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�Withdrawal/Redaction Sheet
Clinton Library
DOCUMENT NO.
AND TYPE
DATE
SUBJECmiTLE
RESTRICTION
001. draft
President William J. Clinton Address at Little Rock Central High
School, 8:30 am draft (17 pages)
9/24/97
P5
002. draft
President William J. Clinton Address at Little Rock Central High
School, 8:30 am draft (17 pages)
9/24/97
P5
003. draft
President William J. Clinton Address at Little Rock Central High
School, 8 pm draft (5 pages)
9/20/97
P5
004. itinerary
Little Rock Central High 40th Anniversary Commission; RE: Phone
numbers [partial] (1 page)
n.d.
P6/b(6)
005. paper
Forty-Four; RE: Phone numbers [partial] (1 page)
n.d.
P6/b(6)
COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Speechwriting
Michael Waldman
OA/Box Number:
14538
FOLDER TITLE:
Little Rock C.H.S. [Central High School] [2]
2006-0469-F
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�v©
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
�Draft 9/24/97 8:30am
PRESIDENT WILLIAM J. CLINTON
ADDRESS AT
LITTLE ROCK CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
September 25, 1997
�Forty years ago, a single image seared the heart and
stirred the conscience of our nation. It is so powerful,
we recall it still. A fifteen-year old girl, dressed in a
crisp black and white dress, wearing sunglasses,
carrying a notebook. She is surrounded by a large
crowd of boys and girls, men and women, soldiers and
police officers. Her head is held high. Her eyes are
fixed straight ahead.
And she is utterly alone.
On September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford walked to
this door for her first day of school ~ and was turned
away by people afraid of change, instructed by
ignorance, hating what they could not understand.
1
�America looked on tho imago of this young girl,
haunted and taunted for the simple color of her skin,
anc^caught a disturbing glimpse of ourselves. We saw,
not one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all, but two Americas, divided, separate and
unequal.
What happened here changed the course of t t e
country forever. Like Independence Hall, where we
first onwrascd the ^^gtio^ thatyall men aro oreatod equalj
m like Gettysburg, where Americans fought and died
1
union amfe&sGmmmmmml&
— i t e is
historic ground. For it was here, at4nttMBfaaek Central
High School, that skmrnkfy painfully, but surely, America,
the nation . . . be&m&m&mpme America, the idea.
�^-33-%-)
Elizabeth Eckford^waS" turned away, but the Little
Rock Nine did not turn back.^They climbed these steps,
passed through this door, and moved a nation.
We have come here today to honor those who made
that day possible.
To honor the parents; as Eleanor Roosevelt said of
them, "to give your child for a cause is even harder than
to give yourself."
To honof Daisy Bates, Wylie Branton, Thurgood
Marshall, the NAACP, and all who guided these
children through their experience.
�To honor President Eisenhowei^and the men of the
101st Airborne who enforced the Constitution.
To honor every student, every teacher, every
4
minister, agd^every Little Rock resident, black and
white, who offered a word of kindness, a glance of
respect, or a hand of friendship.*
'
1
we have come to honor the Little Rock Nine.
Those of us who watched events unfold on TV screens
and newspaper pages acroDo the oity, aorocc the ctatcyor
acrooo iho nation, can never fully understand the
sacrifice they made.
�We cannot know what it was like to be shoved
against lockers, tripped down stairways, and taunted by
classmates, day after day. We cannot know what it was
like to go through school with no hope of being in a
school play, playing on the basketball team, or even
learning in simple peace.
Minnijean Brown. Elizabeth Eckford. Emest
Green. Thelma Mothershed. Melba Patillo. Gloria Ray.
Terrence Roberts. Jefferson Thomas. Carlotta Walls.
The Little Rock Nine.
They persevered; they endured;
iiuuiuu* Jhev immmfkmi. And ihuiisandj fulluvvid buiind Lhun^
tvuvufUi^they immmmkmi. And ihuusandj fulluvvid buiind Ihom
until the- South itoolf rooo up and shook off tho onaino of
segregation that had crippled our region for so -long.
�In 1957, I was eleven years old, living fifty miles
away in Hot Springs, when the eyes of the world were
fixed on -
" ^ Little Rock. Like
aMfaMiiiiew I never attended school with a black
person until I went away to oollogc. But as a young
boy in my grandfathS^s?ore^I learned lessons that
were not taught in those segregated schools. For in mat
storo my grandfathgr, a man ilh liUlu rbiiiial oducation,
taught me the moat profoujidly Amorican legson of aU:
(X^KW
tVt^^ac^U'HiA^^
A ^ ^ W i ) taut I U L I ^ Y * * " ^
1
otir nation has leamod thooc lessons as well.
ti*JjLUMXktujJt )vx»*r UluK fcoUHfiujfi^vWuL.\htfiiu>Mti%w
�—
......
-
Forty years later, we know that mhitio iw^all^g
IKH&U
Wwks benefit when we leam together, work together,
^dAi^OAKifikH iMAJuttKVUtMJfcfe, M ^ t ^ n ^ U u u t
OJJLD QUML
Forty y.ears later, we know thaixi dn^oroo otudont
.
* * * *
I
. body,can moot tho nighoot ataiulasds
and this schoOT?iij*SSl
racially diverse and unrivaled for its academic
440..
excellence, proves it. ^ t l ^ X ^ ^ ^
IjjSs
Forty years later, we know that^f*iy the national
government CM guarantee theTfunclamontal con^titutioHal
rnrri
r
rirhtn nf nil nur p?r>plf in fivnry "
n f
ni11
1n i
" 'd —
and wc muot ha^c strong laws to fulfill ^lo^^glffe^attd
offeotiw couiVa To uphold them.
7
m
m
^
�4« O^UK!T&avxVVM. ^AuAvmUJL
l
AOA U K U I K ^ ^ ^ U U ^ M U U AV
On thio butjuutifttlf •au'lpumn morning, it would be^asy*^
n
3t:.
s-i-mpl}^ to cQngraUil^€^urselws^eH^o-w~fei America ^
l.i.:
V:-
X N
has cuniL since' Hie LiUleT!I)ck km& Clnnbed llrcse " ^ J J ^ i
-"and talk about what thv^ did. Ii iu far harck^to *
3:
•piL^j) uu Willi llielr biavc jomncy', 1 cuulmuc our climb
0
to^iighei" ground. But Iharirw^l wc musl ib.
Amorica io more to lot ant, more intggrntod, mo^e
accepting 01 ohangclnan cverbcfQ^. • Wc-havo-tom
down the trails in our la\Ars—But we have not torn down
1
�Today, children of every race walk through the
same door, but often, they walk down different halls.
Not only in this school, but across America, they still sit
in different classrooms ... eat at different tables in the
cafeteria ... sit in different bleachers at the football
game.
Far too many communities are all white, all black,
all Latino, all Asian. In so many ways, we hold
ourselves apart; retreating into comfortable enclaves of
ethnic isolation. Segregation is not the law. But too
often, self-segregation is the rule. Our schools are
resegregating at the most rapid rate since the 1950s.
And the rollback of affirmative action is slamming shut
doors of higher education on a new generation. TV*KUXJU>
�all races have jimply given up on the dream of
5 ^ integration and the search for common ground. They
*• ' see it as naive, or unattainable, or an affront to ethnic
37.
pride. And some think that it is simply too difficult.
.
ave jpriarch; as ^ure^-as-j^wAS' the idgMntmvard WliiCiT the
Lij^Jk.,RuLk Niiic niai^hed^..
Within three years, our largest state, California, will
have no majority race. Within half a century, America
will be close to having no majority race. Wej^celebrate
our diversity ~ the marvelous blend of cultures, beliefs
and races, that has enriched the American experience.
10
�^
But vtt inuAl iLLUgittBC that cuch gwecping diangc
oatr bring oignifioant dioruptioru A Any nation which
;| ^t) indulges itself in destructive separatism and exclusion
r
dDimpb| will not be able to meet and master the
%
'M*^*
€
enormous challenges of the approaching century ^'^^^5^
The alternative to integration is not^^f isolation - it is
disintegration. Only the American ideal is strong enough
to keep us together.
For alone among nations, America was founded not
on geography, or religion, or race, or ethnicity, but upon
an idea. Whether our ancestors lived here for millennia,
or came to these shores on the Mayflower, or in the
hold of a slave ship, or through the portals of Ellis
Island, or on a 747 to San Francisco, we are linked by
common ideals.
11
,
�We believe that every individual possesses the spark
of possibility. We believe that every individual is bom
with an equal right to work, to strive, to rise as far as
her talents will take her. We believe that we have an
obligation as a community, one to the other. We
believe that the future can be better than the past, and
that we have an obligation to make it so. And we
believe that every individual has an equal obligation to
act responsibly; to obey the law; to pass on our values
to our children. These values transcend our differences,
transcend our geographic and cultural multiplicity,
transcend hatred.
12
�We are white and black, Asian and Hispanic,
Christian and Jew and Muslim, Italian-American and
Vietnamese-American and Polish-American, but above
all, we are Americans. We are, as Martin Luther King
said, woven into one seamless garment of destiny. W£
aro .one x\morioa; We must be one America.
So here on the ctepc of Littlo Piook Contral High
Schuul, let our gonoration rcLUinmil lu Ike hard road of
justice. Lot our generation incict that ooparate can never
,Ui\\y bo oquQl.
That ic wli^
VVL IHUAI
i&y <* young people, horo and
*
«round. the country: n:alk to someone differentfromyou;
speak freely and frankly; a*d you will discover that you
share the same dreams.
13
\A
�That ta why wfr must say^-to^ho^erwiro would ropeal
•affimiativo aotion, "We share your vision of a
colorblind society - butfywe are not there yet, and we
cannot slam shut the doors of education, or economic
opportunity."
-Thai ib why
ll'iusl ^"lu leadery^if min^rity^
groups-^vho seel^gpamtioTiT^nicrtri's rmch to be said
f n r
flthnir p ^ d B . j J a u t J i A ^ m ^
(^X.fcVAM^(^KJQL
^fllUk^ ^Vf^JMlC ^KJLN, Ktfiftisi** \p\
-£m^QW^reiLii¥ bej4i.^i^l^^
JT
and itTO^wioug lu try.",
rvpr be
,
othei'Ammcans ~
...
k
. * . ^
Aj
1
x.That ifi why WP must s^ to thf H'-fffldfifrildren of
Euiopeaii'tmmigrantD, "Du nut pull up llm4adder from
the new Immigranto who come hero for tho Dame reason,
1 illi (tn m f hnpn^i, cuided by th? finm^ valugR as your
1
mf
•mrrastm-s."
14
�Tiial io why wc must say to aif pttrente of all races,
"The battle for.today'c cdioolp & the biUL fui high ^
academic standaids in llu bajito, and you muot lead this
•fight We cannot replace the tyranny of segregation with
t
the tyranny of low expectation^
And thai i/wfiy'Xmerica must continue to expand
opportunity and demand responsibility, lifting people off
welfare, freeing people from the terror of crime,
strengthening our schools for a new generation^j^^^J^
We must be concerned not so much with the sins of
our parents but the success of our children — how they
will live^together^in years to come. We are approaching
a new century,* a time that offeifc stunning opportunities
aoat pooes stiff challenges.
15
�My fellow Americans, if thosefiftoonyotu @ida ~
children - could walk up those steps ... if their parents
audi nii&hlionc could send them into the storm armed
only with schoolbooks and the righteousness of their
cause . . . thoft'Qll of uo can erpen thc-moot important
door of alii tho dooi: to the human •hc«rt. *
AiitTtliat'-in why wt mujt sidf^i m this schoolhouse
door, 3B^^*#iii>i dtiij> opiftiit Tiridg, and abolait with all
t
11
o
our ntrrng^ tn^ wn WT ^^nr t^g^^jj ^ "nil ^
Ameriga in tho 2lot Contuiy. Let us «tand agaiftct
scpaialiun as wc Aluud dgain&l ^cgrcgatwrnrand replace
tl'ii halyful dQclar^on^f^^ past^th^hopc^l I
•declaration of^the^rrtTtre: "One America today, One
America tomorrow, One America forever."
Haod Bless the United States of America.
16
�Draft 9/24/97 8:30am
PRESIDENT WILLIAM J. CLINTON
ADDRESS AT
LITTLE ROCK CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
September 25, 1997
�Forty years ago, a single image seared the heart and
stirred the conscience of our nation. It is so powerful,
we recall it still. A fifteen-year old girl, dressed in a
crisp black and white dress, wearing sunglasses,
carrying a notebook. She is surrounded by a large
crowd of boys and girls, men and women, soldiers and
police officers. Her head is held high. Her eyes are
fixed straight ahead.
And she is utterly alone.
On September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford walked to
this door for her first day of school ~ and was turned
away by people afraid of change, instructed by
ignorance, hating what they could not understand.
1
�America looked on tho imago of this young girl,
haunted and taunted for the simple color of her skin,
ancl^caught^ disturbing glimpse of ourselves. We saw,
not one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all, but two Americas, divided, separate and
unequal.
What happened here changed the course of tfe
country forever. Like Independence Hall, where we
first omferaicd the "gtioa thatyall men aro created equalj
m like Gettysburg, where Americans fought and died
fir
historic ground. For it was here, atlsM&ikmk Central
High School, that slml^ painfully, but surely, America,
the nation . . .
America, the idea.
�Elizabeth Eckford^ras- turned away, but the Little
Rock Nine did not turn back.^They climbed these steps,
passedthrough this door, and moved a nation.
We have come here today to honor those who made
that day possible.
To honor the parents; as Eleanor Roosevelt said of
them, "to give your child for a cause is even harder than
to give yourself."
To hono? Daisy Bates, Wylie Branton, Thurgood
Marshall, the NAACP, and all who guided these
children through their experience.
�To honor President Eisenhowei^and the men of the
101st Airborne who enforced the Constitution.
To honor every student, every teacher, every
4
minister, agd^every Little Rock resident, black and
white, who offered a word of kindness, a glance of
respect, or a hand of friendship.*
*
1
we nave come to honor the Little Rock Nine.
