“Mommy, is that you?” he asked.
It was a young actress pretending to be me when I was a little girl, I explained. He was full of questions: Why did the people look so mean? Why were they saying those things to me and my friends? Was I scared?
Brooke was quieter and less curious about the movie, which suited me just fine. But I listened to Whitney and answered every one of his questions. I kept my answers short, child-appropriate, and unemotional. Whitney would be in high school, and our family would be back in Denver before we ever discussed Central High School again.
But after putting the children to bed, I thought about what I had seen on television. I thought the movie had done a good job of capturing the tension and upheaval of that awful year. It was told through Mrs. Huckaby’s eyes, and she was the central character. History had catapulted her into the center of this drama, and she had a right to share her story—something so far from my mind at that time. Actor Joanne Woodward was convincing as Mrs. Huckaby, but I thought the Hollywood character was a bit too compassionate. I respected Mrs. Huckaby because she was fair, efficient, and a great manager. She kept up with us, tracked down the troublemakers who could be identified, and punished them, which drew the ire of the segregationists to her. But I never sensed from her the kind of warmth I saw in the movie. I didn’t suspect that her stern, businesslike manner had anything to do with race, though; it was just her way.
In the days after the movie, I heard from a few friends, mostly those who already knew my story. They said they were amazed by what we went through and didn’t believe they could have put up with that kind of treatment. But the buzz over the movie soon died down, and I again pushed Central out of my mind.
Mrs. Huckaby’s book by the same name was released after the movie, but I didn’t read it. Again, I wanted to stay as far away from that time in my life as possible.
Mother and I didn’t discuss the movie either. She, too, was reluctant to talk about the painful parts of our past. But she maintained close ties to Little Rock. She traveled there more frequently than I, and she had a network of friends and relatives in Denver who had moved from Little Rock. They even formed a Dunbar alumni club. She looked forward to traveling each summer with members of the group to the Dunbar reunion, a huge affair held in different cities every two years. I occasionally accompanied Mother there. Sometimes I saw Mrs. Monts, Herbert’s mother, by then a retired special education teacher. She always updated me on the accomplishments of her nine children: the son who had become a college professor, the one promoted to university dean, and the others excelling in their careers. But when she got to her oldest son, her face lit up as she said: “But I’m especially proud of Herbert. …” He had gotten married, moved to Detroit, and was working in the automotive industry, she said.
I even saw Herbert briefly in the mid-1980s when the Dunbar alumni group in Denver hosted the reunion and he and several of his brothers accompanied their mother. But I was busy helping to coordinate the festivities for the eight hundred alumni who attended, so Herbert and I didn’t get to spend any time together. I knew what I needed to know: that Herbert had refused to let the trouble in Little Rock ruin his life. For years, that knowledge was enough. I didn’t need to know the details of his arrest and prison time. I still believed he was innocent, and it brought me comfort to know that he was all right, that he had somehow found a way to move on.
I thought I had moved on, too. I had opened my own business as a real estate broker and was volunteering as a board member of the Colorado AIDS Project. This was the 1980s, when AIDS was a mysterious disease sweeping through the country, wiping out primarily young gay men in the prime of their lives. Hysteria over the disease was so rampant that our organization didn’t even put the address of our headquarters on correspondence because we feared it might be bombed. A neighbor who was on the board recruited me, and I was eager to try to help relieve the suffering when I saw so many young people dying throughout the country. Discrimination against the gay community was widespread, and those suffering from the disease were often forced from their homes and jobs and abandoned by family members and friends. Our group ran a food pantry and provided case management and a volunteer “buddy” to those who needed companionship and help determining and balancing their health-care needs. Through my work on the board, I found a way to fight injustice. Few knew just how much my own past helped me identify with those who were hurting.
I’d soon learn, though, that burying a painful past doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve moved beyond it. It’s often still there, simmering, waiting for some unexpected moment to erupt, spewing forth every hurtful thing that you thought had gone away. That’s what happened in 1987, when the Little Rock Nine gathered in Little Rock as guests of the NAACP for the thirtieth anniversary of our landmark school desegregation fight. It was an emotional reunion because it was the first time that all nine of us had come together since Central. I’d seen Ernie regularly at Michigan State and stayed in contact with him on and off afterward. I’d seen Terry, Jefferson, and Melba once or twice over the years, too. Several of us also had gotten together in New York to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the groundbreaking 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that had made it possible for us to attend Central High School. I was able to keep an emotional distance from the past in New York.
But keeping those memories buried would be more difficult in Little Rock. I hadn’t been back to Central since I graduated. At first, it felt good to see so much positive change. The student body president of Central—an African American male—greeted the nine of us in the classroom that had served as the chapel and a haven for us in the morning before class thirty years earlier. We also were welcomed home by the new African American mayor, Lottie Shackelford, who had been in Ernie’s class at Horace Mann. But when we moved into the freshly scrubbed halls, I couldn’t escape the old ghosts. The noise, the angry white faces, the slimy spit—they were right there in my face. The next thing I knew, the usually cool, calm, and collected Carlotta was outside, standing under those granite goddesses, gasping for air, unable to stop the tears from flowing. I knew then there would be no stuffing all of that hurt back inside. I had to find a way to make peace with my past.
