, Gloria Ray came in on that Wednesday to ask whether she might apply for membership in the Beta Club, the national honorary society, which required a B average and good citizenship. Our school bulletin had announced that tenth graders who qualified might apply; and certainly Gloria qualified. I told her that I would ask Mr. Matthews; and that if his answer was no, it would not be because either he or I thought that answer was right, but because it was necessary if we were to operate the school.121

Despite no recorded response to her request, it is doubtful that Gloria expressed resentment of this or other disruptions in her academic achievement. Her “danc- ing an attitude of calmness” was detected by her peers, as Melba informs us: “Her all-knowing eyes grew even more intense as she spoke in softly measured Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 67 words.”122 She would be quite selective in speaking of atrocities she experienced because she was considerate of her father’s heart condition. Her mother would cushion Gloria’s anxieties and minimize the details communicated to her father. When Mrs. Ray received warning and threatening phone calls about Gloria, she lulled herself into disbelief saying, “this was only a new form of intimidation they were trying.”123 Gloria endured many days, not allowing abuses to take on too much signifi- cance. In the school halls she avoided known troublemakers, many times unsuc- cessfully. As the school year was ending, “Gloria, who though she had known remarkable courage all year, now seemed really frightened. The war of nerves— and physical knocks—was getting to her.”124 At least once, she “took refuge in [Mrs. Huckaby’s] office during her lunch period. She was scared of getting soup thrown on her.”125 And when relating the incident when she was sprayed in her eyes with a water-gun, she was overcome with such intense fear that she cried unawares.126 Gloria was an individual who needed to be recognized as such. She didn’t develop the knack of rolling with the punches as Terrence did. She didn’t vent like Minnijean. She didn’t suffer for stardom’s sake. She was neither the psyching- out type, nor the muddling-through type. She was Gloria, incapable of accepting assessments of her that were ignorantly and narrowly formed. What her “all-knowing eyes” recorded of the iniquitous, ignorant, and foolish behavior she faced, was boldly transferred into her science project that earned recognition as “admirable.” The project “proved by her knowledge of science that the white segregationists’ claim on superiority exists only in warped minds.”127 However, such knowledge can be unsettling when the “warped minds” seem to run amok, and Gloria still hasn’t been able to make sense of that running amok. Those “all-knowing [teenage] eyes” didn’t appreciate the sweltering condition in the cauldron into which their innocence was thrown. To her, “the Nine were guinea pigs.” In her estimation, “the Nine should have gotten more emotional and financial help, for in those days money in plenitude came to Little Rock. What did Mrs. Bates do with it? The Nine got none of it.”128 Her scant respect for Mrs. Bates must have been hidden behind those “eyes,” for Mrs. Bates had felt a warmth for Gloria. However, Gloria didn’t relish sitting next to the “limelight lady.” The unwanted, unreal attitudes that converged toward her taught her to put a good distance between that element and herself. She had too much to do with her life to waste it on the ignorant, on those who couldn’t get beyond narrow-minded assessments of her. She married a Swede, and now lives in Sweden and the Netherlands, returning to Little Rock only a few times, solely to tend to family.

Terrence Roberts The eldest among seven children of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Roberts was awarded a PhD in Psychology from Southern Illinois University in 1976. In 1992, he was Assistant Dean of the School of Social Welfare at the University of 68 ● The Little Rock Crisis