Those of us who watched events unfold on TV screens
and newspaper pages acrooo the oity, aorocc the ctato,-or
acrooo tho nation, can never fiilly understand the
sacrifice they made.
�We cannot know what it was like to be shoved
against lockers, tripped down stairways, and taunted by
classmates, day after day. We cannot know what it was
like to go through school with no hope of being in a
school play, playing on the basketball team, or even
learning in simple peace.
Minnijean Brown. Elizabeth Eckford. Emest
Green. Thelma Mothershed. Melba Patillo. Gloria Ray.
Terrence Roberts. Jefferson Thomas. Carlotta Walls.
The Little Rock Nine. They persevered; they endured;
«tvu*uw»*jthey immmfimd. Mid Qiuusaiidj followed biniiid Ihun^
ufltil the South itoolf rooo up and shook off tho orraino of
scgrogation that had crippled our region for oo long.
�In 1957, I was eleven years old, living fifty miles
away in Hot Springs, when the eyes of the world were
fixed on iMMM
Little Rock. Like tmSlmmmk**""*
feaMlMMitfK, I never attended school with a black
person until I went away to oollogc. But as a young
boy in my grandfathS^^fore^I learned lessons that
were not taught in those segregated schools. For in mat
storo my grandfather, a man with lilllL rUrmal oducation,
taughl mi the moat profoundly Amorican Icsaon of all;
that cvciyonc is .equal. Ovci fum dLiades, in milHuitn of
hom^g, through millionc of opiphanioGmrgo and small,
our nation hap leamod those lessons as wcil.
t^tWx UJCIJUUJB^ W W tu u t o eJsXa^nuorjiKtftiudtetf
w
uT^Yr--
ta y r
^KiA^
M^AIMCM
�Forty years'later, we know that nmitan wwinDllgig ^
^ M i a ^ i I.IIIIII .•iihiiMfaj^gi^^^Wwagwfc^ iti in iiiHniihiiiHyli
.JOTMMtiPNMft
lk
bfewks benefit when we leam together, work together,
and come together. This is what it means tote an \H
Wuu*^ ^jA.4JiAcOa0dBk^ lUAJ.tV^VMOai^! MM^tVi^n^Uuu (UU) MJUA
^American.
A 1
, ^
_
t
. ^
h
. ^w^^,
^
Vo.tV3JtTV^^ VW3^ t k ^ ^tVaJrV)4jL. W»kuSitvu*\ i s a V l i l ^
V
(
^^orty years later, we Imow m^^ivorDo otudont
body can moot tho niahoot otmicictfds --and this schoOT,*iuuii&
racially diverse and unrivaled for its academic
excellence, proves it.
V'IHU
dA* ,
^ t ^ T ' ^ ^
^fciud^i
Forty years later, we know XhaX/p&fy the national
government CM guarantee thenFunclamontal emulituliottal
rirhtn of nil mr p?r>plp in rvrij" rnmrr of our Innrl ~
and wo muot have strong laws to fulfill mam r4g4us,-ami
effcotiw courts to uphold them.
7
�On thia boautiful^ autumn rmrmng, it would be easy
sknply to coi^raUilat^^ur^l¥^s4eH^ow-jm' America *
has LUiiiL since [lie LiUle Rock hm& Climbed Llic^e "^jjfj^^
^tpps It ^tfW
1tM M
'^y I"
^'IHII'I
I n ^ -Hi"^flv^iintffH
-"and talk about what^feLj"did. It is fai haid^>to *
•piLAS uu widi lliell" brave journey, 10 coneimic our«faib
,
to .higheF-gromid. Dul [liari^wli^t^wirriTCis[ do.
^ 7
e 1
he
our
down the walls in our laws But we have not torn down
ftT^uJ^
vd^t^U ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
^UKUt,
^tU^t
luevovu, UAU- ^^•J^UHAAIM'VUJUA?
�Today, children of every race walk through the
same door, but often, they walk down different halls.
Not only in this school, but across America, they still sit
in different classrooms ... eat at different tables in the
cafeteria ... sit in different bleachers at the football
game.
Far too many communities are all white, all black,
all Latino, all Asian. In so many ways, we hold
ourselves apart; retreating into comfortable enclaves of
ethnic isolation. Segregation is not the law. But too
often, self-segregation is the rule. Our schools are
resegregating at the most rapid rate since the 1950s.
And the rollback of affirmative action is slamming shut
doors of higher education on a new generation. fyaKUdUa
�all races have mmply given up on the dream of
integration and the search for common ground. They
see it as naive, or unattainable, or an affront to ethnic
pride. And some think that it is simply too difficult.
TfctHfligrifrTirrm^^
tnwnrri rijiinh
—
avt jQiarch!)as .curdy as it was the [llillil TO ward whiCtT the
Lij^Jg .RucLIJiiic uioid
Within three years, our largest state, California, will
have no majority race. Within half a century, America
will be close to having no majority race. WeJ^celebrate
our diversity ~ the marvelous blend of cultures, beliefs
and races, that has enriched the American experience.
10
�But vvi muAl iLLUgiiiiic that cuch pweeping change
RwJT
oaff bring oignifioant dioruption. K Any nation which
indulges itself in destructive separatism and exclusion
mmmty will not be able to meet and master the
% fi^-AM
enormous challenges of the approaching century.
(•M*"
The alternative to integration is not^^r isolation ~ it is
disintegration. Only the American ideal is strong enough
to keep us together.
For alone among nations, America was founded not
on geography, or religion, or race, or ethnicity, but upon
an idea. Whether our ancestors lived here for millennia,
or came to these shores on the Mayflower, or in the
hold of a slave ship, or through the portals of Ellis
Island, or on a 747 to San Francisco, we are linked by
common ideals.
11
�We believe that every individual possesses the spark
of possibility. We believe that every individual is bom
with an equal right to work, to strive, to rise as far as
her talents will take her. We believe that we have an
obligation as a community, one to the other. We
believe that the future can be better than the past, and
that we have an obligation to make it so. And we
believe that every individual has an equal obligation to
act responsibly; to obey the law; to pass on our values
to our children. These values transcend our differences,
transcend our geographic and cultural multiplicity,
transcend hatred.
12
�We are white and black, Asian and Hispanic,
Christian and Jew and Muslim, Italian-American and
Vietnamese-American and Polish-American, but above
all, we are Americans. We are, as Martin Luther King
said, woven into one seamless garment of destiny,
aro one Amorioa; We must be one America.
Ste here on the steps of Littlo Rook Contrai High
Sehuul, let our gonomliuii iccuiiiinil lu die hard road of
justice. Lot our generation incict that oeparate can never
.truly bo oqual.
Yhat ic whj
IIIUAI
s&yfcayoung people, horo and
oround, the countr3|r:n:alk to someone different from you;
speak freely and frankly; and you will discover that you
share the same dreams.
13
\ A
�Tfrflt w vrby v/? must say ^-
iL<l>r
^'
^^nH mp^Ql
•affirmatn/o aotion, "We ohai'c your vision of a
colorblind society - but/^we are not there yet, and we
cannot slam shut the doors of education, or economic
opportunity.
-Thai iu why uu llmsl
lu leadeis-sf min^rity^
groups- who seel^scpar^tion, ^TOcrtri's iwch to be said
fnr pthpir pride, but m^i mmrnu vi'ill ryrr be
n
o
.That i i why WP must rny t 4h rrnnrl^hildr^n of
>
Euiopean ttnmigranlo, "Du nut pull up tlmAidder from
the new inniiigiaiito who come horo for tho oome reason,
II illi llu lump hnpns,
h
aiiLLstois."
14
y ^^-^^p vrfyts as your
�That io why wc must say to all ptrrente of all races,
"The battle for.today'c cchoola & the bittk for high
academic standaids in the bajicu, and you muot lead this
•fight We cannot replace the tyranny of segregation with
t
the tyranny of low expectations?*
And that i/w^Xmerica must continue to expand
opportunity and demand responsibility, lifting people off
welfare, freeing people from the terror of crime,
strengthening our schools for a new generation^Kij^cM
We must be concerned not so much with the sins of
our parents but the success of our children ~ how they
will live together in years to come. We are approaching
4
A
a new century*a time that offoib stunning opportunities
ao it poois stiff challenges.
15
�1
My fellow Americans, if thosefiftnnnyunnftlrin—
children ~ could walk up those steps ... if their parents
QiidKiii^hbonc could send them into the storm armed
only with schoolbooks and the righteousness of their
cause . . . theft all of UJ can upin thc-'inoot important
poor o£ualli the doW to the human heftft. *
AaitFfliatTu 'I'lhy we mujt slainl m this schoolhouse
door, aw^^^MMtoyr^iftiit widg, and dbolawe with all
our ntrrngtb tlftt wp will ^^rwM^thpjj
"nil hr rn^
Ameriga in the 2lot Contuiy. Let us .staftd agaiact
scpdialiun as wc Aluud cfgaiml ^cgrcgatrenTand replace
m
Chi haUful declaranon "of-ror pa^t"mth 2riTOpo^il I
-deglara-tkin of the fuluiL: "One America today, One
America tomorrow, One America forever."
fob*
Haod Bless the United States of America.
16
�„
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
^
}
LI Hi*}
Ol^
Draft 9/20/97 8pm
PRESIDENT WILLIAM J. CLINTON
ADDRESS AT LITTLE ROCK CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
September 25,1997
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Forty years ago, a single image seared the heart and conscience of our nation. It is so
^Jkt^P '
engraved in our rngjnnry4hat we rgcall it still. It is afifteen-yearold girl, dressed in a crisp black
.
and white dress, wearing sunglassesJcarrying a notebook. She is surrounded by a large crc)3fld-o£
boys and girls, meft and women, soldiers and police officers. Her head is held high. Her eyes are
/ fixed straight aheadjAnd she is utterly alone.
On September 4,1957, Elizabeth Eckford walked up these very steps for her first day of
school - and was turned away by people afraid of change, instructed by ignorance, hating what
they could not understand. America looked on the image of this young girl, haunted and taunted
for the simple color of her skin, and caught a disturbing glimpse of ourselves. We saw, not one
nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, but two Americas, divided, separate
and unequal.
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What happened here ~ on this very piece of [granite] - change^the course of this
/ f
country forever. Like Independence Hall, where we first embraced the notion that all men are ^
|
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created equal ~ like Gettysburg, where Americans fought and died for national union and to
^ , ,
make our ideal law - this is historic ground. For it was here, at Little Rock Central High School,
that slowly, painfully, but surely, America, the nation, began living up to America, the ideal.
v
Elizabeth Eckford was turned away, but the Little Rock Nine did not turn back. They
climbed these steps, passed through this door, and moved a nation.
We have come here today to honor those who made that day possible.
To honor the parents; as Eleanor Roosevelt said of them, "to give your child for a cause is
even harder than to give yourself."
To honor Daisy Bates, the NAACP, and all who guided these children through their
experience.
To honor President Eisenhower and the men of the 101st Airborne who enforced the
Constitution.
To honor every student, every teacher, every minister, and every Little Rock resident who
offered a hand of friendship or simple humanity.
And we have come to honor the Little Rock Nine. Those of us who watched events
unfold on TV screens and newspaper pages across the city, across the state, or across the nation,
�can never fully understand the sacrifice they made. We cannot know what it was like to be
shoved against lockers, tripped down stairways, and taunted by classmates, day after day. We
cannot know what it was like to go through school with no hope of being in a school play,
playing on the basketball team, or even learning in simple peace.
Minnijean Brown. Elizabeth Eckford. Emest Green. Thelma Mothershed. Melba Patillo.
Gloria Ray. Terrence Roberts. Jefferson Thomas. Carlotta Walls. The Little Rock Nine. They
persevered; they endured; they pressed on. And thousands followed behind them, until the South
itself rose up and shook off the chains of segregation that had crippled our region for so long.
In 1957,1 was eleven years old, living fifty miles away in Hot Springs, when the eyes of
the world were fixed on the crisis in Little Rock. Like millions of others in that time and place, I
never attended school with a black person until I went away to college. But as a young boy in my
grandfather's store, I learned that everyone was equal; I saw him treat everyone with dignity.
This man with little formal education taught me the most profound lesson of all. And over four
decades, in millions of homes, through millions of small epiphanies, America has learned those
lessons as well.
Forty years later, we know that whites as well as blacks oenefit when we leam together,
work together, and come together. This is what it means to be an American.
Forty years later, we know that a diverse student body can meet the highest standards and this school, racially diverse and unrivaled for its academic excellence, proves it.
Forty years later, we know that only the national government can guarantee the
fundamental constitutional rights of all our people in every corner of our land — and we must
have strong laws to fulfill those rights, and effective courts to uphold them.
On this beautiful, autumn moming, it would be easy simply to congratulate ourselves for
how far America has come since the Little Rock Nine walked up these steps. It would be easy to
stand here - where they stood, and talk about ~ what they did. It is far harder to press on with
their brave journey, to continue our climb to higher ground. BiiUhat is what we must do.
America is more tolerant, more integrated, more just than ever before. But forty years
after the chains of segregation were cast off, we are still not in the Promised Land. We have torn
down the walls in our laws. But^sgJiaygjiQlJtonijiQwn the walls in our hearts.
Today, children of every race walk through the same door, but often, they walk down
different halls. Not only in this school, but across America, they still sit in different classrooms
... eat at different tables in the cafeteria ... sit in different bleachers at the football game. Far too
many communities are all white, all black, all Latino. In so many ways, we hold ourselves apart;
we retreat into comfortable enclaves of ethnic isolation. Segregation is not the law. But too
often, self-segregation is the rule. Our schools are resegregating at the most rapid rate since the
�1950s. And the rollback of affirmative action is slamming shut doors of higher education on a
new generation.
y
^
Perhaps most yxfabling, far too many Americans of all races have simply given up on the
dream of integration/They see it as naive, or unattainable, or an affront to ethnic pride. And
some think that it is simply too difficult. But more than ever, it must be the ideal toward which
we march, as surely as it was the ideal toward which the Little Rock Nine marched.
