In Little Rock, the black activists hoped to resolve the impasse at the injunction hearing on September 20. But Governor Faubus challenged the jurisdiction of Judge Davies, who was only temporarily assigned to Arkansas; ordinarily he presided in North Dakota. The magistrate rejected the challenge and proceeded with the case, causing the governor’s lawyers to protest and storm out of the courtroom. Thurgood Marshall was heard to mumble to his fellow NAACP attorney Wiley Branton, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Judge Davies immediately ordered Faubus to remove his armed forces from around the high school. That night, Faubus went on television and announced his compliance. He also asked blacks to stay away from the high school until he could arrange for peaceful desegregation. Then, to most everyone’s surprise, he left to attend a conference of southern governors in Sea Island, Georgia. While he was there he took in a football game in Atlanta, where, according to Time magazine, a fellow governor described him as in a happy mood: “He’s really lapping up the glory. There were 33,000 people at the game, and every time they cheered a play, Faubus stood up and bowed.”
On Monday morning, September 23, the Little Rock Nine gathered at Daisy Bates’ home to await word from the city police on how they would get to school. Also waiting were four black journalists. The police called shortly after 8 A.M. to tell Bates they would escort the children through a side entrance of the high school, hoping to avoid the angry crowd gathering in front of the building. Bates told the reporters of the plan and advised them to drive to the school.
Reporter Alex Wilson was attacked September 23, the first day the black students entered the school. He was hit on the head with a brick.
The black journalists arrived at Central seconds before the students. As the four got out of their car, the 8:45 school bell rang. Suddenly, someone in the throng of hundreds of whites yelled, “Look, here they come!” The reporters had apparently been mistaken for parents escorting their children to school. About twenty whites began to chase the men down the street; others soon followed. Newsman Alex Wilson chose not to flee and was savaged. “Somebody had a brick in his hand,” remembers James Hicks, another of the journalists, “and instead of throwing the brick, ’cause he was too close, he hit Alex Wilson up the side of his head … Wilson was more than six feet tall, an ex-Marine—he went down like a tree.”
Time magazine later reported that “a cop stood on a car bumper to get a better view of the fighting. Faubus henchman James Karam [the state athletic commissioner] … cried angrily, ‘The nigger started it.’”
Meanwhile, the three boys and six girls under police guard got out of two cars and calmly walked into the school’s side entrance. “Look, they’re going into the school!” someone shrieked. “Oh, my God, they’re in the school!” People screamed, cursed, and wept at the sight.
With the students out of reach, the mob turned its anger on white journalists on the scene. Life magazine reporter Paul Welch and two photographers, Grey Villet and Francis Miller, were harassed and beaten. The photographers’ equipment was smashed to the ground. The crowd began to chant to the white students now staring out of Central’s windows, “Don’t stay in there with them.”
Before noon the mob had swelled to about a thousand people, and Police Chief Gene Smith felt compelled to quell the rioting by removing the black students from the school.
“I was in my physics class,” remembers Ernest Green, the one senior among the nine black students. “A monitor came up from the principal’s office [to fetch me] … the other eight [black students] were [in his office]. We were told by the principal that we would be sent home for our own safety. The police were having difficulty holding the mob back at the barricade, and they said if they broke through they could not be responsible for our safety.” The youngsters were escorted home safely, and Daisy Bates told reporters that they would not return to Central until the president assured them they would be protected.
Still at Sea Island, Governor Faubus said, “The trouble in Little Rock vindicates my good judgment [in sending in the National Guard].” In Washington, President Eisenhower termed the rioting a “disgraceful occurrence.” Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann, fearing that city police could not contain the crowd if they should return the next day, called the Justice Department. He asked that the president consider sending in federal troops to enforce the court order and keep the peace at Central High. Eisenhower issued an emergency proclamation ordering all Americans to cease and desist from blocking entry to the school and obstructing the federal court order to desegregate Central.
The next morning, as Mann had expected, another restless mob of segregationists outnumbered Little Rock police at the high school. The mayor again telephoned the Justice Department. This time he formally requested the aid of federal troops.
At Eisenhower’s orders, that evening more than a thousand members of the 101st Airborne Division flew to Little Rock Air Force Base from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The Arkansas National Guard was also mobilized, but this time, they were ordered to defend the black students. “President Eisenhower was very loath to intervene,” recalls attorney general Brownell. “He wanted so much to have the Brown decision enforced without confrontation wherever possible … It was really a great struggle in his mind before he reached a decision that he had to intervene in order to carry out his constitutional duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision.”