California at Los Angeles: “In addition to a general psychology practice including individual, family and group therapy, Dr. Roberts conducts workshops and semi- nars in the areas of Stress Management, Effective Communication, Managing Human Relationships, Confronting Racism, Team Building, Management Skills, Managing Racial and Ethnic Diversity, and Self Growth and Development.”129 Based on his current career, a backward 20–20 look suggests that Terrence’s talent for delving into the minds of humans was always in the making. He brought to Central High in September 1957 a propensity for pensiveness, questioning, and observation. He could easily have been the model for Auguste Rodin’s sculp- ture, “The Thinker.” Even at the tender age of fifteen, while an eleventh-grader in high school, he had figured out how humans could coexist amicably in American society. Unlike his buddy Jefferson Thomas, who was one year behind him in school, and chose to roll with the brutal punches of the youthful segregationists and absorb the bad with the good, Terrence sought out the good, the humanity in others. Good, he was convinced, was embodied in and personally available to all of humanity. From all indications, Terrence has not wavered from that opin- ion. His experiences have confirmed, over and over again, that when the good in humans is unleashed and allowed to soar, contrary behaviors cease. For example, at the beginning of the second semester at Central High, a chastising rabble-rouser, who had been suspended in October “for kicking the black boys [Terrence and Jefferson] and knocking the books from their arms,”130 challenged Terrence to a fight, alleging that Terrence had called him an SOB. Terrence had taken the threats of getting beaten up after school; he had been shoved into lockers; he had been pushed down stairs; the steam had been turned up when he showered after gym class. But he wasn’t willing to take such violent, threatening and frightful behavior indefinitely. He considered quitting because his adherence to non-violence was receiving no support from those in positions of authority. He could see through the smokescreen of adult do-nothingness. He felt sorrow for their spinelessness. Where was their authority in the midst of mob behavior? How could they choose to do nothing in retaliation to witnessed, not reported second- hand, physical violence? Would their dilemma, if they were to lend a hand, be more detrimental to them than the dilemmas he faced daily were to him? Terrence’s mind sought answers to these disturbing questions after no recourse was taken against two boys who kicked him. Overnight, he changed his mind about quitting. His feeling of sorrow for the spineless adults didn’t change, however, for Terrence dis- cerned that what he was experiencing at the hands of the high-school students was puppetry—they were being manipulated by the strings of their adult creators. Those creators could turn blind eyes to physical abuse for senseless reasons. He decided that no spineless adult, and no “pip squeak” puppet, was going to turn him away from accomplishing the righteous goal of desegregation.131 When Terrence wasn’t putting into practice his philosophy of humane coexistence, he was intellectualizing about it and wrestling with resolutions to problems of interaction. As of 1982, he hadn’t discovered enough satisfactory answers to the questions: How do individuals acquire the selves they become? How is it that a racist sentiment can develop in some and not in others? In what Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 69 degrees and why does racism manifest itself? Do I know any African American racist people? What personal rewards or benefits are derived from racism? Isn’t one’s mental health adversely affected by racism? Does common sense disappear when an individual is “judged” by the negative attributes of a group? Are we capable of “judging” individuals of a group by the positive attributes of the group? Wouldn’t one’s humanity prevent him/her from projecting onto another some generalized, stereotypical characteristics? How would such a stereotyper feel if the same were done to him/her? If the self is a product shaped by others, how can those “others” be reached and made to realize the social crime they are committing? An interview in 1982, with the subheading: “Terrence Roberts remains angry about racism,” reported that Terrence was not optimistic about the possibility of an America, sometime in the future, void of racism:

Terrence Roberts is now 40, but the last 25 years have not blunted his anger over racism in America—and in Little Rock. “People talk about how the blacks have made progress, but this has been for a privileged few.” Roberts quickly concedes that he is among them . . . . “It boggles the mind when you consider the talent, ambition and potential of blacks. We have all this diversity and yet it is still a tremendous struggle for the slightest gain.”132

Coping with racism at Central High in 1957 fine-tuned Terrence’s attitudes on tensions between people of different races. He searched for ideational factors that would make him understand or at least appreciate the reasoning behind racism. Facing irresolvable questions, he, like the other Nine, had to find within himself a way to deal with the unexpected hostility from whites. In the teenage vernacular, his way was to “psych you out.” In the jargon of psychologist Lykes, Terrence opted for a combination of two coping strategies: “indirect instrumental” and “purposeful indirect.”133 Terrence, without being confrontational—cognizant that the odds were against any attempt at physical self-defense—resorted to attenuation in the face of brutality or stress, idealistically impressing upon his adversaries to rethink their intentions and “Do the Right Thing.” He lived the thoughts he thought. “He . . . could be counted on to give the funniest, most intelligent analysis of any situation. I adored his way of always humming a cheerful tune when he wasn’t talking.”134 And, “Terrence, with his high intelligence and sense of humor, held his head high and attended to matters in hand without inviting trouble.”135 Those trying sur- reptitiously to figure out what made Terrence tick, would more than likely learn something about themselves, as did the rabble-rousers who commented on how much “nerve” he had. He had a way of diverting focus from himself, to the inner being of the onlooker. Accordingly:

