Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine

CHAPTER 3 Sacrifice: Profiles of the Little Rock Nine hen the African American youths who had been selected to desegregate Central High in Little Rock arrived for the first day of school on WSeptember 4, 1957, they immediately became targets of white segregationists. 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 activities 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 withdrew 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 circumstances 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 personal 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.

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