First and most important, I reconnected with my eight comrades for good. The nine of us spent hours together, catching up on our post-Central lives—our families, careers, and future plans. We exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and promised to stay in touch—a promise I’m proud to say we’ve kept. There are only eight other people in this world who know exactly what happened to us at Central and how it felt. It helped to be able to pick up the telephone and call one of them on a particularly bad day. It felt good to share our evolving lives.
When I returned from Little Rock, I began getting calls from longtime friends, acquaintances, and even neighbors in Denver who had seen a report about the reunion on CNN. They all wanted to know: Why didn’t you tell us?
“I’ve known you twenty years, and you never said a word,” one friend told me.
At a neighborhood Christmas party, one of the neighbors commented: “I didn’t realize we had a celebrity living among us.”
They all assumed I was just being humble. There was no explaining how desperately I had needed to forget.
Several strangers looked up my number in the telephone directory and invited me to speak in their churches, communities, and schools. I didn’t return calls and tried to ignore the invitations. But one history teacher was particularly persistent. She taught at Ponderosa High School in Parker, Colorado, a Denver suburb, and she kept calling. We were peers, she said. She remembered the stories about the Little Rock Nine, and this would be a way to make history come alive for her students. That sold me. I also reconsidered an interview request that I had initially turned down from a reporter at the Denver Rocky Mountain News; I called him back and agreed to allow him to sit in the class when I spoke. That way, I figured, I could avoid a direct interview.
I didn’t have a canned
speech and just talked to the students from my heart. I tried to connect to them by reminding them that I was their age when I made the decision to attend Central. One boy told me my story sounded surreal. There was no way they would not have fought back, several of them said. I talked to them about what life was like for southern blacks at that time. I told them that my eight comrades and I had been ingrained with the knowledge that we were as close as some white people would get to people of our race and that we were expected to maintain our dignity, no matter what. We just had to have faith that justice would prevail. I’d like to think I helped the students put a face on a story they had read in a book and helped them to understand the human toll. But even more, I hope I left them with the message that true heroism starts with one brave decision to do the right thing.
Afterward, I even talked to the reporter, who asked where my children had gone to school. When I told him that they had spent their first years in Jefferson County, one of the top school districts in the state, he recognized that the schools in the district were largely white. I told him that my family had moved out of the suburbs into southeast Denver and the public schools there in 1977. That was too bad, the reporter responded, because white kids needed to go to school with black kids. The reporter, who was white, said he had a child and was beginning to realize how much his child needed to be exposed to people of other races and cultures. I hope I helped him to understand that diversity is at least a two-way street. It doesn’t belong just on the shoulders of African American children and their families. White families who believe in the ideals of a multiracial society have to be willing to make some tough choices and sacrifices, too.
What I didn’t explain was that Ike and I had decided to move out of our neighborhood in Lakewood and back into Denver because Whitney was one of just two or three black students in his entire school. I had lived that experience, and my natural instinct was to protect my child. While he was never mistreated the way I had been, I knew how isolating such a situation could be. Our society—even a place as progressive as Denver—had not yet evolved to the point that race didn’t matter, and I did not want my child to internalize that something was wrong with him because he looked different from his classmates. Ike and I also chose not to move to a largely black section of Denver, either. We wanted Whitney to grow up knowing and interacting freely with people of all races. We moved to southeast Denver, which was relatively diverse. The children in my new neighborhood—white and black—were bused to a school with a predominantly Hispanic population outside of the neighborhood for the purpose of integration. I don’t like busing. As a parent, I would have preferred a neighborhood school. But busing was a means to an end, and that end—integration and diversity—was purposeful enough for me to make that personal sacrifice.
After the speaking engagement at Ponderosa High School, the invitations to speak kept coming, including one from a friend of my son. The two teenagers were at Cherry Creek High School one day when Whitney’s friend read a story about the Little Rock Nine and saw a picture of me.
“Isn’t this your mom?” he asked Whitney.
When Whitney told him that the photo was indeed me, the friend asked if I could come to their school to speak. Whitney rushed home with the invitation, and I, of course, agreed. I began accepting speaking engagements more frequently. I thought it gradually would become easier, but the opposite was true. The more I talked about Central and Little Rock, the more I remembered, and the tougher it got. From time to time, a new memory would come forth from some long-hidden place, and the tears would start to flow. Once during a speech, I mentioned Chief Smith, and suddenly that old headline flashed in my head: POLICE CHIEF KILLS WIFE, TAKES OWN LIFE AT HOME. I suddenly remembered how devastated and guilty I’d felt and how skeptical I had been of the official version of his death. My voice began to quiver, and I had to step outside to compose myself. The flashbacks and tears were scary to me at first, given my tendency toward restraint. But throughout the 1990s, I kept going, kept speaking.