Within three years, our largest state, California, will have no majority race. Within half a
century, America will have no majority race. We celebrate our diversity ~ the marvelous blend
of cultures, beliefs and races, that has enriched the American experience. But we must recognize
that such sweeping change can bring significant disruption. The alternative to integration is not
only isolation - it is disintegration. There is only one thing strong enough to keep us together.
For alone among nations, America was founded not on geography, or religion, or race, or
ethnicity, but upon an idea. Whether our ancestors came to these shores_onJieK1a^flower, or in
the hold of a slave ship, or through the portals of Ellis Island, or on a^47 to SanFrancis^, we
are linked by common ideals.
'
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We believe that every individual has within herself the spark of possibility. We believe
that every individual is born with an equal right to work, to strive, to rise as far as her talents will
take her. We believe that we have an obligation as a community, one to the other. We believe
that the future can be better than the past, and that we have an obligation to make it so. And we
believe that every individual has an equal obligation to act responsibly; to obey the law; to pass
x on our values to our children. These values transcend our differences, transcend our geographi^.— ^
\
\and cultural multiplicity, transcend hatred. We are white and black, Asian and Hispanic,
fefT^iT'
„
J Christian and Jew and Muslim, Italian-American and Vietnamese-American and PolishXj^OUiKS/^-^
y American, but above all, we are Americans. We are, as Martin Luther King said, woven into one
seamless garment of destiny. We are one America; we must be one America.
So here on the steps of Little Rock Central High School, let our generation recommit to
the hard road of justice.
That is why we must say to young people, here and around the country: talk to someone
different from you; speak freely and frankly; and you will discover that you share the same
dreams.
That is why we must say to thos^whrt^Twho would repeal affirmative action, "We share
your vision of a colorblind society - but weare not there yet, and we cannot slam shut the
^
schoolhouse door."
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—"
That is why we must say to leaders of minority groups who seek separation, "We
J
.
understand your pride, but no American will ever be empowered by being isolated from other / /JT
1
�Americans - and it is wrong to try."
That is why we must say to the grandchildren of European immigrants, "Do not pull up
the ladder from the new immigrants who come here for the same reason and with the same values
as your ancestors."
And that is why America must continue to expand opportunity and demand responsibility,
lifting people off of welfare, freeing people from the terror of crime, strengthening our schools
a new generation.
We are approaching a new century, a time that offers stunning opportunities as it poses
stiff challenges. My fellow Americans, if those fifteen year olds - children - could walk up
those steps ... if their parents and neighbors could send them into the storm armed only with
schoolbooks and the righteousness of their cause ... then all of us can open the most important
door of all: the door to the human heart.
And that is why we must stand in this schoolhouse door, and on this day, open it wide,
and declare with all our strength that we will come together, we will be one America.
"Integration tudayrrntegration toirronriwrimegratfoTrfoTeverA- o-t r
-^W-u-cA-'
God Bless the United States of America.
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^or open the doors of Little
[President Clinton, Governor, Mayor open the doors of Liti Rock Central High
School, * and the Little Rock Nine walk in. ]
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^/'j^y^CS'
0
[Alternate language for the ending: "One America today, One America tomorrow. One
America forever. "]
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i
�PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
�PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
�REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
IN CEREMONY COMMEMORATING
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE
DESEGREGATION OF CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL
SEPTEMBER 25,1997
Governor and Mrs. Huckabee; Mayor and Mrs. Dailey; my good friend, Daisy Bates, and
the families of Wiley Branton and Justice Thurgood Marshall. To the co-chairs of this event, Mr.
Howard, and all the faculty and staff here at Central High; to Fatima and her fellow students - to
all my fellow Americans: Hillary and I are glad to be home, especially on this day. And we
thank you for your welcome.
I would also be remiss if I did not say one other word, just as a citizen. You know, we
just sent our daughter off to college, and for eight and a half years she got a very good education
in the Little Rock school district. And I want to thank you all for that.
On this beautiful, sun-shiny day, so many wonderful words have already been spoken
with so much conviction, I am reluctant to add to them. But I must ask you to remember once
more and to ask yourselves, what does what happened here 40 years ago mean today. What does
it tell us, most importantly, about our children's tomorrows.
Forty years ago, a single image first seared the heart and stirred the conscience of our
nation; so powerful most of us who saw it then recall it still. A 15-year-old girl wearing a crisp
black and white dress, carrying only a notebook, surrounded by large crowds of boys and girls,
men and women, ^oldiers and police officers, her head held high, her eyes fixed straight ahead.
And she is utterly alone.
On September 4th, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford walked to this door for her first day of
school, utterly alone. She was turned away by people who were afraid of change, instructed by
ignorance, hating what they simply could not understand. And America saw her, haunted and
taunted for the simple color of her skin, and in the image we caught a very disturbing glimpse of
ourselves.
We saw not one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, but two
Americas, divided and unequal. What happened here changed the course of our country forever.
Like Independence Hall where we first embraced the idea that God created us all equal. Like
Gettysburg, where Americans fought and died over whether we would remain one nation,
moving closer to the true meaning of equality. Like them, Little Rock is historic ground. For,
surely it was here at Central High that we took another giant step closer to the idea of America.
Elizabeth Eckford, along with her eight schoolmates, were turned away on September
4th, but the Little Rock Nine did not turn back. Forty years ago today, they climbed these steps,
�passed through this door, and moved our nation. And for that, we must all thank them.
Today, we come to honor those who made it possible ~ their parents first. As Eleanor
Roosevelt said of them, "To give your child for a cause is even harder than to give yourself." To
honor my friend, Daisy Bates and Wiley Branton and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP, and all
who guided these children; to honor President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and the
men of the 101st Airborne who enforced the Constitution; to honor every student, every teacher,
every minister, every Little Rock resident, black or white, who offered a word of kindness, a
glance of respect, or a hand of friendship; to honor those who gave us the opportunity to be part
of this day of celebration and rededication.
But most of all we come to honor the Little Rock Nine. Most of us who just watched
these events unfold can never understand fully the sacrifice they made. Imagine, all of you, what
it would be like to come to school and be shoved against lockers, tripped down stairways,
taunted day after day by your classmates, to go through school with no hope of going to a school
play or being on a basketball team or learning in simple peace.
I want all these children here to look at these people. They persevered. They endured.
And they prevailed. But it was at great cost to themselves.
As Melba said years later in her wonderful memoir, Warriors Don't Cry, "My friends
and I paid for the integration of Little Rock Central High with our innocence."
Folks, in 1957,1 was 11 years old, living 50 miles away in Hot Springs, when the eyes of
the world were fixed here. Like almost all Southerners then, I never attended school with a
person of another race until I went to college. But as a young boy in my grandfather's small
grocery store, I learned lessons that nobody bothered to teach me in my segregated school.
My grandfather had a 6th grade education from a tiny rural school. He never made a bit
of money. But in that store, in the way he treated his customers and encouraged me to play with
their children, I learned America's most profound lessons: We really are all equal. We really do
have the right to live in dignity. We really do have the right to be treated with respect. We do
have the right to be heard.
I never knew how he and my grandmother came to those convictions, but I'll never forget
how they lived them. Ironically, my grandfather died in 1957. He never lived to see America
come around to his way of thinking. But I know he's smiling down today not on his grandson,
but on the Little Rock Nine, who gave up their innocence so all good people could have a chance
to live their dreams.
But let me tell you something else that was true about that time. Before Little Rock, for
me and other white children, the struggles of black people, whether we were sympathetic or
hostile to them, were mostly background music in our normal, self-absorbed lives. We were all,
like you, more concerned about our friends and our lives, day in and day out. But then we saw
what was happening in our own back yard, and we all had to deal with it. Where did we stand?
�What did we believe? How did we want to live? It was Little Rock that made racial equality a
driving obsession in my life.
Years later, time and chance made Ernie Green my friend. Good fortune brought me to
the Governor's Office, where I did all I could to heal the wounds, solve the problems, open the
doors so we could become the people we say we want to be. Ten years ago, the Little Rock Nine
came back to the Governor's Mansion when I was there. I wanted them to see that the power of
the office that once had blocked their way now welcomed them. But like so many Americans, I
can never fully repay my debt to these nine people. For, with their innocence, they purchased
more freedom for me, too, and for all white people. People like Hazel Bryan Massery, the angry
taunter of Elizabeth Eckford, who stood with her in front of this school this week as a reconciled
friend. And with the gift of their innocence, they taught us that all too often what ought to be can
never be for free.
Forty years later, what do you young people in this audience believe we have learned?
Well, forty years later, we know that we all benefit ~ all of us — when we leam together,
work together, and come together. That is, after all, what it means to be an American.
Forty years later, we know, not withstanding some cynics, that all our children can leam,
and this school proves it.
Forty years later, we know when the constitutional rights of our citizens are threatened,
the national government must guarantee them. Talk is fine, but when they are threatened, you
need strong laws faithfully enforced and upheld by independent courts.
Forty years later, we know there are still more doors to be opened, doors to be opened
wider, doors we have to keep from being shut again.
Forty years later, we know freedom and equality cannot be realized without responsibility
for self, family, and the duties of citizenship, or without a commitment to building a community
of shared destiny and a genuine sense of belonging.
Forty years later, we know the question of race is more complex and more important than
ever — embracing no longer just blacks and whites or blacks and whites and Hispanics and
Native Americans, but now people from all parts of the Earth coming here to redeem the promise
of America.
Forty years later, frankly, we know we're bound to come back where we started. After all
the weary years and silent tears, after all the stony roads and bitter rods, the question of race is in
the end still an affair of the heart.
But if these are our lessons, what do we have to do? First, we must all reconcile. Then
we must all face the facts of today. And finally we must act.
�Reconciliation is important not only for those who practice bigotry, but for those whose
resentment of it lingers, for both are prisons from which our spirits must escape. If Nelson
Mandela, who paid for the freedom of his people with 27 of the best years of his life, could invite
his jailers to his inauguration and ask even the victims of violence to forgive their oppressors,
then each of us can seek and give forgiveness.
And what are the facts? It is a fact, my fellow Americans, that there are still too many
places where opportunity for education and work are not equal, where disintegration of family
and neighborhood make it more difficult. But it is also a fact that schools and neighborhoods
and lives can be turned around if, but only if, we are prepared to do what it takes.
It is a fact that there are still too many places where our children die or give up before
they bloom, where they are trapped in a web of crime and violence and drugs. We know this too
can be changed, but only if we are prepared to do what it takes.
Today children of every race walk through the same door, but then they often walk down
different halls. Not only in this school but across America, they sit in different classrooms.
They eat at different tables. They even sit in different parts of the bleachers at the football game.
Far too many communities are all white, all black, all Latino, all Asian. Indeed, too many
Americans of all races have actually begun to give up on the idea of integration and the search
for common ground.
For the first time since the 1950s, our schools in America are resegregating. The rollback
of affirmative action is slamming shut the doors of higher education on a new generation, while
those who oppose it have not yet put forward any other alternative.
In so many ways, we still hold ourselves back. We retreat into the comfortable enclaves
of ethnic isolation. We just don't deal with people who are different from us. Segregation is no
longer the law, but too often, separation is still the rule.
And we cannot forget one stubborn fact that has not yet been said as clearly as it should.
There is still discrimination in America. There are still people who can't get over it, who can't let
it go, who can't go through the day unless they have somebody else to look down on. And it
manifests itself in our streets and in our neighborhoods and in the workplace and in the schools.
And it is wrong. And we have to keep working on it -not just with our voices, but with our
laws. And we have to engage each other in it.
Of course, we should celebrate our diversity. The marvelous blend of cultures and beliefs
and races has always enriched America, and it is our meal ticket to the 21st century. But we also
have to remember with the painful lessons of the civil wars and the ethnic cleansing around the
world, that any nation that indulges itself in destructive separatism will not be able to meet and
master these challenges of the 21st century.
We have to decide ~ all you young people have to decide ~ will we stand as a shining
example, or a stunning rebuke, to the world of tomorrow? For the alternative to integration is not
�isolation or a new separate but equal, it is disintegration.
Only the American ideal is strong enough to hold us together. We believe, whether our
ancestors came here in slave ships or on the Mayflower, whether they came through the portals
of Ellis Island or on a plane to San Francisco, whether they have been here for thousands of
years, we believe that every individual possesses the spark of possibility; bom with an equal
right to strive and work and rise as far as they can go, and bom with an equal responsibility to act
in a way that obeys the law, reflects our values and passes them on to their children.
We are white and black, Asian and Hispanic, Christian and Jew and Muslim, Italian- and
Vietnamese- and Polish- Americans and goodness knows how many more today. But above all,
we are still Americans. Martin Luther King said, "We are woven into a seamless garment of
destiny. We must be one America."
The Little Rock Nine taught us that we cannot have one America for free. Not 40 years
ago, not today. We have to act. All of us have to act. Each of us has to do something.
All of us, especially our young people, must seek out people who are different from
themselves and speak freely and frankly to discover they share the same dreams.
All of us should embrace the vision of a colorblind society, but recognize the fact that we
are not there yet and we cannot slam shut the doors of educational and economic opportunity.
All of us should embrace ethnic pride and we should revere religious conviction, but we
must reject separation and isolation.
All of us should value and practice personal responsibility for ourselves and our families.
And all Americans, especially our young people, should give something back to their
community through citizen service.
All Americans of all races must insist on both equal opportunity and excellence in
education. That is even more important today than it was for these nine people; and look how far
they took themselves with their education. The true battleground in education today is whether
we honestly believe that every child can leam, and whether we have the courage to set high
academic standards we expect all our children to meet. We must not replace the tyranny of
segregation with the tragedy of low expectations. I will not rob a single American child of his or
her future. It is wrong.
