| The Little Rock Nine |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|03:48 pm] |
I've been re-reading the book The Fifties by David Halberstam--I got it on Amazon a few years ago, thinking it was another book about the '50s that I'd read years ago--when I realized it was a different one, I perused it but didn't pay too much attention. Mom snaked it out of my bookcase when she was here a few weeks ago so I picked it up again.
Very interesting book that deals with trends/themes/etc. chapter by thorough chapter. One that's struck me is the on Little Rock--I think it's especially poignant now, with all these people claiming "I'm not a racist..." and then saying or doing racist things.
The facts: 3 years after the Brown decision, nine kids were hand-picked to integrate Central High in Little Rock. Elizabeth Eckford was one of those nine. She showed up for the first day of school (well, she and the others should've been there before then--there were legal shenanigans, injunctions, etc., anything to block these kids' ingress). However she didn't realize that the meeting place had changed--Daisy Bates, the head of the NAACP wasn't able to contact her because the Eckford household had no phone. So this little slip of a girl shows up--all alone. She sees the soldiers, the Arkansas National Guard, ostensibly there in case of violence but in reality their purpose is to keep the black kids out. She sees the Guard letting in the white kids--as she tries to follow them through, they block her entrance. Not understanding, she makes her way to another entrance, and another--the same thing happens. There's been a crowd gathering of militant segregationists--men, women, old people, teenagers--who start following this little girl. Yelling unbelievable things. Unbelievable things. To this 15 year old girl, who just wants an education.
Elizabeth Eckford maintained her dignity throughout all of this--behaved with a superhuman control, although I can't imagine her terror. She finally went over to the bus bench and sat down--a reporter helped her and she made her way home. Eventually, finally, the kids were able to get in--the drama had subsided but the war was just beginning.
It's important to know that Little Rock was actually relatively racially moderate, as Southern cities went at that time. And even more bizarrely, so was Orville Faubus, the Arkansas governor. This is a man who's gone down in history as the proto-George Wallace, a racist, arch-conservative demagogue and yet believe it or not, until the Central High events started shaping up, he was actually quite moderate.* It's--appalling or disgusting, or discouraging, to realize that his actions, which helped create what could've been a fatal crisis, were completely politically motivated. He was not a racist ideologue. He was facing re-election and wanted to defang the segregationists who were going to be challenging him. (And it worked. He was re-elected several times after that.) I don't even know what to say about a man who throws nine schoolchildren to a howling mob, a moder-day Pontius Pilate, just to be re-elected. Like, are you even a human being after that? Elizabeth Eckford could've been killed--easily. Her life was in danger. There were people--more than one--calling for her lynching right then and there, in front of the cameras and microphones. This was the most dramatic episode, but those nine kids were criminally harassed--taunted, stalked, physically attacked--throughout the entire school year. God bless every last one of them. Teenagers? I don't think I could've withstood that at 15. Jesus. How does a teenager have that kind of courage?
*Interestingly, Eisenhower was more racist than Faubus, although he absolutely would've been one of those oblivious types who denied it. The book recounts an interesting episode when a black guy at the U.N., I think it was Ralph Bunch, was going to be honored and Eisenhower was leery of attending the function--because, he said, he thought other people might boycott it, other people might be uncomfortable. He finally was pushed into it, and was stunned to see the function was completely uncontroversial and everyone supported the guy wholeheartedly. Truly oblivious to his own bias. He ended up pulling the rug out under Faubus NOT because of Faubus's actions towards the kids, but because he had gone back on his word to Ike--this bajillion-star general wasn't going to tolerate insubordination.
Although, not that this is to Ike's credit, when he finally did sign Executive Order 10730 (which federalized the Arkansas National Guard) and sent in the 101st Airborne--now the soldiers were on the side of the kids, not the racists--things progressed somewhat awesomely. The book talks about how the soldiers marched up to Daisy Bates home, where the kids were, and saluted the mothers and said "ma'am, we'll bring your children back here at 3:30." Minnijean Brown, one of the nine, said "for the first time in my life, I felt like an American citizen." Which makes me want to cry.
I think people like this morally bankrupt JP in Louisiana want to look at things like this--at one of the most egregious examples of racism on display in this country's history--and comfort themselves, "I'm not like that. I would never do that. That's what racism is." If you'd asked those people yelling those epithets if they were racist, this is what they would say: "No, I'm not a racist. I would never murder blacks, I just don't want them in my school." But thought, feelings, words and actions are all a continuum, you can't compartmentalize. And just because you're not actually doing the worst, doesn't mean you're not contributing to and reinforcing the attitudes that help create the worst.
And not only that, the weird thing is that most of the harassment of the Nine was by a relatively small group--I think Eckford said it was 55 kids out of a pretty large school population (1500? 2000? Something like that). Any white kid who showed any decency to the Nine was also subject to harassment (and the reporter who helped Eckford at the bus stop was practically run out of town). There's something really vile that 55 kids can hold an entire school hostage like that--truly illustrating that "all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." |
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