That night the president went on nationwide television to explain why he was using federal troops, as the segregationists would later put it, against American citizens. “To make this talk,” the president began, “I have come to the President’s office in the White House. I could have spoken from Rhode Island, where I have been staying recently, but I felt that, in speaking from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson, and of Wilson, my words would better convey both the sadness I feel in the action I was compelled today to take and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course until the orders at Little Rock can be executed without unlawful interference. In that city, under the leadership of demagogic extremists, disorderly mobs have deliberately prevented the carrying out of proper orders from a federal court … This morning the mob again gathered in front of the Central High School of Little Rock, obviously for the purpose of again preventing the carrying out of the court’s order relating to the admission of Negro children to that school. Whenever normal agencies prove inadequate to the task … the president’s responsibility is inescapable … I have today issued an executive order directing the use of troops under federal authority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock … Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement … Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts … [Most southerners] do not sympathize with mob rule. They, like the rest of our nation, have proved in two great wars their readiness to sacrifice for America. And the foundation of the American way of life is our national respect for law.”
The federal troops surrounded Central High School. Little Rock police, who in the past few days had jailed more than forty people on charges of “inciting to riot,” continued to arrest small groups of white men near the school. In the city’s black neighborhoods, people were unnerved. As one news reporter later described it, “the Negro districts [were] uniformly dark and silent; where a house was lighted, the lights were switched off at the approach of the car.” Police watching Daisy Bates’ home followed a car that drove slowly past with its lights off. Minutes later an officer returned to the darkened house to report that police had discovered dynamite and firearms in the vehicle.
The next morning, the Little Rock Nine again met at the Bates house, this time to be escorted to school by federal troops. “There was more military hardware than I’d ever seen …,” recalls Ernest Green. “The colonel in charge of the detail escorting us to school was from South Carolina. He had a very thick southern accent. He went to great pains to assure Mrs. Bates and the other parents that he was there to provide protection … It see
med so incongruous that this guy with a deep southern accent was going to provide us with our protection … it was going through my head, ‘This dude really ain’t going to be looking out for me too tough …’”
The First Day at Central High: An Interview with Melba Pattillo Beals
One of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals entered Central High as a junior. She attended San Francisco State University and, after receiving a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, worked for six years as a news reporter for NBC in San Francisco.
There was no thought on my part, on any of our parts, that our going to Central High would trigger this terrible catastrophe. I wanted to go because [students at Central] had more privileges. They had more equipment; they had five floors of opportunity. I understood education before I understood anything else. From the time I was two, my mother said, “You will go to college. Education is your key to survival.” I did not have an overwhelming desire to integrate this school and change history. Oh, no, there was none of that.
My getting into Central was almost an accident. I simply raised my hand one day when they said, “Who of you lives in the area of Central High School? Who has good grades?” I had excellent grades. It was an accident of fate. I was sitting in Cincinnati, Ohio, with my mother when Walter Cronkite came on television and said that in late August, Central High School in Little Rock was going to be integrated … and these were the children who were going. He mispronounced my name. My mother said, “What did you say?” And that was it … Then we came back to Little Rock and I began to be involved in the NAACP’s preparations.
The first time, the first day I was able to enter Central High School, what I felt inside was stark raving fear—terrible, wrenching, awful fear. A fear that I cannot explain to you. There are no words for how I felt inside. I had known no pain like that because I did not know what I had done wrong. You see, when you’re fifteen years old and someone’s going to hit you or hurt you, you want to know what you did wrong. Although I knew the differences between black and white, I didn’t know the penalties one paid for being black at that time.
On the first day, the kinds of things that I endured were parents kicking, parents hitting, parents throwing things. You would get tripped; people would just walk up and hit you in the face. And you couldn’t hit back. We had been instructed that any attempts to hit back, to respond, to call a name would mean the end of the case.
They separated us. The school officials said to us, “You want integration? We’ll give you integration. We will separate you.” And so, in a school of 2,500 or so, they sent us nine different ways. My homeroom was, I believe, number 313. That meant I had to go up, by myself, three flights of stairs. The only way I could get up those stairs was to say the Lord’s Prayer repeatedly. And that’s how I got there. I could not look to my left or my right.
I’d only been in the school a couple of hours and by this time it was apparent that the mob was overrunning the school. Policemen were throwing down their badges and the mob was getting past the wooden sawhorses because the police would no longer fight their own in order to protect us. We were all called into the principal’s office and there was great fear that we would not get out of this building … Even the adults, the school officials, were panicked. A couple of the black kids who were with me were crying. Someone made a suggestion that if they allowed the mob to hang one kid, then they could get the rest out while they were hanging the one kid. And a gentleman, whom I believed to be the police chief, said, “How are you going to choose? You’re going to let them draw straws?” He said, “I’ll get them out.” And we were taken to the basement of this place and put into two cars, grayish-blue Fords. The drivers were told, “Once you start driving, do not stop.” They told us to put our heads down. So the guy revved up the engine and came out of the bowels of this building and as he came up, I could just see hands reaching across this car. I could hear the yelling. I could see guns. The driver didn’t hit anybody, but he certainly was forceful and aggressive in the way he exited this driveway because people tried to stop him. He dropped me off at home, and I remember saying, “Thank you for the ride.” I should have said, “Thank you for my life.”