My fellow Americans, we must be concerned not so much with the sins of our parents as
with the success of our children - how they will live, and live together, in years to come. If
those nine children could walk up those steps 40 years ago, all alone; if their parents could send
them into the storm armed only with school books and the righteousness of their cause, then
surely together we can build one America ~ an America that makes sure no future generation of
our children will have to pay for our mistakes with the loss of their innocence.
�At this schoolhouse door today, let us rejoice in the long way we have come these 40
years. Let us resolve to stand on the shoulders of the Little Rock Nine and press on with
confidence in the hard and noble work ahead. Let us lift every voice and sing, till earth and
heaven ring, "One America today, One America tomorrow, One America forever."
God bless the Little Rock Nine, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.
�3
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5
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"I
I—k
^1
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
�REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
IN CEREMONY COMMEMORATING
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE
DESEGREGATION OF CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL
SEPTEMBER 25,1997
Governor and Mrs. Huckabee; Mayor and Mrs. Daley; my good friend, Daisy Bates, and
the families of Wiley Branton and Justice Thurgood Marshall. To the co-chairs of this event, Mr.
Howard, and all the faculty and staff here at Central High; to Fatima and her fellow students ~ to
all my fellow Americans: Hillary and I are glad to be home, especially on this day. And we
thank you for your welcome.
I would also be remiss if I did not say one other word, just as a citizen. You know, we
just sent our daughter off to college, and for eight and a half years she got a very good education
in the Little Rock school district. And I want to thank you all for that.
On this beautiful, sun-shiny day, so many wonderful words have already been spoken
with so much conviction, I am reluctant to add to them. But I must ask you to remember once
more and to ask yourselves, what does what happened here 40 years ago mean today. What does
it tell us, most importantly, about our children's tomorrows.
Forty years ago, a single image first seared the heart and stirred the conscience of our
nation; so powerful most of us who saw it then recall it still. A 15-year-old girl wearing a crisp
black and white dress, carrying only a notebook, surrounded by large crowds of boys and girls,
men and women, soldiers and police officers, her head held high, her eyes fixed straight ahead.
And she is utterly alone.
On September 4th, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford walked to this door for her first day of
school, utterly alone. She was turned away by people who were afraid of change, instructed by
ignorance, hating what they simply could not understand. And America saw her, haunted and
taunted for the simple color of her skin, and in the image we caught a very disturbing glimpse of
ourselves.
We saw not one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, but two
Americas, divided and unequal. What happened here changed the course of our country forever.
Like Independence Hall where we first embraced the idea that God created us all equal. Like
Gettysburg, where Americans fought and died over whether we would remain one nation,
moving closer to the true meaning of equality. Like them, Little Rock is historic ground. For,
surely it was here at Central High that we took another giant step closer to the idea of America.
Elizabeth Eckford, along with her eight schoolmates, were turned away on September
4th, but the Little Rock Nine did not turn back. Forty years ago today, they climbed these steps.
�passed through this door, and moved our nation. And for that, we must all thank them.
Today, we come to honor those who made it possible — their parents first. As Eleanor
Roosevelt said of them, "To give your child for a cause is even harder than to give yourself." To
honor my friend, Daisy Bates and Wiley Branton and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP, and all
who guided these children; to honor President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and the
men of the 101st Airborne who enforced the Constitution; to honor every student, every teacher,
every minister, every Little Rock resident, black or white, who offered a word of kindness, a
glance of respect, or a hand of friendship; to honor those who gave us the opportunity to be part
of this day of celebration and rededication.
But most of all we come to honor the Little Rock Nine. Most of us who just watched
these events unfold can never understand fully the sacrifice they made. Imagine, all of you, what
it would be like to come to school and be shoved against lockers, tripped down stairways,
taunted day after day by your classmates, to go through school with no hope of going to a school
play or being on a basketball team or learning in simple peace.
I want all these children here to look at these people. They persevered. They endured.
And they prevailed. But it was at great cost to themselves.
As Melba said years later in her wonderful memoir, Warriors Don't Cry, "My friends
and I paid for the integration of Little Rock Central High with our innocence."
Folks, in 1957,1 was 11 years old, living 50 miles away in Hot Springs, when the eyes of
the world were fixed here. Like almost all Southerners then, I never attended school with a
person of another race until I went to college. But as a young boy in my grandfather's small
grocery store, I learned lessons that nobody bothered to teach me in my segregated school.
My grandfather had a 6th grade education from a tiny rural school. He never made a bit
of money. But in that store, in the way he treated his customers and encouraged me to play with
their children, I learned America's most profound lessons: We really are all equal. We really do
have the right to live in dignity. We really do have the right to be treated with respect. We do
have the right to be heard.
I never knew how he and my grandmother came to those convictions, but I'll never forget
how they lived them. Ironically, my grandfather died in 1957. He never lived to see America
come around to his way of thinking. But I know he's smiling down today not on his grandson,
but on the Little Rock Nine, who gave up their innocence so all good people could have a chance
to live their dreams.
But let me tell you something else that was true about that time. Before Little Rock, for
me and other white children, the struggles of black people, whether we were sympathetic or
hostile to them, were mostly background music in our normal, self-absorbed lives. We were all,
like you, more concerned about our friends and our lives, day in and day out. But then we saw
what was happening in our own back yard, and we all had to deal with it. Where did we stand?
�What did we believe? How did we want to live? It was Little Rock that made racial equality a
driving obsession in my life.
Years later, time and chance made Ernie Green my friend. Good fortune brought me to
the Governor's Office, where I did all I could to heal the wounds, solve the problems, open the
doors so we could become the people we say we want to be. Ten years ago, the Little Rock Nine
came back to the Governor's Mansion when I was there. I wanted them to see that the power of
the office that once had blocked their way now welcomed them. But like so many Americans, I
can never fiilly repay my debt to these nine people. For, with their innocence, they purchased
more freedom for me, too, and for all white people. People like Hazel Bryan Massery, the angry
taunter of Elizabeth Eckford, who stood with her in front of this school this week as a reconciled
friend. And with the gift of their innocence, they taught us that all too often what ought to be can
never be for free.
Forty years later, what do you young people in this audience believe we have learned?
Well, forty years later, we know that we all benefit ~ all of us ~ when we leam together,
work together, and come together. That is, after all, what it means to be an American.
Forty years later, we know, not withstanding some cynics, that all our children can leam,
and this school proves it.
Forty years later, we know when the constitutional rights of our citizens are threatened,
the national government must guarantee them. Talk is fine, but when they are threatened, you
need strong laws faithfully enforced and upheld by independent courts.
Forty years later, we know there are still more doors to be opened, doors to be opened
wider, doors we have to keep from being shut again.
Forty years later, we know freedom and equality cannot be realized without responsibility
for self, family, and the duties of citizenship, or without a commitment to building a community
of shared destiny and a genuine sense of belonging.
Forty years later, we know the question of race is more complex and more important than
ever ~ embracing no longer just blacks and whites or blacks and whites and Hispanics and
Native Americans, but now people from all parts of the Earth coming here to redeem the promise
of America.
Forty years later, frankly, we know we're bound to come back where we started. After all
the weary years and silent tears, after all the stony roads and bitter rods, the question of race is in
the end still an affair of the heart.
But if these are our lessons, what do we have to do? First, we must all reconcile. Then
we must all face the facts of today. And finally we must act.
�Reconciliation is important not only for those who practice bigotry, but for those whose
resentment of it lingers, for both are prisons from which our spirits must escape. If Nelson
Mandela, who paid for the freedom of his people with 27 of the best years of his life, could invite
his jailers to his inauguration and ask even the victims of violence to forgive their oppressors,
then each of us can seek and give forgiveness.
And what are the facts? It is a fact, my fellow Americans, that there are still too many
places where opportunity for education and work are not equal, where disintegration of family
and neighborhood make it more difficult. But it is also a fact that schools and neighborhoods
and lives can be turned around if, but only if, we are prepared to do what it takes.
It is a fact that there are still too many places where our children die or give up before
they bloom, where they are trapped in a web of crime and violence and drugs. We know this too
can be changed, but only if we are prepared to do what it takes.
Today children of every race walk through the same door, but then they often walk down
different halls. Not only in this school but across America, they sit in different classrooms.
They eat at different tables. They even sit in different parts of the bleachers at the football game.
Far too many communities are all white, all black, all Latino, all Asian. Indeed, too many
Americans of all races have actually begun to give up on the idea of integration and the search
for common ground.
For the first time since the 1950s, our schools in America are resegregating. The rollback
of affirmative action is slamming shut the doors of higher education on a new generation, while
those who oppose it have not yet put forward any other alternative.
In so many ways, we still hold ourselves back. We retreat into the comfortable enclaves
of ethnic isolation. We just don't deal with people who are different from us. Segregation is no
longer the law, but too often, separation is still the rule.
And we cannot forget one stubborn fact that has not yet been said as clearly as it should.
There is still discrimination in America. There are still people who can't get over it, who can't let
it go, who can't go through the day unless they have somebody else to look down on. And it
manifests itself in our streets and in our neighborhoods and in the workplace and in the schools.
And it is wrong. And we have to keep working on it -not just with our voices, but with our
laws. And we have to engage each other in it.
Of course, we should celebrate our diversity. The marvelous blend of cultures and beliefs
and races has always enriched America, and it is our meal ticket to the 21st century. But we also
have to remember with the painful lessons of the civil wars and the ethnic cleansing around the
world, that any nation that indulges itself in destructive separatism will not be able to meet and
master these challenges of the 21st century.
We have to decide ~ all you young people have to decide ~ will we stand as a shining
example, or a stunning rebuke, to the world of tomorrow? For the alternative to integration is not
�isolation or a new separate but equal, it is disintegration.
Only the American ideal is strong enough to hold us together. We believe, whether our
ancestors came here in slave ships or on the Mayflower, whether they came through the portals
of Ellis Island or on a plane to San Francisco, whether they have been here for thousands of
years, we believe that every individual possesses the spark of possibility; bom with an equal
right to strive and work and rise as far as they can go, and bom with an equal responsibility to act
in a way that obeys the law, reflects our values and passes them on to their children.
We are white and black, Asian and Hispanic, Christian and Jew and Muslim, Italian- and
Vietnamese- and Polish- Americans and goodness knows how many more today. But above all,
we are still Americans. Martin Luther King said, "We are woven into a seamless garment of
destiny. We must be one America."
The Little Rock Nine taught us that we cannot have one America for free. Not 40 years
ago, not today. We have to act. All of us have to act. Each of us has to do something.
All of us, especially our young people, must seek out people who are different from
themselves and speak freely and frankly to discover they share the same dreams.
All of us should embrace the vision of a colorblind society, but recognize the fact that we
are not there yet and we cannot slam shut the doors of educational and economic opportunity.
All of us should embrace ethnic pride and we should revere religious conviction, but we
must reject separation and isolation.
All of us should value and practice personal responsibility for ourselves and our families.
And all Americans, especially our young people, should give something back to their
community through citizen service.
All Americans of all races must insist on both equal opportunity and excellence in
education. That is even more important today than it was for these nine people; and look how far
they took themselves with their education. The true battleground in education today is whether
we honestly believe that every child can leam, and whether we have the courage to set high
academic standards we expect all our children to meet. We must not replace the tyranny of
segregation with the tragedy of low expectations. I will not rob a single American child of his or
her future. It is wrong.
My fellow Americans, we must be concerned not so much with the sins of our parents as
with the success of our children - how they will live, and live together, in years to come. I f
those nine children could walk up those steps 40 years ago, all alone; if their parents could send
them into the storm armed only with school books and the righteousness of their cause, then
surely together we can build one America ~ an America that makes sure no future generation of
our children will have to pay for our mistakes with the loss of their innocence.
�At this schoolhouse door today, let us rejoice in the long way we have come these 40
years. Let us resolve to stand on the shoulders of the Little Rock Nine and press on with
confidence in the hard and noble work ahead. Let us lift every voice and sing, till earth and
heaven ring, "One America today, One America tomorrow. One America forever."
God bless the Little Rock Nine, and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.
�http://news.newspress.com/local/react.htm
Capps dies of heart attack at 63
Capps dies of heart attack at 63
10/28/97
By MELISSA GRACE
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
E-Mail
As word of Rep. Walter Capps' death spread across the South Coast on
Tuesday, friends and colleagues of the former religious studies professor
remembered him as a scholar, a teacher and a dear friend.
All were shocked by the news/T've known Walter Capps for 30 years,
since I was a student at UCSB," said professor Richard Hecht, chairman
of UCSB's Department of Religious Studies. 'T wouldn't be here
without the spark that Walter kindled in me as an undergraduate/T think
today is one of the saddest days of my life."
Capps, who taught at UCSB from 1964 to 1996, was said to have
touched the lives of a generation of students." Literally, thousands of
UCSB students will remember that fire," Hecht said.
Capps was known as an innovative teacher. In 1979 he started a course
on the Vietnam War. He would continue to teach the class to close to
1,000 students annually until he left UCSB in 1996.
The course's format was what made it so successful. Capps brought
American and Vietnamese war veterans and U.S. politicians into his
classroom to talk with students. The class made Capps famous among
students and professors across the country and it seemed to speak to the
American consciousness about the war. Ultimately the CBS-TV show,
"60 Minutes," ran a segment on Capps and his class.
Capps was hired as a professor of religious studies before it became a
department at UCSB. He was instrumental in building the program and
its national reputation, said Robert Michaelsen, a professor emeritus of
religious studies and a former vice chancellor at UCSB.
As a scholar, Capps' area of expertise was Western religions of the 19th
and 20th centuries. Hired to teach Christian thought, he would go on to
lecture on the philosophy of religion and, with the introduction of his
course on Vietnam, he increasingly highlighted morality and ethics in
American culture and politics.
Capps published 14 books. The most recent was a textbook, "Religious
Studies."
1 of 2
10/29/97 17:37:25
�Capps dies of heart attack at 63
http://news.newspress.cotn/local/react.htm
It is a survey of the scholarly study of world religions. The book is
taught at UCSB and is in wide circulation, according to Ninian Smart, a
UCSB religious studies professor.
What Capps taught had a great deal to do with his growing interest in
politics and eventually led him to run for Congress.
