In Honor of Black History Month
After last week’s horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, it’s tempting to romanticize the past and imagine that obtaining an education was once not as dangerous of a proposition as it is now. However, the young people who led the charge to desegregate public schools in the United States also faced peril as they tried to attend classes. In the 1950s and 1960s, primary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions across the South erupted into violence as civil rights activists asserted African-American rights after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawed segregation in public schools.
A little more than a decade after the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division parachuted behind German lines in Normandy to liberate France from Nazi tyranny, soldiers from that same military unit found themselves protecting nine African-American teenagers as they began the 1957-1958 school year at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. After Governor Orval Faubus refused to cooperate with desegregation efforts and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block the students’ entry into the school, President Dwight Eisenhower mobilized federal troops to escort them to classes.
The iconic photo above is of Little Rock Nine student Elizabeth Eckford, who arrived at Central High by herself on the first day of classes in September 1957. When the guard turned Eckford away at the front door, she headed to the bus stop and encountered a mob. People screamed “Lynch her!” as she attempted to flee. The photo contrasts Eckford’s dignified demeanor under duress with the angry, contorted face of white student Hazel Bryan, who shouted insults and epithets. (Amazingly, Bryan had a change of heart as she grew up, feeling ashamed of the way she treated Eckford that day. She apologized, and the two women became friends for a brief period in the 1980s and 1990s. While Eckford was able to forgive, it was nearly impossible to forget.)
In further defiance of Eisenhower’s desegregation order that fall, Faubus ordered the guard to stand down completely. The result was, after they gained admittance, the students were at the mercy of the angry white mob outside the school that was determined Central High would not be integrated. In the documentary Eyes on the Prize, Melba Patillo Beals, one of the students, recalled:
I’d only been in the school a couple of hours and by this time it was apparent that the mob was just overrunning the school…We were trapped. And I thought, ‘Okay, so I’m going to die here, in school’…A couple of the kids, the black kids, that were with me were crying, and someone made a suggestion that if they allowed the mob to hang one kid, they could get the rest out.
During that year, Eckford, Patillo-Beals, and the other Little Rock Nine students were abused, bullied, and threatened with serious violence. Yet eight of the nine of them made it through the school year. One of them, Ernest Green, graduated with Central High’s class of 1958.
Other students like six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who helped desegregate the New Orleans public schools; James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi; and Vivian Malone and James Hood, who enrolled at the University of Alabama despite Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” made their mark. All these brave students risked their lives so other African-American students coming after them would not have to endure such abuse and hardship.
As we contemplate how to respond in the aftermath of last week’s school shooting in Florida, we should remember that what happens in our schools is always a reflection of the times. The school violence perpetuated by southern segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s was ultimately met with appropriate force. Likewise, we should not consider it a failure if schools in contemporary times need armed personnel to ensure that deranged, violent cowards can no longer prey upon innocent children.
