Arkansas Blog

The only thing I couldn't imagine is why did blacks wanted to associate with whites, and that is, were they not getting a good education in their schools? If not why not? Was the state not spending the enough money educating blacks. I figured they were happy being in their own schools.
I remember being told that our football team played the black schools' team one time and beat them over a hundred points.
I also remember that lots of kids from central came to finish school at our school.

I've tuned out to most of this hoopla. It always seems odd to combine the two words "anniversary" (which, to me, implies a happy celebration) and "crisis" (usually a traumatic event) but I guess whether this is a celebration or whether the occasion was traumatic depends on whether you were the jeerer, the jeeree or the mute bystander.

In 1957, I did not live in Little Rock and did not have any black friends, so I would probably have fallen in with the passive segment wanting to keep it peaceful but trying to keep a low-profile that Ralph Brodie seems to describe. If things got out of hand around me, I would have been inclined to choose to help the underdog but that's easy to say 50 years later.

I am curious about what really got the nine kids to take that final step into the harsh spotlight. I guess I'll have to actually start reading some of the articles to see if the "valor" displayed by the nine students was a voluntary decision of their own or whether they were just the pawns of activist parents, willing to put their braver children at risk to accomplish a positive, long overdue social change.

My God, chasv. What world do you live in?

Don (and chasv), if you want to know why the nine students wanted to go to Central and what it was like for them there, try reading Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals.

Crawl out form under your rock, chasv, and go to the library. They''ll give you a card free of charge. There's lots and lots of stuff there.

WhiteKnight: I have a really short attention span - unless this is a brief article, is there a condensed version somewhere?

Was the state not spending the enough money educating blacks? I figured they were happy being in their own schools.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

No the state wasn't spending "enough" money educating blacks. In Little Rock go see the comparisons of Central to Dunbar at the current Central High Visitor Center.

And as for being "happy" in your "own" school -- there's happy being with your friends and colleagues; and then there's unhappy seeing kids a skin color lighter get MORE of everything in the way of education.

IT'S ABOUT EDUCATION!

Don't bother trying to get chasv to do any reading, hugh...

Would probably rather burn the books than read them...

Poor soul...

Just more bigoted, racist crap from the "holy" wingnut...

When the hell are youse going to get it, and IGNORE the mindless claptrap from chasv so he'll just GO AWAY?!! He's never said a single thing that I've read that would pass 7th-grade muster.

Suppose he'll have the 'nads to show up at Max's fall "gathering?"

I have every reason to believe that if I had been in LR in 1957, I would have been one of those angry white kids yelling at the blacks. I don't really think I'd go so far as to spit or throw a brick at them, but my own personal enlightenment about racial problems came upon me long after high school.

Here's the Cliff Notes for chasv and Don, LR Central Crisis for Dummies.....yes the LR 9 were put up to going to Central. It was intended for them to break the racial barrier and see that Arkansas schools followed the dictates of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), which said it was illegal to have separate but equal schools (like they were ever equal) and that US schools must be integrated.

After all 3 whole years had passed, Charleston, Arkansas schools were integrated IN 1954 while the rest of Arkansas just kinda pretended not to notice. It was 1964 before Fort Baptist schools were integrated, our black population apparently lacked the willpower of the activists in Little Rock.

I can only speak for FS when I say I went to new schools with other white kids and the black kids around here went to 80 year old dinosaur buildings......so I well remember there was separate, but weren't no equal going on in Fort Smith.

Anyone who has ever been a parent can see how it would feel to know your kid was getting a grade D education while another race sucked up all the A list stuff. And the lessons learned in LR in 1957 kicked the whole civil rights movement in the butt and helped integrate the rest of the nation faster. A LR Central Crisis was going to happen somewhere in America in the 50s, we just got lucky or unlucky depending on your view point.

Celebration is an odd term for it, but it's fitting. This September will mark the anniversary of a life changing moment for our country. An event that made us who we are today. End of history lesson.

The troubling thing to me is seeing 1957 America repeated again today with our new Mexican neighbors. The same damn mistakes of the past are swirling around our heads as I type. Rogers with it's new paramilitary INS police force. Fort Baptist with it's English only bill in the docket. The ugly looks I see white people giving little Mexican kids.......people on this blog wanting to pull them little brown kids out of our schools by the hair of their heads.