In 1994, Capps was narrowly defeated by Republican Andrea Seastrand
for the 22nd Congressional District seat. He lost by less than 1 percent of
the vote that year. In 1996, he again challenged Seastrand, that time
successfully."He was always interested in questions of public policy,"
said Smart, adding that before Capps was elected to national office he
was "always popping off to Washington."
He took UCSB students to the Capitol and to the Vietnam War
Memorial, he said.
Capps, who was chairman of the Department of Religious Studies in the
early 1990s, become a scholar of democracy during his UCSB tenure.
He was director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at
the university. He helped establish the University of California's
Washington Center, which promotes student involvement in government
and politics.
Hecht said Capps ran for office because he believed national politics is
consumed by special interest groups.
He saw an "absence of interest in public culture and ethics," Hecht said.
"He found it exciting, vibrant and in many ways, I think, he saw it as his
new classroom."
Capps' adopted home was Santa Barbara - he was bom and raised in
Omaha, Neb. - and his push for a congressional seat was built on his
interest in politics and his ties here.
One of his friends, Phil Womble, said, "He had a very indomitable
spirit. This is a great loss to UCSB, to the people in the district and the
people of the world."
Capps, a Lutheran, had pledged that during his congressional term he
would visit as many Santa Barbara churches and synagogues as possible.
This often brought Capps into contact with people who did not agree
with his political views - but his efforts were appreciated."Although we
didn't see eye to eye on some issues, Walter impressed me as a kind,
gentle, decent man, striving to serve his constituents with honesty," said
the Rev. Tim Philibosian, who welcomed Capps to services at Trinity
Baptist Church in Santa Barbara. "He will be missed."
Local | Sports | Business | Life | Editorial | Barney Brantingham | Weather | AP
2 of 2
10/29/97 17:37:29
�PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
I
s
so
3
�PROPOSED CENTRAL HIGH PROGRAM
Start time of 10:00 am.
Principal welcomes, announces Little Rock 9 onto stage.
Mayor speaks, intros Governor.
Governor speaks, intros a Little Rock 9 rep.
Little Rock 9 rep speaks, intros Central High Student Body President.
Student Body President speaks, intros the President.
President speaks.
President, Governor, Mayor, proceed up stairs of school, open door to school
for Little Rock 9.
——
�P ^ J ^ -
L I T T L E R O C K C E N T R A L HIGH
_
W ' 71
r ' '
f •-''
40TH A N N I V E R S A R Y COMMISSION
WEBSITE: www.centralhigh57.org
PRELIMINARY C A L E N D A R OF EVENTS
Friday. September 19. 7:00 P.M.. Central High School
A symposium on the media coverage of the 1957 Crisis, sponsored by the Arkansas
Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists
(contact: Kitty Chism, President, Arkansas Chapter, Society of Professional
Journalists, 501-758-2571).
Saturday. September 20.10:00 A.M.. 14th and Park. Central High School
Central High Visitor Center Opening with Governor Mike Huckabee and Mayor
Jim Dailey
(contact: Rett Tucker, President, Central High Museum, Inc., 501-376-8005)
Beginning Saturday and continuing throughout the week, the Visitor Center will host
signing ceremonies featuring the following:
'
•Civil rights leader Daisy Bates, signing copies of her book,
The Long Shadow of Little Rock.
• Little Rock Nine member Melba Patillo Beals, signing copies of her
book, Warriors Don't Cry.
•Photographer Will Counts, signing copies of his historic
photographs taken during the 1957 Crisis.
•Well-known local artist Richard DeSpain, signing copies of his
pen and ink drawings of Central High.
•Little Rock Nine member Ernest Green, signing copies of thfe Disney
movie, "The Ernest Green Story."
•Renowned artist George Hunt, signing copies of his commemorative
painting created exclusively for the anniversary.
•Pat Murphy, son of Women's Emergency Committee founder Sara
Murphy, signing copies of their book, Breaking the Silence.
•Biographer Roy Reed, signing copies of his book, Faubus.
Visitor Center Hours: Monday - Saturday, 10:00 A.M. - 4:00 P.M.
Sunday, 1:00 P.M.- 4:00 P.M.
�Withdrawal/Redaction Marker
Clinton Library
DOCUMENT NO.
AND TYPE
004. itinerary
DATE
SUBJECT/TITLE
Little Rock Central High 40th Anniversary Commission; RE: Phone
numbers [partial] (1 page)
n.d.
RESTRICTION
P6/b(6)
COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Speechwriting
Michael Waldman
OA/Box Number:
14538
FOLDER TITLE:
Little Rock C.H.S. [Central High School] [2]
2006-0469-F
dbl969
RESTRICTION CODES
Presidential Records Act -144 U.S.C. 2204(a)|
Freedom of Information Act - |5 U.S.C. 552(b)|
PI
P2
P3
P4
b(l) National security classified information [(b)(1) of the FOIA)
b(2) Release would disclose internal personnel rules and practices of
an agency [(b)(2) of the FOI A]
b(3) Release would violate a Federal statute 1(b)(3) of the FOIA]
b(4) Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential or financial
information |(b)(4) of the FOIA]
b(6) Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy |(b)(6) of the FOIA)
b(7) Release would disclose information compiled for law enforcement
purposes 1(b)(7) of the FOIA]
b(8) Release would disclose information concerning the regulation of
financial institutions 1(b)(8) of the FOIA)
b(9) Release would disclose geological or geophysical information
concerning wells |(b)(9) of the FOIA)
National Security Classified Information [(a)(1) of the PRA|
Relating to the appointment to Federal office 1(a)(2) of the PRA|
Release would violate a Federal statute 1(a)(3) of the PRA|
Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential commercial or
financial information 1(a)(4) of the PRA|
P5 Release would disclose confidential advice between the President
and his advisors, or between such advisors |a)(5) of the PRA)
P6 Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy 1(a)(6) of the PRA)
C. Closed in accordance with restrictions contained in donor's deed
of gift.
PRM. Personal record misfile defined in accordance with 44 U.S.C.
2201(3).
RR. Document will be reviewed upon request.
�Saturday. September 20.11:00 A.M. - 2:00 P.M.. Central High School
Open House at Central High School, 14th and Park, (tours available)
(contact: Vicki Saviers, President, Central High PTSA, 501-664-8585, Rudolph
Howard, Principal, Central High School, 501-324-2300 or Fatima McKindra,
President, Central High Student Body, 501-375-3312).
Weekend of Sunday. September 21
Reconciliation Prayer
All Little Rock churches and synagogues will be asked to pray for reconciliation
within the city.
_
(contact: Rev. Hezekiah Stewart, ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ B o r Rev. Chris Keller,
Tuesday. September 23.11:30 A.M.. Doubletree Hotel
Weekly program, Little Rock Rotary Club
Speaker: Little Rock Nine Member Emest Green
(contact: Mark Saviers, Program Chairman, Little Rock Rotary Club, 501-663-3325).
Wednesday. September 24.12:00 Noon. St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center
Weekly program, West Little Rock Rotary O u t "
(contact: Brad Cazort, Program Chairman, West JJttle Rock Rotary Club,
501-375-9947).
Wednesday. September 24. 2:00 P.M.. Excelsior Hotel
News conference with Little Rock Nine.
(contact: Alma Williams, Executive Coordinator, Little Rock Central High 40th
Anniversary Commission, 501-312-1190).
Thursday. September 25. Visitor Center
The United States Postal Sen/ice will issue a special cancellation recognizing the
anniversary. Visitors may purchase a distinctive cachet (envelope) with an etching
of Central High School and have it hand stamped at the Visitor Center from 10:00
A.M. to 4:00 P.Mi
(Contact: Mike Binko, U.S. Postal Sen/ice, 501 -375-5155).
Thursday. September 25.10:00 A.M.. Central High School
President Bill Clinton, Governor Mike Huckabee, Mayor. Jim Dailey and the Little Rock
Nine will take part in a program commemorating the 40th anniversary of the court
ordered entrance of the students into Central under the protection of federal troops,
(contact: Rett Tucker, Co-Chair, Little Rock Central High 40th Anniversary
Commission, 501-376-8005, GailJ^eede Jones, CorChair, Little Rock CehtraLHigh
40th Anniversary Commission, 501-225-9755, Alma Williams, -501-312-1190,
Rudolph Howard, 501-324-2300 or Suellen Vann, Little Rock School District, Director
of Communications, 501-324-2020).
Clinton Library Photocopy
_
�Thursday. September 25. 5:30 P.M. - 7:30 P.M.. Excelsior Hotel
Reception honoring Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine.
(contact: Rett Tucker, 501-376-8005, Gail Reede Jones, 501-227-9755 or Alma
Williams, 501-312-1190).
Friday. September 26 (at UALR) and Saturday. September 27 (at Central High),
times to be determined
History symposium, "Remembrance and Reconciliation: Understanding the Little
Rock Crisis of 1957," sponsored by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with
assistance from the George W. Donaghey Foundation.
(contact: Dr. C. Fred Williams, Director of Center for Arkansas Studies, UALR,
501-569-8782).
Friday. September 26 (Dinner) and Saturday. September 27 fat Central High).
times to be determined
Civil rights conference, "Education and the Construction of an Inclusive United
States," sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
(contact: Ron Lanoue, Executive Director, NCCJ, Arkansas Region, 501-372-5129).
Saturday. September 27.1:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M.. Central High School
A 70th birthday party celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the building called,
"America's Most Beautiful High School" when it opened in 1927. All former students
are invited.
(contact: Craig Rains, Little Rock Central High 40th Anniversary Commission,
501-372-3313).
Saturday. September 20 through Saturday. September 27. Arkansas Arts Center.
McArthur Park
"Central High 1957 and 1997: Photographs by Will Counts."
(contact: Ruth Pasquine, Curator of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, 501-396-0325).
Arkansas Arts Center Hours: Monday - Thursday, Saturday, 10:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Friday, 10:00 A.M. - 8:30 P.M.
Sunday, 12 noon - 5:00 P.M.
Saturday. September 20 through Saturday. September 27. State Capitol Rotunda
"The Finest High School for Negro Boys and Girls: Dunbar High School in Little Rock,
Arkansas, 1929-1955".
This exhibit was created by the National Dunbar History Project, a collaboration of the
National Dunbar Alumni Association and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock,
(contact: Dr. Erma Glascow Davis, 501-922-4841 or Dr. Johanna Miller Lewis,
Associate Professor of Public History, UALR, 501-569-3216).
Exhibit Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 10:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M.
Monday - Friday, 8:00 A.M. - 6:00 P.M.
�PRESERVATION
O
s
a
B
a
�Central High Speech
This is an opportunity to point to the lessons learned in a time of racial crisis as a way of celebrating how far we have come, while understanding how far we still have to go.
A.
Forty years ago, Central High was a microcosm, not only of the segregated South,
but of the forces of division and hate that still pervaded much of the country. The challenge then
was to tear down the walls of legally sanctioned segregation.
B.
The President's own personal upbringing and his innate aversion to injustice led
him to question the segregation all around him and to feel a special affinity for the Little Rock
Nine.
C.
Salute the resilence and strength of the Little Rock Nine — for all they endured and
for going on to build successful careers and productive lives. Salute Dwight Eisenhower and the
men and women in uniform who protected the children from the mobs. And salute the NAACP
and Daisy Bates for their courageous stand.
C.
Segregation was a destructive force that held back those who were excluded as
well as the excluders. It took years for Little Rock, Central High and the South to recover from
the stultifying effects of segregation.
D.
But we have made progress. Today, Central High is fully integrated, with a
reputation of excellence. It is lining proof that diversity and excellence go hand in hand.
>*
*•
''
E.
As we enter a new century and new millennium, when America will be forging new
partnerships and competitive relationships on the global stage, we must remember that diversity is
our greatest strength — especially in higher education. The right kind of affirmative action has
strengthened higher education and promoted equal opportunity. We have thefinesthigher
education system in the world. There is room for excellence and opportunity for all.
E.
But integration alone is not a panacea for the ills of American education. We must
have high expectations and high standards. We must not replace the tyranny of segregation
with the tyranny of low expectations. All children, regardless of race or economic background,
deserve the world's best education. Education is the great equalizer.
F.
We also must not replace forced segregation with self-resegregation. Many
children sit together in the classroom, but still segregate themselves elsewhere: at the football
game, at the dances, in social and civic clubs. Are we moving closer together or farther apart?
G.
America will soon have no majority population. We know what we will look like
in 30 years, the question is what will we be like. That is why I have launched this unprecedented
initiative on racial and ethnic reconciliation, led by John Hope Franklin and Judy Winston. The
health and security of our nation and future generations hangs in the balance. We must come
together as One America.
�Themes for the President's speech at Central High School in Little Rock on Sept. 25
Remember the integration of Central High as a defining moment in America. For too long we
closed our doors and minds to the disservice we have done to the nation's children by legally
segregating them by race in their schools.
We cannot say too often how much we appreciate the pioneering spirit and courage represented
by the Little Rock Nine as they braved the tormentors who would deny them what we all seek for
each of our children: the right to an equal educational opportunity, a chance to pursue a high
quality education; one that promised to make them productive and well-qualified citizens.
This commemoration provides us with another opportunity that we should not miss taking
advantage of — a chance to think about the racial divides that still — too often — prevents us from
valuing and cultivating the best that we have to give of ourselves as Americans to make this
country greater than it has ever been.
What is it about different color skin and different cultural heritage that frightens us so much that
we would fail to live up to the principles that we all have embraced theoretically as American
citizens? Why do we feel comfortable presuming that those who look like us, talk like us, live
near us are automatically our friends, hold values that match our own, and deserve the
presumption of our respect and trust? We have sometimes been proven wrong about those
attributes.
Today, in this great country of ours we h^ve ^ racial and ethnic groups represented among
our citizenry. Together they constitute 100 percent of all citizens; those who are non-white
constitute
percent. Early in the 21st century, non-white citizens will comprise
percent
of our population and the imperative for use to overcome bur racial chauvinism will become
even greater. And what is the incentive for us to do so? Especially as it pertains to strengthening
the education that is available to all children but most especially children of color — the future
Ernie Greens, [other well-known people of color who are women, Latinos, and Asians].
