University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 

When Ernest G. Green and seven other Black students waded through ahostile White mob, mounting the stairs of Little Rock Central High School, they soon learned the banner hanging above, "Welcome Back Tigers," did nor apply to them. They couldn't get past the front door. Met by 250 Arkansas National Guardsmen with their bayonets drawn, the sign might have read "No Blacks Allowed" as they watched the troops let the White students pass.

A ninth student, Elizabeth Eckford, 15, attempted to enter Central that day, Sept. 4, 1957, on her own. She, too, was denied. "The Little Rock Nine," as they became known, were eventually ushered unto the school by police escort--the first Black students to integrate the previously all-White school.

The Little Rock crisis showed that despite a favorable Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case three years earlier, the road to desegregated public schools would be a rocky one. Arkansas Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus, a one-time moderate, decided that if he was going to get re-elected, he would have to harden his position on race. Under the guise of protecting the Black students from carloads of White supremacists, he called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the Black students from enrolling.

"I think up until the time that Faubus decided to play the resister that it would have bumped along with minimal [opposition]. He raised the level of protest. He gave support to the most avid segregationistsand created this huge conflict,'' remembers Green.

During a Labor Day press conference, Faubus had declared, "blood will run in the streets," if the two sophomores, six jurors and Green, the only senior, from the all-Black Horace Mann High School, were allowed to transfer to all-White Central.

All of the students, except Elizabeth Eckford, had convened at the home of Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and editor-in-chief of the Arkansas State Press, that first day of school and arrived at Central High by car. Eckford, however, had not received the message that they would meet beforehand and arrive as a group. They were at one end of the school, 14th Street, and Eckford was at the other end, on 16th Street. Eckford marched through a jeering, taunting White mob, like a lone unarmed soldier in the war against segregation. As she neared the front of Central, she begged one of the guardsmen to take her into the school. She got no response.

"She tried several times to pass through the guards. The last time she tried, they put their bayonets in front of her," Benjamin Fine, education editor of The New York Times, recalled in Bates' The Long Shadow of Little Rock (which was recently reissued by The University of Arkansas Press). "For a moment she just stood there trembling. Then she seemed to calm down and started walking toward the bus stop with the mob baying at her heels like a pack of hounds. The women were shouting, 'Get her! Lynch her!' The men were yelling, 'Go home, you bastard of a Black bitch!'"

Eckford eventually made it to the bus bench and was comforted by a White woman, Grace Lorch, who helped her onto the bus and saw her away to safety.

Green's decision to leave Horace Mann High School, which was about 35 blocks from his home, to attend Central, just 12 blocks away, was not without cost. He forfeited his last year at a school where he was popular; his younger brother, Scott, and all of his friends were left behind and he would no longer lead The Jazzmen, a school ensemble in which he played tenor saxophone. At Central, none of the Black students would be permitted to engage in any extracurricular activities--including team sports, service and social clubs, or the school marching or swing bands. Nor would they be allowed to run for a student government office or attend school dances.

Looking back, Green, who is now managing director for the Washington, D.C., office of Lehman Brothers, an investment banking firm, says if he had it to do again, his decision would have been exactly the same." The tough decisions are usually the ones that have more lasting change," he explains. "I had basic ideas that I was wedded to. One, it was my right to be there; and two, my folks pay taxes to support it; and three, that Little Rock in a segregated environment wasn't the best situation for me and I wanted to change that."

So did Elizabeth Eckford, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Minniejean Brown, Melba Pattillo, Terrance Roberts, Thelma Mothershed and Gloria Ray. Gov. Faubus, however, was opposed to that idea.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower requested that Faubus comply with federal law, but the governor refused. On Sept. 23, instead of protecting the Black students, who with police assistance had entered Central through a side door, Faubus suddenly withdrew the state troops. The mob immediately became more violent, and the city police left on duty, were unable to keep them at bay behind the wooden sawhorses. Just as quickly, the nine students were led to the basement, placed in two grayish-blue Ford automobiles and the drivers were instructed: "Once you start driving, don't stop."

After the narrow escape, Eisenhower made a televised address to the nation, saying, "Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts." By nightfall, the president had ordered more than 1,000 riot-trained paratroopers from the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division to Central High School to restore order. The following morning, the "Little Rock Nine" successfully entered Central High School.

"Any White students who attempted to befriend us was intimidated by the segregationist element. They were threatened," recalls Green. "At that time, to be called a 'nigger lover' was something short of death; so the rightwing of resistance threw up a real gauntler to make sure we had no friendly contact with White students."

When they got into the school, each of the nine students were assigned a soldier. Green says, "They would go with us from class to class. They would have their sidearms. They would wait for us outside the classroom door and they'd walk us through the hall." By November, the troops were withdrawn. And with them went some personal protection. "We knew we were exposed," remembers Green. "We were exposed to a lot of physical danger."

In the course of the school year, their vulnerability became apparent. For example, during a noon break, White students threw their lunch contents at Mothershed, knocked her books from her arms and kicked them down the stairs. Another day, two boys blocked Eckford's path, and as she attempted to pass, they shoved her down the stairway. On more than one occasion, Green stepped into the gym shower, and got a bloody gash on his foot from broken glass "accidentally" littered on the floor. Then a group of boys kicked and beat Thomas in a deserted hallway, throwing a garbage can on top of him as he lay helpless on the ground. And shortly before the Christmas break, Minniejean Brown was expelled.

Four of the "Little Rock Nine" were in the cafeteria. Brown was behind Ernest Green in the lunch line, when a White boy who had repeatedly made rude, derogatory comments to her, whispered something in her ear. Brown was very tall, and her harasser was no more than 5 feet 5 inches. He reminded Green of a small dog, yelping at somebody's leg."

"This guy continued to call Minnie a series of 'niggas,' and just as I was about to turn around and yell .Minnie, 'Don't hit him,' that's when she picked up the chili and poured it over his head," Green recalls with amusement. "It was an act that arose from being fed up with all the violence and hostility that we were receiving. Then there was absolute silence in the place. And then the support staff, which was all Black, began to clap."

At the end of that tumultuous school year, on May 29, 1958, Ernest Green graduated, the only Black in a sea of 601 White students. "No longer could anybody say that Central High was an all-White high school and that it had never graduated a Black student," Green recounts with pride.

"That night at graduation, in which Dr. King sat with my mother, aunt and my brother and grandfather, [after my name was called] there was silence. Only my family clapped and I really didn't care if the others didn't clap. The fact that I had gotten through that year and graduated made me feel like I had accomplished something. I felt that, even though in listening to all the students being recognized for scholarships and various honors and all of that, even if I didn't get any special recognition, I had achieved the goal that I had set out to achieve.