September 25, 2007
Little Rock, 50 Years Later
A worthy read from Newsweek:
The image is among the most iconic in civil-rights history: a dignified black girl in a prim, white-and-black dress marches through a hostile mob intent on keeping her from school. Fifty years after it first flashed around the world, that image retains its power—evoking sorrow, even anger, that one so young would face such cruelty. Now a 65-year-old woman, Elizabeth Eckford still bears scars from that long, lonely walk as one of the Little Rock Nine: teenagers charged with integrating that city’s finest high school in 1957. “I’m the only one who says I wouldn’t do it again,” said Eckford in an interview at the Little Rock courthouse where she works as a probation officer.This month, Little Rock will commemorate the date, 50 years ago, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort black children to Central High. In that moment, Little Rock became a synonym for hate. After claiming that desegregation would lead to violence, Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to keep black children from attending the school. Meanwhile, the black students designated to integrate Central High made plans to enter as a group. Eckford’s family had no phone, so she never got the message. She came alone, only to be sent away by Faubus’s soldiers and left to the angry mob.
. . .
Mostly, the Nine have flourished. Many got advanced degrees. All moved away—for a while, at least—and Little Rock tried to move on. Mayor Mark Stodola says it’s time to put the past aside. He says Little Rock never deserved its racist reputation and that “the people who want to continue to look to the past are an impediment to where we want to go for the future.” Ralph Brodie, a Central High football player and student-body president at the time of the crisis, says the reputations of many were unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few. Most people at Central were receptive to the black enrollees, he says, yet the world focused on “problem students—25 maybe, a minuscule percentage.” The rest “did everything they could to make that schoolyear work,” says Brodie, a lawyer and member of Central’s 50th Anniversary Commission.
The black students do not remember things that way. “The tone was set by a couple of hundred students engaged in this reign of terror,” says Ernest Green, one of the Nine and an executive with Lehman Brothers. “The silence was deafening. We would have appreciated some of them speaking out when all of this harassment was going on.” Eckford also dismisses Brodie’s point. Those who were silent, she says, are just unwilling to “think of themselves as bad people.”
. . .
The Supreme Court agrees that focusing on past racial wrongs will not yield solutions for the future—as made clear in June by its ruling against voluntary school-desegregation plans. But there is still a point in remembering how we got here, and remembering how determined some people were to keep Americans apart—if only because it reminds us of why it remains so hard for us to come together.
I believe that it was more like a couple hundred students harassing them. If it were only 25 trouble makers the school could have easily disciplined–if not suspended–them. Methinks some revision is going on to make the school and town look better.
Filed under: Education/Schools, Race/Ethnic Issues