I think it's worth taking some time to think and talk about this.
Our isolation from one another in our neighborhoods, our schools, the places where we work has
permitted us to perpetuate the racial myths and stereotypes that have become deeply embedded in
this country's psyche. They are the result of ugly and intractable history of race relations. Now,
there is enough blame to go around on this and that is not the purpose of the conversation I want
to pursue with you and others. We cannot undo that, nor should we take a lot of time trying to
dissect that history - but we certain should try to understand what happened and why so that we
do not find ourselves making the same mistakes. And, I truly believe those mistakes will be at
everybody's expense.
You know, people suggest that I particularly like to rely on polls, and to some extent they are
right. Because I think it's important to know what Americans think about particular issues and to
�try to respond to the concerns they have -- if possible. We are a government for, by and of the
people so I don't consider it particularly problematic if I have from time to time tried to be
responsive to the concerns of Americans. But I believe my responses have always been guided
and tempered by the principles and values of our great Constitution as perfected through
amendment over the years.
�Outline for Little Rock Central
It is wondrefiil to be here, in school that Chelsea would have gone to, a mile from the house
where we lived for over a decade, with so many old friends and neighbors.
What happened here We Americans celebrate those places and times where people risked
everything for freedom - f o r their own and for the country Bunker Hill Gettysburg And here at
Little Rock Central.
This is such a place For it was here that our oldest ideas were tested. Where once again, we
were forced to ask ourselves whether Mr Jefferson's words - we are all creatd equal - were real
And we were forced to face that question because of 9 brave young people, not only them, but
salute to families.
[personal?] [what I remember, etc.]
Now, 40 years later, we still feel the reverberations that emanated from this spot, -^r
We know now that whites as well as blacks benefit when we integrate.
We know now that our region was crippled by chains of hatred - chains that we ourselves forged
and that we ourselves had to break.
We know now that only a strong national government can guarantee those fundamental rights,
[courts?]
It would be easy on a day like today to bask in the glory of the achievemtns of nearly half a
century ago, to congratulate ourselves for the wisdom that has come from time. But we must not
^ do that, for the best way - the only way - to honor the sacrifice and courage of the Little Rock 9
is to XXX.
\
We have torn down the walls in our laws, but we have not torn them down in our hearts Today,
black students and white students can walk in through the same door, but too often, they walk
down different halls.
This school is in so many ways a model for America. I want the whole country to know that
[hasn't tipped]. But here, as in too many schools across America, black students and white
students study separately They eat lunch separately. At the football game, they sit separately.
In too many communities across America, whites and blacks work together - but when the
workday closes, stream home to communities that are as racilaly homogeneous as any in the
segregated south of a half century ago.
�And too many Americans of all races seem to have given up on the ideal of one America, of the
melting pot, of an overarching natioanlity that transends race or ethnicity.
My fellow Americans, we are one. We must be one We must cherish and honor the many
cultures from which we come, but we must honor even more fiercely the America that we must
become. We must insist that the bonds of fellowship and common history, of faith and family and
devotion to country, that unite us and set us apart from the world, are stronger than any bonds of
xxxx
We need do do this more now than ever. Because where once there were 2 groups, black and
white, now there are 100 groups.
Unless we commit once again to the ideal of integraiotn - unless we reach out beyond those who
look different from us, talk different from us, act different from us - unless we recognize that we
are all Amreicans - then we are xxxxx [screwed].
As we appraoch the new century, let us commit once again to the common creed. Xx. xx. xx.
doors.
�And too many Americans of all races seem to have given up on the ideal of one America, of the
melting pot, of an overarching natioanlity that transends race or ethnicity
My fellow Americans, we are one We must be one We must cherish and honor the many
cultures from which we come, but we must honor even morefiercelythe America that we must
become We must insist that the bonds of fellowship and common history, of faith and family and
devotion to country, that unite us and set us apart from the world, are stronger than any bonds of
xxxx
We need do do this more now than ever Because where once there were 2 groups, black and
white, now there are 100 groups
Unless we commit once again to the ideal of integraiotn - unless we reach out beyond those who
look different from us, talk different from us, act different from us - unless we recognize that we
are all Amreicans - then we are xxxxx [screwed].
As we appraoch the new century, let us commit once again to the common creed Xx. xx. xx.
doors.
�Themes for the President's speech at Central High School in Little Rock on Sept. 25
1.
Remember the integration of Central High as a defining moment in America. For too
long we closed our doors and minds to the disservice to which we subjected many of our
nation's children by legally segregating them by race in their schools. While many may believe
they understand why it was a disservice to black children, Latino and American Indian children,
fewer will recognize it as a disservice to white children as well who through their isolation
became victims and perpetuators of stereotypes and prejudice that stunted their ability then and
later to leam from , work with, and value the talents of many Americans for the greater good.
2.
We cannot say too often how much we appreciate the pioneering spirit, courage and
patriotism represented by the Little Rock Nine as they braved the tormentors who would deny
them what we all seek for each of our children: the right to an equal educational opportunity, a
chance to pursue a high quality education; one that promised to make them productive and wellqualified citizens — the right to pursue the American dream, a right that has been embraced by
millions of immigrants to this country and many more millions who began their lives here.
These children and their parents sought what we all seek ~ the opportunity, just the chance to
apply our god-given talents and abilities towards making our own success.
And, I call them pioneers and patriots because they were acting on the principles and promise of
our Constitution. They were following the rules upon which we founded this country although
often and in fundamental ways the country's early implementation and practice of the these
principles were flawed.
3.
This commemoration provides us with another opportunity that we should not miss
taking advantage of — a chance to think about the racial divide that still — too often — prevents us
from valuing and cultivating the best that we have to give of ourselves as Americans to make this
country greater than it has ever been. As we are contemplating this we should ask ourselves the
following questions:
What is it about different color skin and different cultural heritage thatfrightensus so much that
we would fail to live up to the principles that - at least as a theoretical matter - we all have
embraced as American citizens? Why do we feel comfortable presuming that those who look
1
�like us, talk like us, live near us are automatically our friends, hold values that match our own,
and deserve the presumption of our respect and trust? We have sometimes been proven wrong
about those attributes.
4.
Today, in this great country of ours we have
racial and ethnic groups represented
among our citizenry. Together they constitute 100 percent of all citizens; those who are nonwhite constitute
percent. Early in the 21st century, non-white citizens will comprise
percent of our population and the imperative for use to overcome our racial chauvinism will
become even greater. And what is the incentive for us to do so? Especially as it pertains to
strengthening the education that is available to all children but most especially children of color - the future Ernie Greens, [other well-known people of color who are women. Latinos, and
Asians].
I think it's worth taking some time to think and talk about this.
Our isolation from one another in our neighborhoods, our schools, the places where we work has
-permitted us to perpetuate the racial myths and stereotypes that have become deeply embedded
in this country's psyche. They are the result of ugly and intractable history of race relations.
Now, there is enough blame to go around on this and that is not the purpose of the conversation I
want to pursue with you and others. We cannot undo that, nor should we take a lot of time trying
to dissect that history — but we certainly should try to understand what happened and why so that
we do not find ourselves making the same mistakes. And, I truly believe those mistakes will
have unfortunate consequences for all of us who believe and trust that the best that this country
has to give is yet to come.
You know, people suggest that I particularly like to rely on polls, and to some extent they are
right. Because I think it's important to know what Americans think about particular issues and to
try to respond to the concerns they have — if possible. We are a government for, by and of the
people so I don't consider it particularly problematic if I have from time to time tried to be
responsive to the concerns of Americans. But I believe my responses have always been guided
and tempered by the principles and values of our great Constitution as perfected through
amendment over the years
5.
I remember vividly seeing for the first time the pictures of these nine people as
youngsters being led into Central High School by paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division
forty years ago. I remember the taunts and cursing, the ugliness of that mob. I understand why
the rest of the world that saw those scenes began to characterize Southern white people as
hateful, bigots and why so many across this country were galvanized to struggle for the full
implementation of civil rights for our black citizens.
But I also remember that two of the four ministers that accompanied the nine students on
the second day of school were white. I also recall learning that many of the white students at
Central took it upon themselves to welcome the nine black students, inviting them to join them to
�eat lunch. One white student who was a senior during that school year recalled Howe he began
to change during that year:
"Claude Rains, a white senior at Central during the 1957-58 school year
[remembers]['I began to change'] 'from being ... a moderate, who, if I had my way, would have
said, 'Let's don't integrate, because it's the state's right to decide.' I changed to someone who
felt a real sense of compassion for those students, and felt like they deserved something that I
had, and I also developed a real dislike for the people that were causing problems."
(Eves on the Prize. America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965. Juan Williams. Penguin Books,
1987)
6.
We must remind ourselves over and over again that our worst struggles against racism
and oppression have been struggles fought by people of many races, many faiths, many cultures
and beliefs. The abolitionists, those seeking the vote for women and people of color, the
freedom fighters in the civil rights movement, [examples of other (non-black) civil rights
struggles involving e.g. American Indians, Latinos (Caesar Chavez struggle on behalf of migrant
labor?), Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans) were multi-racial advocates for justice. All
were aimed at securing Constitutional rights and principles for racial and ethnic minorities and
women who had been excluded from many of the privileges of American life .
My point here is that it is just as destructive and unfair to think of white people as
monolithic in their views of racial and ethnic minorities as it is to stereotype others based on their
membership in racial or ethnic groups or on the basis of reports of wrongdoing by a few
members of those groups. We must recognize and acknowledge that the values we share as
Americans, those values that make us uniquely American, are shared across racial, ethnic, and
socio-economic groups. We must strengthen the bonds that join us in our embrace of those
common values and celebrate the differences that our inherent in a diverse America.
7.
A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to meet with representatives of several ethnic
groups [name some of the groups, e.g., Italian Americans, Portuguese Americans, Irish
Americans, Arab-Americans]. They all were anxious to share with me their enthusiasm for
supporting the Race Initiative. I was particularly struck by the fact that as each of them began to
describe their own experience as first or second generation Americans or the experience of their
parents so many of their stories and concerns were similar to those that had been shared with me
only a month or so before by members of several African-American organizations who had come
to discuss their support for the work of the Race Initiative. The same is true of my recent
conversations with community leaders from the Latino and American Indian [have there been
such meetings recently?] Our challenge is to help all Americans understand that each of "your
stories" are together "our stories". Your aspirations for your children are the aspirations for all of
our children. [Make clear that President does not intend to equate the unique experiences that
some racial groups have had in this country, e.g. the legacy of slavery for African-Americans; the
trail of tears for American Indians but an individual's experience with discrimination and racism
and prejudice is for that individual a painful sometimes dibilitating event — can anyone say how
�much more painful or distressing his or her pain is than the next person? Indeed, that is not the
point so much as the point of having some common ground from which to work to unite
Americans and to eradicate racists attitudes and actions]
8.
[Some interesting observations re: Little Rock from Eyes on the Prize]
•
The Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in its 1954 Brown decision; but
only two southern states began desegregation that year — Texas integrated one
school district; Arkansas, two. In the rest of the South, not a single classroom was
racially mixed!
•
The law school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville voluntarily admitted
blacks as early as 1948 and the university's medical school in Little Rock did the
same!
•
Nearly half the student body of that city's University of Arkansas Center was
black! Juan Williams goes on to make the point that this relatively progressive
attitude towards race made Little Rock an unlikely place for a crisis in 1957
•
From mid-40's to mid-50's blacks in Little Rock made dramatic gains
•
•
some blacks permitted to join police force;
33 percent of eligible black population in Arkansas were registered to vote
- stark contrast to rest of south
•
Little Rock school board was first in South to issue a statement of
compliance after the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling
[p. 92 Eyes on the Prize]
9. [Where to go with the above paragraphs.... Several possible approaches follow. They are
somewhat disjointed, I admit but I into "stream of consciousness at the moment" Perhaps you
can develop some connecting links.]
I sincerely believe that the majority of American's are people of good will who believe in
equality and fairness. Many are people who believed that most Americans would comply with
the law and discontinue racially discriminatory practices. Many view the progress we have made
in eliminating many of the starkest disparities in education and the economy as an indication that
the civil rights laws achieved what they were designed to achieve. Because of these beliefs about
how far we have come they may be blindsided to the fact that there is much more we must do.
They find it difficult to understand why there is a level of discontentment in many communities
where disparities and discrimination and economic blight continue to exist.
�Others, however, are acutely aware of the cost and continuing consequences of a long
history of racial strife, racial stereotyping and suspicions about the motives and capabilities of
those who are not in or of "our community". The existence of these differences in viewpoint
should not become the basis for conflict or debate but should be seen as an opportunity to share
perspectives and information. Our differences should be a basis for conversation not
confrontation.
I am here today to do [two] important things. First, to recognize that what happened in Little
Rock forty years ago was a defining moment in our history. We revealed to the world not only
our most ugly and bigoted side but also the best of us. Few could forget or fail to be inspired by
the bravery and determination of the Little Rock Nine and those who supported and protected
them. I also am here to challenge Little Rock and the state of Arkansas to model again its
leadership in finding new and progressive ways to contribute to the building of my now famous
"bridge to the 21st Century." — a bridge that will span the racial divide and the education gap.
You may not know this but Arkansas and Little Rock were both way ahead of other places in the
South in 1954 in terms of repairing the breech between the races [use some of the material above
from Eyes on the Prize]. I think you can take the lead again and I believe that the young people
who are enrolled in Central High School today, their parents and committed leadership in the
community can play a pivotal role.
— tomorrow start talking about what you believe in ~ what makes you proud to be an
American; what are your dreams and how will your own hard work in school and the support of
your parents, teachers, and friends help you to achieve that dream. What will you give back to
the community if through its help you realize your aspirations. Then begin to compare your \
answers to that question with those of your classmates and school mates who come from
different backgrounds. I am convinced that you will discover you dream the same dreams for
yourselves and your community. That becomes a common basis for building the bridge I speak
of.