Terrence Roberts’ English teacher, Imogene Brown, had come in during the morn- ing to tell me that she had observed an act of hostility toward Terrence for the first time in her class. She had looked up in time to see a girl throw a wad of paper at 70 ● The Little Rock Crisis

him. Mrs. Brown made no comment at the time, but kept the girl after class to ask her why she had thrown at Terrence. The girl said it was because he stared at her. Mrs. Brown said that Terrence’s behavior in class was always correct, that the only time she had seen him look in this girl’s direction was after her missile struck him, and that the class as a whole ignored him. Terrence went quietly on his way, making top scores on every test and written assignment. Now, throwing paper wads is often an attempt to get someone’s attention. I won- dered about this girl’s subconscious feeling about Terrence. He was a tall, good- looking boy, with an intelligent, mobile face and an attractive smile. Could this girl be resentful of her true feeling for Terrence?136

Perhaps the girl was like all “children who, of course, want everything almost indiscriminately and certainly want what they cannot have, often for reasons hard to comprehend. They slowly learn, though—learn why, or simply learn that there is no why—that they must obey the arbitrary law of their parents’ whims, fears or attitudes.” Perhaps, her mind was “at least as devious as the world.”137

Jefferson Thomas Ironically, the bullies of Central High were motivated by the same factors as was Jefferson Thomas; all of them were stewing in the same cauldron. They were uneasy and fearful about the changes they faced. The white racist bullies feared a drop in their social position of supremacy. Jefferson, too, was plunged into cul- tural shock at Central High: all of his prior schooldays he had been a prince, but now he was a pauper. To physically and emotionally survive in this new and lowered position, he had to pull out all the stops, including some that had never before been unplugged. Jefferson’s days at elementary school had been spent at the segregated Gibbs School, named for the first African American municipal judge in the nation, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs. When in sixth grade there, he was chosen to be the prince of the May Day festivities (Gloria Ray, another of the Nine, was the princess). The two of them would be in the public eye together again in the winter of 1958, when a picture of them was snapped while they were touring the University Medical Center’s biochemistry department. Three of the criteria for selection were high academic achievement, teacher recommendation, and commendable participation in extra-curricular activities. Jefferson retained his well-rounded character throughout his life, excelling in sports, academics and leadership. His attraction to and excellence in track events and swimming in particular were indicative of his self-motivation, personal drive, and competitiveness,—all part of his primary quest for personal achievement. His many positive attributes—tolerance of other’s differences, spirit of coop- eration with figures of authority, and being goal-oriented and self-motivated— earned him the admiration of his peers and teachers. Among his individualistic traits that contributed to his being generally admired were that he was a private person, not inclined to be very vocal or physically aggressive, and he possessed a Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 71 high endurance level. Psychologists say that such attributes are shaped by a child’s position among siblings; Jefferson was the youngest of seven children. Those same attributes sent a different signal to the Central High segregationist bullies who chose, rather than to become acquainted with the talented new- comer, to force him into the social position their mythical racial superiority had deemed appropriate for him. He was supposed to remain poor and dependent on the white man’s miniature favors. He was supposed to be dumb, ignorant, stupid. He was, to them, nothing other than a sex-fiend who wanted to deflower their pure white women.138 He was supposed to be a strong “buck” only fit for hard labor that would yield personal profit for the white man. Dark-skinned Jefferson’s obvious admirable traits had all to be discounted, as his adversaries attempted to force him into the mold they had designed for him. Consequently, Jefferson became “the one singled out for the segregationists’ wrath.”139 The singling out accelerated after their successful pressuring of the volatile Minnijean Brown, leading to her expulsion. Then a plan of the active segregationists emerged: concentrate on one of the Nine at a time. Jefferson was selected as the second target whom they would try to push out of Central High. “Jefferson’s difficulties came mainly from his tentativeness, a manner that tor- mentors often respond to with cruelty.”140 His non-antagonist demeanor fed the need of the bullies. His body language indicated his nature of non-violence. The bullies liked that because if he wouldn’t fight back, they could get their “kicks” out of him. They needed to physically harm