I also tried to stay close to Big Daddy, who in 1995 turned one hundred years old. For his birthday, my sisters and I traveled to the Department of Veterans Affairs home in Seattle, where Big Daddy was living at the time. The staff had a big birthday party for him, and he seemed to be happy. His health was failing, though. Big Daddy had been suffering from dementia for years. He had been forced to close his businesses in Little Rock more than a decade earlier when he walked out one day without locking up and relatives found him lost, wandering around downtown.
By his one hundredth birthday, Big Daddy had been living in Seattle about ten years. His speech was impaired, but he wore a big smile and seemed to recognize my sisters and me. As I looked at him that day, I felt such peace. Big Daddy had reached his goal. He’d told me many times throughout my childhood that he planned to live to be at least one hundred years old. I never forgot that, and I protected him fiercely. When a serious bout with pneumonia had threatened his life at age ninety-seven, it seemed to me the hospital was considering his age and holding back treatment. I sent word to the doctors that my Big Daddy fully intended to live past one hundred and that somebody had better give him antibiotics right away. The medication worked, and Big Daddy recovered.
He survived five more years. On May 1, 1997, Big Daddy slipped away. I was in awe of him. He had lived to see 102.
The year before Big Daddy died, I got word that the city of Little Rock was planning a huge commemoration for the fortieth anniversary of the integration of Central. There was vigorous debate about the appropriateness of such a celebration, whether the city should spend such time and energy focusing on the ugliest chapter of its history. The local chapter of the NAACP even argued that the commemoration was more a public relations stunt than a meaningful effort at racial reconciliation. I disagreed. I thought it was a good idea to recognize the fortieth anniversary in such a special way. I wanted to see Little Rock acknowledge its past, as ugly as it was, but it was equally important to me that participants in the commemoration not get stuck there. I saw it as a positive step that the city wanted to showcase how much had indeed changed.
I called my eight comrades and suggested that we meet to talk. As I saw it, the time had come for us to take as much control as possible of our own legacy. We had been complaining for years about people putting money into their pockets by using our name and images to publicize events that we knew nothing about and to sell all kinds of T-shirts and trinkets. We needed to do what we could to assure that we were educating the next generation about the Little Rock Nine and the importance of education. We needed to make sure that our name was associated with good.
Eight of us were able to meet later in Las Vegas. I pitched the idea of starting the Little Rock Nine Foundation. Through the foundation, we could give back to the community as a group and continue the journey that we had started so many years ago toward academic excellence and equity.
“We’re grown now, and it’s time to stop complaining about people using us,” I told my comrades. “Let’s take control of our own name and get on the same page about what we accept and not.”
We agreed that we would participate as a group in the commemoration. We also agreed to create the foundation as a means to do our part in helping to advance the principle of academic excellence. Several of us volunteered to kick off fund-raising for the foundation by donating a percentage of any speaking fees and honorariums. The group assigned me the task of taking care of the necessary business, including obtaining nonprofit status and establishing our name—Little Rock Nine—as a registered trademark.
I had just started the process of officially establishing the foundation when the fortieth anniversary rolled around. Indeed, the commemoration was as big as we had imagined. A committee had planned more than a week of receptions, lectures, honors, and appearances, which drew a host of dignitaries, including one from the nation’s highest elected office—Arkansas’s native son Bill Clinton, who was nearing the end of his first presidency.
Of all the wonderful events that week, the image in my head of the ceremony at the school on September 25, 1997—exactly forty years after we first marched up the front steps into Central—will stay with me forever. Thousands of people of all races, local residents as well as guests from all over the world, assembled at the school to welcome the nine of us home. They applauded and stood to their feet as we were presented. Then the nine of us ascended the steps to the front entrance of our alma mater. President Clinton and Governor Mike Huckabee were waiting there and held open the door for us—a gesture that touched all nine of us deeply. Forty years earlier, we had entered those doors under the protection of gun-toting federal troopers, against the will of the state’s segregationist governor. Now, the president of the United States and a very different Arkansas governor stood at the door to usher us through. There were few dry eyes among us. This time, though, I was shedding tears of joy.
I was grateful that so much of my family had come to witness the events—my husband and children, Mother, my sisters, Aunt M.E., and others who had supported me as much as they could over the years. I also enjoyed meeting the children of my eight comrades. I wished Daddy and my grandfathers could have been there to see how much things had changed. I especially missed Daddy during a program later that evening at the Excelsior Hotel (now the Peabody), where our parents and Mrs. Bates were honored. Hillary Clinton presented plaques to them. Until that day, our mothers and fathers had never been formally recognized. Melba gave a moving speech about their role.
It was good to see Mrs. Bates during the festivities. I hadn’t seen her in many years. She was in a wheelchair, but she looked well. I’d heard that she had fallen on difficult financial times and even faced the threat of losing her home after the death of Mr. Bates in 1980. That saddened and frustrated me, and I did what I could to help when Ernie rallied to try to save the home where so much of our history had taken place. It eventually was declared a National Historic Landmark maintained by the National Park Service, which allowed it to remain a private residence. When I saw her at the reception, I walked over and embraced her. She had suffered a stroke and had difficulty speaking, so we said little. But her eyes told me that she was happy to see me, too.
A Mighty Long Way Page 26