— once it is clear that you share the same vision for your future and that in many ways
you are depending on the same people and institutions to help you realize that vision, perhaps
you will then recognize your obligation to make sure that eliminating the barriers that stand in
the way of that vision is our joint responsibility regards of race, religion, age or ethnicity, etc.
— start brainstorming about how a collective pooling of ideas and resources that may be
uniquely yours can move the barriers aside; how the many can accomplish what the few cannot
— you will find that the diversity you have as a community is a strength not a weakness;
that is what America is about many people joined by a common bond of principles, values and
aspirations for themselves and their children.
— as you share your vision, your plans for bridge building, your approach to eliminating
barriers to a productive future, remember that you need not start with the most difficult problem -
4
�- a series of little steps successfully taken can quickly add up to miles of satisfaction.
�-SEP.20.1997
2:25PM
202 395 1020
NO.104
p.2/4
Themes for the President's speech at Central High School in Little Rock on Sept. 25
1.
Remember the integration of Central High as a defining moment in America. For too
long we closed our doors and minds to the disservice to which we subjected many of our
nation's children by legally segregating them by race in their schools. While many may believe
they understand why it was a disservice to black children, Latino and American Indian children,
fewer will recognize it as a disservice to white children as well who through their isolation
became victims and perpetuators of stereotypes and prejudice that stunted their ability then and
later to leamfrom,work with, and value the talents of many Americans for the greater good.
2.
We cannot say too often how much we appreciate the pioneering spirit, courage and
patriotism represented by the Little Rock Nine as they braved the tormentors who would deny
them what we all seek for each of our children: the right to an equal educational opportunity, a
chance to pursue a high quality education; one that promised to make them productive and wellqualified citizens — therightto pursue the American dream, arightthat has been embraced by
milUons of immigrants to this country and many more millions who began their lives here,
These children and their parents sought what we all seek the opportunity, just the chance to
apply our god-given talents and abilities towards making our own success.
And, I call them pioneers and patriots because they were acting on the principles and promise of
our Constitution. They were following the rules upon which we founded this country although
often and in fundamental ways the country's early implementation and practice of the these
principles were flawed.
3.
This commemoration provides us with another opportunity that we should not miss
taking advantage of - a chance to think about the racial divide that still - too often -- prevents us
from valuing and cultivating the best that we have to give of ourselves as Americans to make this
country greater than it has ever been. As we are contemplating this we should ask ourselves the
following questions:
What is it about different color skin and different cultural heritage thatfrightensus so much that
we would fail to live up to the principles that - at least as a theoretical matter « we all have
embraced as American citizens? Why do we feel comfortable presuming that those who look
like us, talk like us, live near us are automatically ourfriends,hold values that match our own,
and deserve the presumption of our respect and trust? We have sometimes been proven wrong
about those attributes,
4.
Today, in this great country of ours we have
racial and ethnic groups represented
among our citizenry. Together they constitute 100 percent of all citizens; those who are nonwhite constitute
percent. Early in the 21st century, non-white citizens will comprise
1
�-SEP.20.1997
2:26PM
202 395 1020
NO.104
P.3/4
percent of our population and the imperative for use to overcome our racial chauvinism will
become even greater. And what is the incentive for us to do so? Especially as it pertains to
strengthening the education that is available to all children but most especially children of color - the future Ernie Greens, [other well-known people of color who are women, Latinos, and
Asians].
I think it's worth talcing some time to think and talk about this.
Our isolationfromone another in our neighborhoods, our schools, the places where we work has
-permitted us to perpetuate the racial myths and stereotypes that have become deeply embedded
in this country's psyche. They are the result of ugly and intractable history of race relations.
Now, there is enough blame to go around on this and that is not the purpose of the conversation 1
want to pursue with you and others. We cannot undo that, nor should we take a lot of time trying
to dissect that history - but we certainly should try to understand what happened and why so that
we do notfindourselves making the same mistakes. And, I truly believe those mistakes will
have unfortunate consequences for all of us who believe and trust that the best that this country
has to give is yet to come.
You know, people suggest that I particularly like to rely on polls, and to some extent they are
right. Because I think it's important to know what Americans think about particular issues and to
try to respond to the concerns they have - if possible. We are a government for, by and of the
people so I don't consider it particularly problematic if I havefromtime to time tried to be
responsive to the concerns of Americans. But I believe my responses have always been guided
and tempered by the principles and values of our great Constitution as perfected through
amendment over the years
5.
I remember vividly seeing for thefirsttime the pictures of these nine people as
youngsters being led into Central High School by paratroopersfromthe 101st Airborne Division
forty years ago. I remember the taunts and cursing, the ugliness of that mob. I understand why
the rest of the world that saw those scenes began to characterize Southern white people as
hateful, bigots and why so many across this country were galvanized to struggle for the full
implementation of civilrightsfor our black citizens.
But I also remember that two of the four ministers that accompanied the nine students on
the second day of school were white. I also recall learning that many of the white students at
Central took it upon themselves to welcome the nine black students, inviting them to join them to
eat lunch. One white student who was a senior during that school year recalled Howe he began
to change during that year:
"Claude Rains, a white senior at Central during the 1957-58 school year
[remembers][T began to change'] 'from being.,. a moderate, who, if I had my way, would have
said, 'Let's don't integrate, because it's the state's right to decide.' I changed to someone who
felt a real sense of compassion for those students, and felt like they deserved something that I
�"SEP. 20.1997'
2:26PM
202 395 1020
NO.104
p.4/4
had, and I also developed a real dislike for the people that were causing problems."
fEyes on the Prize. America's Civil Rights Years 19S4-196S. Juan Williams. Penguin Books,
1987)
6.
We must remind ourselves over and over again that our worst struggles against racism
and oppression have been struggles fought by people of many races, many faiths, many cultures
and beliefs. The abolitionists, those seeking the vote for women and people of color, the
freedom fighters in the civilrightsmovement, [examples of other (non-black) civil rights
struggles involving e.g. American Indians, Latinos (Caesar Chavez struggle on behalf of migrant
labor?), Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans) were multi-racial advocates for justice. All
were aimed at securing Constitutional rights and principles for racial and ethnic minorities and
women who had been excludedfrommany of the privileges of American life ,
My point here is that it is just as destructive and unfair to think of white people as
monolithic in their views of racial and ethnic minorities as it is to stereotype others based on their
membership in racial or ethnic groups or on the basis of reports of wrongdoing by a few
members of those groups. We must recognize and acknowledge that the values we share as
Americans, those values that make us uniquely American, are shared across racial, ethnic, and
socio-economic groups. We must strengthen the bonds that join us in our embrace of those
common values and celebrate the differences that our inherent in a diverse America.
7.
A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to meet with representatives of several ethnic
groups [name some of the groups, e.g., Italian Americans, Portuguese Americans, Irish
Americans, Arab-Americans]. They all were anxious to share with me their enthusiasm for
supporting the Race Initiative, I was particularly struck by the fact that as each of them began to
describe their own experience as first or second generation Americans or the experience of their
parents so many of their stories and concerns were similar to those that had been shared with me
only a month or so before by members of several African-American organizations who had come
to discuss their support for the work of the Race Initiative. The same is true of my recent
conversations with community leadersfromthe Latino and American Indian [have there been
such meetings recently?] Our challenge is to help all Americans understand that each of "your
stories" are together "our stories". Your aspirations for your children are the aspirations for all of
our children. [Make clear that President does not intend to equate the unique experiences that
some racial groups have had in this country, e.g. the legacy of slavery for African-Americans; the
trail of tears for American Indians but an individual's experience with discrimination and racism
and prejudice is for that individual a painful sometimes dibilitating event - can anyone say how
much more painful or distressing his or her pain is than the next person? Indeed, that is not the
point so much as the point of having some common groundfromwhich to work to unite
Americans and to eradicate racists attitudes and actions]
�What unites us
All these problems are real. But we must have the clarity of mind and charity of spirit to
realize that they are not new - and that the striving to surmount them is the story of America.
We are all, in Martin Luther King's words, woven into "one garment of destiny." We
rightly celebrate the multiplicity of America ~ our marvelous blend of cultures, beliefs and races.
Yet despite this diversity, or above it, we possess a common identity ~ as Americans and as
human beings.
We must recognize that the same ethnic and racial ties that can offer us a sanctuary of
meaning and personal strength also contain the possibility of a frightening fragmentation. We
must honor our diversity; we must cherish the uniqueness of each culture that feeds into the
American experience; we must find new ways of talking to one another with respect instead of
disdain. But we must reach with even greater fervor across those lines that divide us, to honor
and strengthen those bonds of community and shared values that have always united us.
Our national motto says: E Pluribus Unum, "Out of Many, One." What unites us as
Americans?
We Americans are a people bound by faith. Every week we flock to our churches,
mosques and synagogues. Religious observance in our nation is the most intense in the Western
world. That is true across every ethnic line. We are truly "one nation under God."
We are a people united by respect for the value of work. It is our work that supports all
our efforts to build strong families and strong communities.
We cherish our families; we expect that the lives of our children can be better than the
lives of our parents; and we strive to give them that future.
And we are a people who still believe ~ more than any other on earth - that every
individual has within himself or herself the spark of possibility, that still, 220 years later, we are
all created equal.
Opportunity for all. Responsibility from all. Faith, family, community. These are the
values of no one color or region or religion. These are America's values. And these are the values
we must put to work as we prepare our nation for the century ahead.
What we must do now
�Talking Points re: Conversation with Sylvia
1. Concerned about Board's ability to be fully engaged in providing advice to President Clinton
in light of questions posed.
2. Would like questions to be related to the Little Rock speech and to the subject of the
Conversations on Race and Education and the conference that most of the Board will be
participating in on Fri.and Sat.
3. Envision the President's challenge to the audience at Little Rock and to the nation becoming a
central theme in the discussions that the National Conference will sponsor on Fri. and Sat. (In
which the Board will participate)
4. Board can specifically challenge the participants to respond to the President's challenge; they
can also begin to think about how they will advise him on the following Tuesday. This lays the
foundation for the Board's advice. Otherwise, it will appear to be someone disjointed from their
prior deliberations.
5. Some challenges that might be included in the speech:
President indicates we are linked by a set of common ideals. Our challenge is to both
articulate those ideals in terms that every American can embrace and translate them into daily
action. What in your view are the ideas that best express what it means to be an American?
What evidence can we now point to that helps to support our belief that those ideas and ideals are
widely held across all racial and ethnic groups? Have you determined how we can expand that
understanding? (Engagement of leadership from various sectors, reference to participation in
conversations, the fact of the Initiative has been an incentive for people to begin to talk about
race; board members can describe some of their meetings, mail, one-on-one conversations since
July 14; encourage the President to continue to refer to the importance of this in every
presentation he makes; encourage all members of the Adminstration to seek the views of diverse
group of staff, public on all issues)
6. Key to the interaction on the 30th is ability to point back to the Little Rock speech and to
Board's related activities both before and after Little Rock to give credibility to the discussion.
�M A W A L D M A N @ aol.com
09/19/97 12:54:00 AM
Record Type:
To:
Record
June Shih, Michael Waldman
QlL&(9~Xs<U
J^fl
lj(
^ " f o ^ ^ t .
Subject: suggested outline for LRC
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset = unknown-8bit
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
June
I have to go to an 8:30am meeting with Sens. McCain & Feingold.
(You've never lived until you've gone to a campaign finance reform meeting.)
I cooked up this outline for the speech .... what do you think? I'd like
you to work on it, focusing especially on the beginnign, as I suggested, but
plow ahead. And I'd like you to work with Jonathan Prince, w h o is a very
powerful writer. He will be in t o w n Friday but will leave t o w n Friday night.
He can be useful ... but don't let him crowd you. This is a crisis project
where I want to hear your original voice; don't write for what you think I
want to hear (except for following the outline), but let your originality
f l o w a bit. (A bit.) MICHAEL
Outline for Little Rock Central
It is wondreful to be here, in school that Chelsea would have gone t o , a mile
from the house where we lived for over a decade, w i t h so many old friends and
neighbors.
What happened here. We Americans celebrate those places and times where
people risked everything for freedom - f or their o w n and for the country.
Bunker Hill. Gettysburg. And here at Little Rock Central.
This is such a place. For it was here that our oldest ideas were tested.
Where once again, we were forced to ask ourselves whether Mr. Jefferson's
words - we are all creatd equal - were real.
And we were forced to face that question because of 9 brave young people,
not only t h e m , but salute to families.
[personal?] [what I remember, etc.]
Now, 4 0 years later, we still feel the reverberations that emanated from this
spot.
We know now that whites as well as blacks benefit when we integrate.
&-^)
^'
�five girls three boys
became — a journalist. A wife, a mother,
finished the school year.
Burning crosses
"The worst was never having anyone say anything kind to you, no one recognizing you as a
human being
flying pencils given way to assumptions
nothings has changed
commemorate.
Scars heal
Ambition, Personality, Preparation and Opportnity.
Blood will run in the streets
sports, dances
pres gov mayor- who hadn't agreed, no=w do,
�3
?
st
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
�\
ARKANSAS'
GOVERNOR
FAUBUS
is mnos
�A letter from the PUBLISHER
TIME
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~THE'WEEKLY ^NEWSMAGAZINE
. H S N R Y R . l.UCK
EoirOR-lN-CHIEF.
. . RoY-E. LARSIIN
P*?SIDItNT...... .
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• .
MANAGING EDITOR
Roy Alexander
•
•
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR
- OLto Fuerbrinffer
•
SENIOR EDITORS
.L6ttla\>Bank«: Robert W. Boycl- Jr., Edward O. Cerf.
^ Thomaa Cnfiith, Heiirv Anatolc GrunwaM. Jamefl Keoffh,
'.Aobcrt^Malinlng. Hlllla Mlll«, Content I'eckham. Joaeph
Purtcll, John Walker.