What next? Spitting, throwing rocks at them, lynching, Boss Womack turning the dogs and the water hoses on Mexican workers leaving Tyson's? Fort Compassion has a new rule that allows a Yard Nazi storm trooper to march right into your house without a warrant to see how many people are sleeping in each bed. It's directly aimed at our Hispanic population who are in some cases overcrowding rent property.....just like the Vietnamese did in 1975, just like the Cubans in 1981, the blacks after the Civil War, the Irish and the Chinese immigrants before them.

So we may celebrate and commemorate, but we never seem to get any smarter. But let's at least try.

you're about right rosso some books aren't worth wasting time to read.

I think you may be a little hard on Hazel Massery, Max. I believe I read where continually reliving her actions in 1957 at gatherings with Elizabeth Eckford was too emotional for her and they ceased doing the programs. Ms. Eckford said she understood, as I recall. As Will Counts' book reported, Massery didn't want her life to be summed up by that picture, but the emotional strain of reliving those events time and again became too much for her. If Ms. Eckford accepts that, so do I.

Here's the Cliff Notes for chasv and Don, LR Central Crisis for Dummies.....yes the LR 9 were put up to going to Central.

NO! The nine were not PUT UP to going to Central. Each of them decided, individually and without the input of their parents to sign up to attend Central in the fall of '57 rather than continue at brand-spanking new Horace Mann High School for Negroes.

They weren't the first--Charleston, Fayetteville, and Hoxie came before--but they weren't the last, either. And it was THEIR perseverence that finally convinced Eisenhower to send in the Army to uphold the Constitution and let some kids get an "equal" education.

Great post historian. Charleston was first I recall without ruckus and Fayetteville followed without ruckus. However Justice Jesus Jim Johnson got involved in Hoxie so it was a near shoot-out. JJJJ is still proud of his actions today on the basis of states' rights.

Chasv, once again, I have difficulty believing you are not a fictional character having us all on.

If not, then I'm amazed that you could think the education offered to black and white Arkansans up to integration was equal. I'm white, and can't speak from or for the black experience.

But even as an "outsider" to that experience, I could see that 1) textbooks from white schools were recycled for use in black schools when they became too tattered, worn out, and outdated to use in white schools, 2) furniture from white schools was recycled to black schools when it was too broken down and antiquated to use in white schools.

I believe black teachers did a heroic job trying their best to teach under almost impossible circumstances. Those I have known from the pre-integration period, and those with whom my aunts taught after integration, were, on the whole, exemplary teachers and exemplary human beings.

But the resources they were given to teach with were disgraceful, as was the condition of many black schools. There were showcase black schools in some few communities, but around the state, on the whole, black schools were in deplorable condition.

I'm as amazed at your lack of knowledge of all of this as your assumption, on another thread, that teens weren't having sex and getting pregnant before the 1960s.

There is one thing about this blog I got you all off your donothings and got your blood boiling... That is what I do best... That is the way to test the atmosphere so to say.
There was no comments 'till I wrote mine. You all are just a bunch of stiffnecks ready to pounce on any comment to rip it apart to make yourselves fill good about yourselves.. sorta like a do gooder does.
Did all of you feel the same way when those nine were intergrating back in '57? If I were a betting man I'd bet you didn't feel the same. We all have changed our opinion since that day.
I am glad to see you all are still kicking.

"yes the LR 9 were put up to going to Central."

I perhaps worded that wrong. What I meant, according to what I've read over the years, the Little Rock 9 were aware they were part of a movement. They didn't accidentally walk into the wrong school the first day. That in no way makes them less heroic, in fact, probably knowing before hand the fire storm they were going to walk into make their action more heroic.

My mother and father had a memorable experience related to Central's infamous crisis. They had graduated from a segregated high school (elsewhere in Arkansas) in 1956 and attended college one year. Then my father decided to join the Army and went into the 101st. As a young married couple, probably sometime in 1958, they drove back across Arkansas, returning home from Fort Campbell, KY. Somewhere in eastern Arkansas they stopped at a typical cafe for a meal. Daddy was wearing his 101st Airborne uniform. He had not been in the 101st when they were sent to Little Rock, but the incident had been recent.