him to feel better about themselves— to feel strong, tough, alive, and invincible. They would be the admired ones when Jefferson was put at a disadvantage and made the object of ridicule. To some extent, Jefferson was abiding by the directives given to him and the other eight before they were accepted as unwanted enrollees at Central High, to turn away from rather than respond to taunts; however, he was essentially a coop- erative sort with a non-retaliatory disposition. But the taunts kept coming. He’s the first to admit that he tried to avoid the big bullies, and that he felt no cow- ardliness in running away when he was outnumbered. He knew his body weight of a little over a hundred pounds was no match for the aggressors. Jefferson will also admit, as he did in September 1997 at the University of Toledo, that he wished to retaliate against those whom he knew he could physically undo. But he had pledged himself to non-violence. Feeling defenseless, he along with Minnijean and Melba came to believe in late October, when the federal guards were released, that a personal guard would be to their benefit. Jefferson’s innate attractive nature couldn’t help but surface. A “dainty little baton twirler” of Central High was able to recognize that he was special. Though she had found interaction with Minnijean Brown wanting, she didn’t project a unilateral view that an African American would be “not my type of person” onto Jefferson. “She said she really enjoyed hearing Jefferson Thomas make a book report in her class. She could just listen to him for hours. ‘He’s really smart.’”141 How did Jefferson Thomas translate the actions of the bullies toward him? How was he able to cope with what his cerebral analysis identified as unwar- ranted behavior that was purely an extension of the endemic racism that existed 72 ● The Little Rock Crisis in Little Rock and America? How then, did this fifteen-year-old African American male, with a name that reversed that of the principal author of the country’s Declaration of Independence, cope? What motivated him to endure and avoid the atrocities within the halls of Central High? Jefferson realized that his primary goal, of getting an education that would enable him to achieve his youthful aspiration to become an architect, would not be helped by physical retaliation. His logic told him that if he didn’t take the bad with the good, that if he fought back, that if he didn’t transform personal anguish into moral virtue, he would quite likely be suspended from school. For that to happen would be a disappointment to himself as well as to those to whom he had pledged not to give Central High cause to expel him. At times, he had to open a valve within to passively avoid anticipated hard- ships. A characteristic example was: “Jefferson Thomas came in to ask whether he could study in my outer office, as he sometimes did to get out of the hostile halls at noon. I took him back to my inner office and asked him whether he wasn’t going to eat lunch. He said he didn’t want any.”142 Ever one to test his personal limits, Jefferson sought and was granted enroll- ment at Central High for the 1959–1960 school year. Segregationists were still on the warpath. Carlotta Walls, the only other African American assigned to Central High that year, was out of town on the first day of school. Jefferson sum- moned his courage, and prepared to face antagonism alone. Elizabeth Eckford, the one of the Nine who knew what that meant more than anyone else, volun- teered to accompany him; however, plans changed and Jefferson, as though repeating Elizabeth’s lonely walk, met a howling mob. Two years had not dimin- ished segregationists’ voracious appetite for displaying racial hatred. (As fate would have it, once in the military—he was drafted in 1968 and spent a year with the Army in Vietnam—by sheer coincidence while stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, he again met Elizabeth Eckford who was also in the army.143 The masterchef of desgregation, Brown, had afforded Jefferson what educa- tion is designed to provide—a journey toward knowledge and self-discovery. Motivated by “intra-psychic phenomena,” his individualized, goal-oriented defense mechanisms sustained him sufficiently to endure a volatile situation. He put his experience of conflict resolution and his understanding of the racist mindset of his teachers and classmates to use in the long term, avoiding confron- tation wherever possible. His style of coping worked. In 1960, he became the second African American to graduate from Central High at Little Rock, Arkansas. He has found fulfillment in remaining a private person while supervising a research department of Defense Finance. When his guard was down, Jefferson Thomas’s “sense of humor was subtle, the kind that makes you giggle aloud when you’re not supposed to.”144 That humor is evident in his account of

the day that the young white hoodlums were yelling loudly: “Two, four, six, eight. We ain’t going to integrate’” (But we were saying, just as determinedly under our breath, . . . “eight, six, four, two. Ten to one, we bet you do.)”145 Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 73