By this time, 350 paratroopers lined two blocks of Park Avenue in front of the school. Major James Meyers spoke to the gathering mob from a sound truck. “Please return to your homes or it will be necessary to disperse you,” he barked. One small group called back, “Nigger lover.” A man yelled, “They’re just bluffing. If you don’t want to move, you don’t have to.” Then, at the Major’s order, a dozen paratroopers advanced with their bayonets poised, sending the crowd scurrying.
Inside the school, Major General Edwin A. Walker, commander of the federal forces, spoke to the white students at a special assembly. “What does all this mean to you students?” he asked. “You have often heard it said, no doubt, that the United States is a nation under law, and not under men. This means we are governed by laws … and not by the decrees of one man or one class of men … I believe that you are well-intentioned, law-abiding citizens who understand the necessity of obeying the law … You have nothing to fear from my soldiers and no one will interfere with your coming, going, or your peaceful pursuit of your studies.”
The Little Rock Nine were on their way. “The convoy that went from Mrs. Bates’ house to the school had a jeep in front, a jeep behind,” recalls Ernest Green. “They both had machine gun mounts, [and] there were soldiers with rifles. When we got to the front of the school, the whole school was ringed with paratroopers and helicopters hovering around. We marched up the steps … with this circle of soldiers with bayonets drawn … Walking up the steps that day was probably one of the biggest feelings I’ve ever had. I figured I had finally cracked it.”
When the black students got inside the school, each was assigned a bodyguard. “The troops were wonderful,” remembers Melba Pattillo Beals, then fifteen years old. “They were disciplined, they were attentive, they were caring, they didn’t baby us, but they were there.”
Eighty white students had left the school after Major General Walker addressed the assembly, but most of those remaining were very friendly to the nine newcomers. At the end of the school day, paratroopers escorted the black students back to the Bates house. One of the youngsters, Minniejean Brown, happily recounted that she had been invited by her white classmates to join the glee club. Some of the students had asked the black kids to eat lunch with them. Reporters from across the nation interviewed white children at the school. The president of the student council told reporter Mike Wallace that if only the white parents would stay away from the school, there would be no violence. Another student commented, “I think it [the opposition to integration] is downright un-American. I think it’s the most terrible thing ever seen in America. I mean, I guess I’m sounding too patriotic or something, but I always thought all men were created equal.”
Daisy Bates watches as the students leave her home for Central High School. They continued to meet at her home each morning before going to school.
From the first day of the school year, the Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by soldiers.
During a televised speech on September 27, Governor Faubus held up a newspaper photograph to illustrate the violence white people suffered at the hands of the federal troops. He failed to mention that the people were part of a mob threatening to attack the black students.
On Friday, September 27, with order prevailing in the area of the high school, Governor Faubus spoke on statewide television. “We are now an occupied territory,” he said. Displaying newspaper photographs of the troops in action at Central High, he intoned, “Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in these unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls.” Faubus told his audience that a federal soldier had struck one Arkansan in the head with a gunbelt, sending blood streaming down his face. The governor claimed that, if he had been given more time, the situation would have been handled
peacefully. He asked, “Does the will of the people—that basic precept of democracy—no longer matter?”
On September 31, the 101st Airborne troops withdrew to Camp Robinson, twelve miles away, leaving the federalized Arkansas National Guard to insure order. By then many of the more segregationist students had returned to Central High School. The initial, relatively calm reception for the nine black students was replaced by tension and harassment.
In October, four of the southern governors who had been at Sea Island with Faubus visited President Eisenhower. They proposed an arrangement that would keep the black children safely enrolled at Central but also get federal troops out of Little Rock. If Faubus would pledge not to interfere, the president said, he would remove the soldiers. Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina called Faubus, who readily agreed to the deal, saying he would send a telegram to the president outlining his compliance. But the telegram was never sent. “I called him repeatedly,” Hodges remembers. “He refused to take the calls. Later … he made contact with the president and said that he would give a qualified statement that he would not personally [interfere with the black students]. He did not give assurances from the power of his office, as the state’s executive. [White House officials] said they couldn’t accept it. I said, ‘I don’t blame you at all’ … Faubus just turned completely around. He evidently became a prisoner of the right-wing group … that wanted to keep things as they were … He was so personally ambitious to move along that he sensed this point of view, of being against integration, … was probably the most popular thing that would get him votes.” The federalized National Guard remained at Central High.
Faubus received increasing support in Little Rock and all of Arkansas. In early October, he stirred new protests by charging that federal troops had entered the girls’ restroom at Central High. Four days later, 600 segregationists gathered at Central Baptist Church to pray for the governor’s triumph and the troops’ departure.
Eyes on the Prize Page 14