According to Mother, they went in a took a seat in the restaurant. Some time passed, a little longer than usual, while they waited to be brought a glass of water and asked for their food order. More time passed. Then an awkward span of minutes went by and still no waitress came to their table. Confused and a little put out, they left and drove on.

Mother said they were maybe five miles down the road, still puzzled, when they realized that it was all about Daddy's uniform. No one EVER would have come to wait on someone in the uniform of the 101st Airborne, the soldiers who came and enforced the desegregation. She said in that small instance, brief but never forgotten, they both understood for just a moment what it must be like to be discriminated against, to be ignored or poorly treated because of bigotry. But they also knew while Daddy could change his clothes and order a chicken fried steak, the kids in Little Rock had to live in their own skin, always.

It was a story she told much more eloquently than I have, but I have never forgotten it. My parents always acknowledged that the world was different as they were growing up, but I appreciated that she tried to share with me that bigotry is wrong-minded whether it is about race, religion, economics, gender or politics.

I suspect that chasv is like a character from a Rod Sterling episode. He stepped off somewhere back in the 1950's and stayed there, except for the car he drives and maybe his tv and now a computer.
All else is the same. No growth, no evolving, just a static person from 1957.

Chasv, you ask, "Did all of you feel the same way when those nine were intergrating back in '57? If I were a betting man I'd bet you didn't feel the same. We all have changed our opinion since that day. "

Since I was in second grade at the time, you're right, I've changed my opinions. But I do have some crystal-clear memories of the events, from a second-grader's perspective.

I remember heated discussion around the dinner table on Christmas day that year. I remember one of my aunts, a teacher, saying, "If I were colored, I'd be out there marching for my rights, too. But since Daddy was a segregationist, I'm a segregationist, too."

I remember being baffled, in my child's mind, by what seemed to be a, shall we say, lapse in logic in that observation. It has stuck in my mind. "Daddy", by the way, was born in 1869 on a plantation in Alabama.

I remember asking that same aunt--the only one of my family who was an ardent churchgoer--why God had made some folks black and others white. She told me it was in the bible, and that black folks simply couldn't do anything about it, since they were paying for a long-ago sin. Something about a son of Noah, Ham, who uncovered his father's nakedness when Noah was drunk and Ham was turned black and all his descendants were doomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for the rest of us.

It's in the bible, chasv. I'm sure you'll know the precise passage.

Yes, my opinions have changed quite a bit over the years. Like most white Southerners of my generation, I was raised to be a racist. Like most white Southerners of my generation, I was sure that my little worldview was commanded, ordained, and blessed by God, and that it was all somehow in the bible.

Thankfully, somewhere along the line, I began to realize that the world is a much bigger place than that tiny little world of my upbringing, and that God is a much bigger being than the little puppet we pull out when we need something to bless what we've already decided to believe, anyway, no matter how hateful and how hurtful that belief may be.

I got you all off your donothings and got your blood boiling... That is what I do best... Posted by: chasv
********
Methinks you flatter yourself a bit much . . .

10-4 good buddy. I bet none of you are telling the whole truth about your thoughts back there. We know the beginning of all this from history books.

I am a 1971 graduate of LR Central. We lived in the shadow of 1957. The LR school board tried to kill our school by building up Hall by treating Central the same way that Dunbar was treated. I have heard from LR Central educational staff that 1971 was the low point in Central's history.

We all sufferred together, whites and blacks. We learned how to be a community and friends. We stood together and did not let the school board divide us.

My point is that the Little Rock 9 deserve all the credit that they can get. But they were not the only ones paying a price for integration. Faubus shut down the LIttle Rock schools the next year. The entire LR Central senior class of 1959 lost their senior year and graduation because they tolerated integration.

One may want to criticize those white students who said nothing. A white student being freindly to blacks in 1957 was considered by many to be a traitor to one's race. Simply deciding not to hurt the Little Rock 9 and continue to go to school with them was not a cowardly act. The racists who came to stop the Little Rock Central integration made death threats to those whom they considered to be traitors to their race. Let us not forget that some whites who fought for integration were killed in the 1960's is Mississippi.

Integration is a community term. We should celebrate what the Little Rock 9 did. And we should celebrate that students, black and white, learned to live together and become a community at Little Rock Central. My class of 1971 is just one example.