Carlotta Walls To get the best education available, to attend the school closest to her home, hav- ing been “taught to take every opportunity to improve myself,”146 Carlotta, the youngest of the Nine, entered Central High in 1957 as a sophomore. At fourteen years of age, she saw herself as a doctor in the future, and had been convinced by her parents and teachers that she was as good as anyone. She lived with her par- ents and her two sisters in a neighborhood more integrated than any of the other Nine. Consequently, she knew some Central High students before becoming their classmate. She was the fairest in complexion of the Nine, with dark, natu- rally curly hair that was straight at the roots. At first glance, one might mistake her for a white, and this assuredly contributed to her being the “most generally accepted” among the Nine.147 She had other unique traits: “Carlotta Walls was an athlete, very sleek and wonderfully energetic. Everything she said or did was quickly executed. She was a girl-next-door type, always in a good mood, always ready to try something new.”148 Additionally, Carlotta was the kind of person Ralph Waldo Emerson would have admired. She was self-reliant. She gave the school administration no cause for reprimand. She did her homework. She brought to the cauldron the philosophical attitude that if she did her part, handled her own problems, and did not allow herself to get too concerned about what others did or said, the diverse mixture of people, their ideas, ideologies, and attitudes would melt into a delectable dish. In retrospect, she would say, “I didn’t want to hear about the magnitude of what we were doing. I just looked at school as a job I had to go to every day.”149 Pearlin and Schooler would have applauded Carlotta’s strategy, as she came to a “surprising” conclusion in identifying and examining “the most effective and least effective responses” to occupational stressors: “self reliance is more effective in reducing stress than the seeking of help and advice from others.”150 Carlotta was not the tattletale type, and she would not ask for the aid of others to solve her problems. In fact, she would have to be persuaded to report to the administrators incidents of aggression against her and the other eight. She was even able to find some humor in one episode:

Under my prodding, however, she finally mentioned some boys and a girl or two in her biology class who said unfriendly things to her, and two boys in her English class who threw paper wads and small objects at her when Mrs. Means wasn’t looking. One of these boys was extremely small for his age, and it seemed to amuse Carlotta, somehow, that he would throw [things] at her. “He’s so little,” she laughed.151

She did her part in handling her own problems. She resisted hitting a girl who made her miss eating lunch one day. “That girl,” as she was identified, dropped a handful of milk-bottle caps and soiled paper napkins in Carlotta’s food. According to Mrs. Bates:

[Carlotta] pointed her finger at me and added emotionally, “I don’t care what you say. One of these day I’m going to knock the hell out of her!” A few days later 74 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Carlotta related another incident. “Today I was walking down the hall. In fact I was nearly running. That girl was trying to keep up with me. I turned suddenly and stepped on her foot. But hard! I smiled at her and called her a few choice names, and I told her what I’d do to her if she didn’t leave me alone. And each time I saw her after that, I smiled, pretty like. And you know what? She didn’t come near me anymore today.”152

The solving of that problem, “quickly executed,” and communicated emphatically to an adult, signifies both her mistrust of (or belief that there was no need for) administrative intervention in her behalf, and her resolve to nip problems in the bud. The foot-stepping incident sent out the clear message that she would take only so much repetitive abuse. That girl apparently got the message. With her characteristic perpetual positive attitude and “good mood,” Carlotta applauded a white boy who had wrongly accused her but later accepted responsibility for his actions. This boy had participated in the October walk-out of students supporting segregation that was sponsored by the Mothers’ League, and asked his homeroom teacher whether “a nigger girl had a right” to elbow him. Upon interrogation, however, he admitted that the elbowing had not been intentional.153 Even though experiencing a great amount of abuse—much of it within the classroom (particularly biology class), groups of students stepping on her heels while she traversed the hallways, bottle caps and a soiled paper napkin tossed in her food, bruises on her legs from being kicked, trippings on the stairway, being hit with a tomato, obscene and abusive language directed toward her, boys bumping into her hard enough to spin her around, and verbal threats to her life—Carlotta earned academic honor roll recognition in the last grading period of the 1957–1958 school year. Her accomplishment, under such adverse circum- stances, further attests to her reliance on self to do whatever it took to do her part, her “job.”154 But for all of her self-reliance, she tended—in 1957 and even as recently as September 1997—to minimize the severity of the unpleasant experiences, as if to disallow any penetration into her psyche. Finding all words insufficient to recre- ate the true essence of the Central High experience, she resorted to an understate- ment, “It wasn’t a very easy time.”155 In addition to her high self-motivation and self-reliance, and her tendency to play down potentially stressful occurrences, the multidimensional Carlotta also used a technique of directing attention away from herself. This effective strategy was evident even years later, in two instances. At the conclusion of the January 1992 Oprah Winfrey Show, Carlotta was sympathetic toward her segregationist co-guests’ rationalization that they had “brought up” to believe all the negative stereotypes of African Americans. Accepting their explanation of their erroneous views, Carlotta challenged them to do their part to “break the chain.” Operating on the premise that, because of the Little Rock crisis, they now knew that some of what they had learned in their insulated environments was inaccurate, she asked what they were going to do about eradicating the misconceptions? She challenged them to ponder how they, Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 75 as individuals, could stop the perpetuation of racism. That’s the same sort of question she asked her self-reliant self when faced with a dilemma. She recog- nized some of America’s ills that needed changing, and asked herself: What can I do to alleviate the stress, the ignorance, the pain? In the same show, when she discussed her two children’s inability to “comprehend the violent racism of Little Rock in 1957,” she stressed that her “emphasis now in raising my children is to see that they are exposed to as much as possible.”156 In a second instance, as she recalled the desegregation crisis, Carlotta down- played her involvement and diverted the attention to others who had been on the same battlefield. Her accounts of their horror, their mental anguish, their func- tioning in the maelstrom, their “dancing an attitude of calm,” served to make points about herself. Expressing her emotions came easier when she was speaking of other persons:

[Carlotta] LaNier did get emotional when she explained that during one of these talks she remembered for the first time the death of a white police officer and his wife. Little Rock officials claimed it was a double suicide, but LaNier thinks they were probably murdered because he had helped the black students by warning them about possible dangers.157

Carlotta was not quite correct on one aspect of that tragedy. Newspaper accounts presented a different view:

The hero who stood down the mob on its way to Central High survived only a few months. Under relentless pressure from angry segregationists, Gene Smith slowly came unhinged. He began to drink heavily. More than once, including a night when he had driven into a ditch, acquaintances in the state police removed him from his car and quietly drove him home. He blamed leaders on all sides for his problems but was especially angry at Faubus. He got out of bed one day, picked up his pistol, [Mrs. Bates records that Bill Hadley had given Smith his pistol, and that was the one used in the murder/suicide] and told his wife, “I’m going out to the mansion and kill Orval Faubus.” She stopped him. Added to the pressures of poli- tics and work were a number of personal problems. A son was arrested for burglary in another town. His marriage was troubled. Finally, about midnight on March 16, 1960, after a long quarrel, he got the pistol that he had wanted to use on Orval Faubus and killed his wife. He walked the floor into the early hours of the new day, then turned the gun on himself.158

When neither of the two strategies to turn attention from herself seem to make an impact, Carlotta resorts to talking in platitudes. Though several of her sagacious suggestions for the remedy of racial conflict are noteworthy and realis- tic, the lofty ones ring hollow with idealism. She knows, like the other eight, that the ideal and the pragmatic are at oppositional poles, and if the twain ever meet, America will have experienced a miraculous meeting of heart and mind. She would idealistically proclaim on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “For this world to 76 ● The Little Rock Crisis stay on course, we have to learn to get along with each other.” Further, she believed it must be true that “We changed the course of the nation,” because today, “You’ll be talking to people and they will say they can’t believe it hap- pened in the U.S. . . . I took [my children] around Central High the last time we went back . . . But it’s hard for them to understand that as a black you couldn’t go to the school of your choice, or swim in the city pool.”159 The pho- tograph that accompanied an article in People magazine, of Carlotta and her family basking in the family swimming pool, subtly implies through its caption—“I was always taught to get the best out of life”—that one of the limited ways in which African Americans can get the best out of life is through acquiring material possessions. In response to the question that all of the Nine have been asked—Would you expose yourself again to a crisis similar to the one you survived?—Carlotta does not hesitate to repeat: “Deep down, I’d have to say yes, I’d do it again. I’d have to say yes, I’d do it again. We changed the course of a nation, we really did.”160 However, that’s her answer retrospectively. In 1960, when she graduated from Central High, “My number one goal was to get above the Mason-Dixon line . . . I ‘got lost’ in the crowds after three years in the public eye.”161 Her being in the public eye had been partly the result of a mysterious incident:

Early in 1960, the home of one of the Central High black students, Carlotta Walls, was bombed. There were no injuries. Faubus could barely contain his satisfaction when the culprits turned out to be two Negro men. They were sentenced to prison. Faubus and others speculated that the event had been staged to draw contributions for the Walls family.162

Once above the Mason-Dixon line, according to Carlotta, she ran into discrimi- nation again: “The discrimination was different at MSU [Michigan State University]—minor compared to what I had been through, . . . ” But it was bad enough for her to give up her dream of medical school because counselors kept advising her against it and a faculty member accused her of cheating, not willing to believe that LaNier was capable of writing the ‘A’ paper she had turned in.163 But Carlotta Walls LaNier survived, both in the desegregation cauldron of Little Rock between 1957 and 1960, and after, because she has been blessed with a repertoire of varied coping mechanisms.

Epilogue by D. LaRouth Perry I’m grateful to Dr. Vincent Harding for our discussion on whether one might refer to the Nine as pawns or pioneers.164 He favors the latter. I would like to as well, and do, to the extent that their endurance did achieve desegregation. However, a thorough look at their experience during the crisis and since, leads me to see “pawn” as equally accurate. Miraculously, they weren’t visibly physically maimed for life; none of them was killed; and eight of them are alive over fifty years later. There is something to Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine ● 77 be said for these three facts; I just don’t know what it is. They survived, while many other youthful instruments of racial justice didn’t. But their carefree youth- fulness was stolen. Their academic achievements were thwarted. Their jovial high-school days could be counted in less than two digits. They didn’t need a citizenship class; they lived it. They learned more about social studies outside of the formal classrooms than inside. They were treated and used as test cases in the implementation of a Supreme Court decision. They were little more than pawns in a game of power. They were martyrs for their African American communities. During the desegregation crisis, they faced fear. They were brave. They absorbed the physical taunts. They made history. They sacrificed. They were sac- rificed. They dug deep into their reservoirs of stamina just to be able to stand amidst adult and peer hecklers. Their abusers dug deep to try and make them fall. Did their hecklers ever see the similarities to themselves as they spewed their venom on the Nine? They had both been duped: the Nine unsuspecting into a living hell, the bitter segregationists ignorantly equating themselves with the socially superior one-fourth population of the white planter aristocracy who in their heyday had been slave owners. The young hecklers were duped by their environment to try and reestablish that orally transmitted myth of white superi- ority. The Nine were duped into being agents of cultural change. The ordeal of the Nine was a local manifestation of the larger American cultural phenomenon of racial inequality. What they endured in Little Rock on a daily basis was “micro”—only in the sense of the nation’s “macro” racial inequality, not in the sense of the horrors they faced. They had to manufacture temporary calluses to cover the wounds of each day. They experienced firsthand man’s inhumanity to man. Are they any less victims than battered children? In what trunk, attic, garbage pail, or sea can the memories of these ordinary, yet extraordinary, teenagers be tossed? Beginning this project, I was plagued by the question “What Price Glory?” I’m still plagued by it. I haven’t yet arrived at what debt, if any, a society owes its cultural victims, and the question continues to recur. If the Nine’s pioneering accomplishment is so laudable, what has happened to the inherited tradition from as far back as Beowulf where what was achieved in the name of a nation is celebrated by its people with songs, poems, honor, and recognition as heroic? Where are the scoops to tell and retell the story? In all fairness, perhaps the Nine being invited to tell their story to sundry audiences is the modern-day version of celebrating an admirable accomplishment. Most of the Nine still talk about their experiences, even though they lack the compulsion of the Ancient Mariner whose experience had transformed him and for whom the urge to retell his story over and over again was irresistible. Is the element of a personally gratifying, spiritual conversion the missing component in the case of the Nine? In present times, it would be unrealistic to expect them to follow the African griot tradition. The Nine’s pyrrhic victory has meant that, in the absence of material gain or under- written expenses, they are not likely to share their insights. Of course, their pri- vate lives must also be respected. 78 ● The Little Rock Crisis

Whatever the position of the Nine today, there can be no question about the memorable individual and collective sacrifices they made to help America see that moral law supersedes all other forms of law. If due credit is given to them for their pioneering role in an era of consciousness-raising, then their ordeal in the cauldron at Central High will not have been in vain. It takes time to make a palatable stew; hopefully, it will not take forever.