;
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G.. O&AAJUSS-^
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ASSOOATE-'EDITORS •
AuchlndoM..A.Wl.vBttkwABnicc Barton Jr.,
Bernstein,: Rodney:.CarapbeU. Gllliert Cant.
. Clark, George ^(^.i^D^uJcl»,^ Henry Bradford i
J JT, Alexander'Eliot. William KprM* «Mte=
n. Barker T. Haruhom, Koeer S..Hewlett, Ctahatbif^
, Alyln M. JoMphy Jr., Louis Kronentxrser,. Jona-:,
KNorton-s I ^ n a r d , Sr/Marsaret' Qulmby,: Klchara i
INT. S. Eliot's The
Ic
Cocktail Party, a
Broadway success
eight seasons ago,
a middle-aged character complains to
an acquaintance: " I
am obsessed by tjie
thought of my own
insignificance." His
POET ELIOT
friend, a psychiatrist
who understands him well, poetically replies:
Precisely. Aiul I could make you feel
important,
And you would imagine it a marvellous cure;
\
And you would go on, doing such
amount of mischief
As lay within.,your power—until you
came to grief.
Half of the harm that is done in
this world
Is due to people who want' to feel
important.
.
/
For a fine example of life'imitating
art, see the Cover Story in NATIONAL
AFFAIRS, What Orval Hath Wrought.
from coast to coast, see PRESS, New
Tonic for the Trlb.
all French
LIKEFelix Gaillard Finance Ministers,
occupies quarters
in the Palace of the Louvre, and en
route to his private dining salon passes
through the state apartment of^Napoleon I I I with its massive chandeliers, velvet drapery and columns,
caryatids and cherubs encrusted with
gold leaf. "Ugly, isn't it?" remarked
Gaillard cheerfully to a TIME reporter. "AH the gold I own is on these
walls." This week F61ix Gaillard arrives in the U.S. See FOREIGN NEWS,
France's Daring Young Man.
science, week after
THE news ininto a wondrous varieweek, falls
of
or private
N Ois crannyfrompub'iccuriosity of life
safe
the
the
U.S. press—except the U.S. press. Publishers treat other publishers as fellow club members whose foibles—
and achievements—may be whispered
about in a comer of the library but
are not to be bruited about in public
print. From its window seat in the
clubhouse, TIME sees newspapers and
newsmen, as well as other magazines,
as legitimate, significant and often fascinating subjects for discussion and
criticism. Because no other general
U.S. publication talks so regularly and
so candidly about the press in action,
TIME'S Press section is must reading
for most newsmen, and an intriguing
source of information for the millions
who read newspapers an<j magazines.
For a story that will be discussed in
city rooms and ignored in newspapers
ty of categories—from astronomy (the
sweep of galaxies) to biology (the
strange way of animals) to archaeology (the digging into man's past). Occasionally, as it does this week, the
fascinating news in science comes under agriculture. Now quarantined in
the Carolinas is a pesky parasite called
Striga asiatica, or witchweed, that
could cause more trouble than Asian
flu and ruin crops from Virginia to
Texas. See SCIENCE, Little Red Hower.
O-J. OEM. OF UUaiLTOIE
CAROLINA'S WITCHWEED
INDEX
Art......
78
Books
..98
Business, v.... ..86
Cinema ...^:...^48
Education
69
Foreign News—20
e
ipXluK'h^^'oriain
:jnaca<lne,or:obtaln^from;^/M"A**KAi££4.<J
Cover-Story
Hemisphere
Letters
11
30
2
Medicine..
41
Milestones
83
Miscellany
104
Music
44
National Affairs . 1 1
People
Press
Religion
Science
33
....61
i...81
....34
Sport
72
TV & Radio
55
�Vol. LXX No. 13
THE
IME
WEEKLY
September 23, 1957
NEWSMAGAZINE
NATIONAL
AFFAIRS
THE NATION
Retreat from Newport
It was a momentous confrontation, set
before a backdrop of high feeling and history. The rebellious governor of the state
of Arkansas, defying U.S. courts and U.S.
law, went to plead his case before the
President of the U.S. There was quiet,
friendly talk behind closed doors; there
were smiles and handshakes for the camera, then politely worded, carefully prepared statements. Through all of these
devices the result was clear: the President of the U.S. had flatly insisted that
the governor of Arkansas must bow to the
law and withdraw from his position of
rebellion.
The meeting began at 8:50 a.m. on a
grey, sticky morning last weekend, after a
marine helicopter put Arkansas' Governor
Orval Faubus down on the lawn of Dwight
Eisenhower's vacation headquarters at
Newport, R.I. First the President and the
governor talked alone for 20 minutes behind the drawn blinds of a tiny office.
Then they moved to an adjoining room
for a two-hour conference with Attorney
General Herbert Brownell Jr., White
House Staff Chief Sherman Adams, ind
Arkansas'
Democratic
Representative
Brooks Hays, who had helped arrange the
meeting (see below).
Smiling & Wan. At the outset, President Eisenhower characteristically asked
everyone to speak frankly and freely.
They did. The discussion ranged over
the timing of school desegregation not
only in Arkansas but throughout the
South. Faubus explained at length the
integration progress already made in Arkansas, at the state university in Fayetteville, in public transit systems, etc.
Finally the governor made a significant
request: that Little Rock integration be
delayed (a mere year's postponement
would get Faubus past next July's Democraticfprimary, when he hopes to win renommation for a third term),
.'•^resident Eisenhower's answer was direct^^rHe Federal Government woMld work
firmlyjand patiently through the courts to
enforce the desegregation ruling of the
Sujpjeme Court. There could be no back.Jng^fway from this position. Therefore
there.\ could not be, and there was not,
anyj.-agreement, implied or stated, to deife^jntegration in Little Rock. For his
-part,;Orval Faubus did not promise to reinoye the National Guard from Little
•il'
A u o c i a t e d Press
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER, CONGRESSMAN HAYS, GOVERNOR FAUBUS
The message beneath the smile: Bow to the law.
Rock's Central High School and permit
Negro children to enter. But there was a
general understanding that some time this
week Faubus would begin withdrawing the
Guard and turning law enforcement back
to Little Rock authorities.
After the conference a smiling President and a wan governor walked down the
stairs into a cluster of newsmen. "The
President and I "have had a very friendly
and constructive conference," said Faubus. Said President Eisenhower: "Good to
see you." Replied Faubus: "Thanks."
Then they parted.
Clear & Contrite. That afternoon President Eisenhower and Governor Faubus
issued separate statements. The President
made clear what he considered the key
point of the conference: "The Governor
stated his intention to respect the decisions of the U.S. district court, and to
give his full cooperation in carrying out
his responsibilities in respect to these decisions . . . I am sure it is the desire of
the Governor not only to observe the
supreme law of the land but to use the
influence of his office in orderly progress
of the plans which are already the subject of the order of the court." Governor
Faubus' statement had the sound of re-
treat: "The people -of Little Rock are
law-abiding, and I know that they expect
to obey valid court orders. In this they
shall have my support."
Then Governor Faubus flew back to
Little Rock, where political trouble awaited him on both hands. He had infuriated
his former liberal following by calling out
the National Guard in .the first place.
Now he stood to infuriate segregationists
if he withdrew the Guard. Orval Faubus
had not exactly surrendered at Newport.
But he was withdrawing to a position
that he had yet to prepare.
THE SOUTH
W h a t Orval H a t h W r o u g h t
(See Cover)
Orval Faubus entered his second-floor
study bent double, hands clutching his
abdomen. He greeted a visitor perfunctorily, collapsed into a contour chair,
groaning in the agony of too much sweet
corn and too many sweet potatoes the
night before. His wife popped anxiously
into the room, carrying a tray; Faubus
peered distastefully at the stewed chicken
and rice. "Put that rice in a bowl,"
snapped he, "so I can put some milk on
�rendered to heightened passion, withdrew
from school.
In Louisville, a segregationist composed
a battle hymn: "Stand firmly by your
cannon/Let ball and grapeshot fly/And
trust in God and Faubus/But keep your
powder dry." In Alabama four potential
candidates for governor set a political
pattern for the South, each desperately
trying to outdo the others in praise of
Faubus. One wired Faubus his congratulations. Another promised to back Faubus
"at all costs." A third offered to go to
jail to prevent integration. The fourth
topped them all: he was willing to die
for segregation.
Fury in the North. The North, which
has its own segregation faults, watched
and smoldered with resentment. A Long
Island summer-theater audience heard
South Pacific Heroine Nellie Forbush say
she was from Little Rock, stopped the
performance with three minutes of furious
boos and hisses. A drugstore clerk in Philadelphia admitted to human dilemma: " I
don't like Negroes and God knows I ' d
hate to have to live with them—but I
can't help thinking how awful it would be
if my little girls had to go through a mob
to be cursed and spit upon." Said a Negro
bartender in Dynamite Jackson's Los Angeles saloon: "A lot of whites I know
never got excited about this segregation
thing in the past. Now they're red-hot
under the collar."
Politically, Orval Faubus stabbed at the
heart of his own Democratic Party. During the 85th Congress, Texans Lyndon
Johnson and Sam Rayburn had labored;,
tirelessly, skillfully and successfully to
avoid a ruinous party blowup over civil,
rights. They had even contrived to put a
Democratic stamp of sorts on civil rights^
legislation. Now Faubus had undone themo
—and Democratic politicians, in their*
acute embarrassment, could only pretend
A«tociated Press
that Faubus did not exist. Lyndon Johnson
BARRING THE WAY AT NORTH LITTLE ROCK
became unavailable for comment. Grunted
"They shall not pass!"
old. Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the U.S^'
to attend classes. And even as Governor high school without a hint of protest. House of Representatives longer than any^
Faubus defied his doctor's orders, the But the sparks from Little Rock soon
other man in history: "I'm not making,
shock waves of his defiance of the U.S. landed and flared: a Negro girl was hit any comment about segregation at all, m y |
Government crashed through the South, with a clothes hanger; a boy was struck
friend, one way or another. It's not myj
the nation and the world.
in the back with a book—and a white problem."
By calling out the National Guard motorist tried to run down two Negro
Sojourning in London, Arkansas' Demagainst school integration in Little Rock children as they.walked home from school. • ocratic Senator J. William Fulbright, a
(TIME, Sept. 16), Faubus meant only to Integration was suspended, and Miss Elizsegregationist by the record in spite of a
further his personal political ambitions. abeth Burrow, half owner of the weekly
long career as a self-described liberal, said .
But the slightly sophisticated hillbilly Ozark Spectator, dying of throat cancer, *ie just didn't know enough about the Arfrom near Greasy Creek had, in fact, wrote to her townspeople: "Here's a makansas situation to, comment. Iowa's Dem- ;
set off a chain reaction that quickly went lignancy worse than my cancer, and I ocratic Governor Herschel Loveless drew
beyond his control; his manufactured ^wouldn't swap with you."
a formal N.A.A.C.P. protest for his evacrisis in Little Rock brought the reality
Spreading Tension. What Orval Faubus" sion ( " I have enough troubles of my own .
of crisis to other Southern cities, aroused wrought for Arkansas, he wrought for the without getting mixed up in this"). Demothe North as rarely before, turned askew South. Said the Knoxville, Tenn. News- cratic National Chairman Paul Butler of
the nation's political picture, and placed Sentinel of Orval's sUnd: "This official
Indiana refused to "pass judgment" on
the U.S. on the moral defensive.
act has lent an air of respectability and
Faubus. At week's end the Democratic
Worse Than Cancer. In Faubus' own social approval to mob action." Violence Advisory Committee, including Members
state, the impact of his defiance was im- exploded in Nashville (see below), and
Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, finalmediate and sharp. At North Little Rock responsible officials attributed it directly ly got around to issuing a statement
(pop. 50,000), officials had been so con- to the impact of the news from Lit- blaming Republican Dwight Eisenhower
fident of peaceful school integration that tle Rock. In Charlotte, N.C., Dorothy
for the whole Arkansas mess.
they were going ahead without even a Counts, Negro high school girl who had
Assaying the political effects, the New
court order. With Faubus whipping up faced the jeers of a crowd with dignity York Times said that Orval Faubus had
emotions across the muddy Arkansas and courage the week before, finally sur- knotted the "civil rights albatross firmly
12
TIME, SEPTEMBER 23, 1957
it." But this, protested Alta Faubus, was
what the doctor had ordered. " I don't
care!" cried Faubus. " I won't cat it! If
you won't get me a bowl of rice and
milk, I ' l l go get it myself." Alta Faubus
shrugged, left, returned with the rice and
milk. Faubus wolfed it down, milk dribbling down his chin. Then Orval Eugene Faubus, 36th governor of Arkansas,
turned to his guest and belched gustily.
At that moment, one day last week,
the governor of Arkansas had good reason
to be suffering from, as he put it, a "sore
stomach." Arkansas National Guardsmen
were deployed around his salmon-pink
executive mansion, warding off all. Other
militiamen surrounded Little Rock's Central High School, ready to defend it to
the death against Negro children trying
River, the North Little Rock people realized that they were in trouble. Integration was suspended (said a school board
member: "We don't want the Guard over
here"), and responsible Negro leaders
joined with white in asking Negro parents
to keep their children away.
Other Negroes, angered to recklessness
by the Faubus action, egged the parents
on. Result: six Negro pupils tried to go
to school. They ran up against a pack
of pool-hall bums led by a beefy, redfaced man who stood with arms folded
across his chest and grandly proclaimed:
"They shall not pass." Pushed and shoved
away, the Negroes did not pass.
One hundred miles to the northwest,
little Ozark (pop. 1,757), where racial
conflict was unknown, had integrated "its
1
�around the neck of the entire Democratic
Party." In San Francisco, William Stratton, executive director of the Booker T.
Washington Community Center, recalled
that Faubus, as a Democratic "liberal,"
had been elected with Negro support. "Because of that," said Stratton, "we must
act to analyze the attitudes of those running for office. We must do as much as
we can to make sure that a Faubus doesn't
exist in this area. It's foolish to be blindly
tied to a party which has no concern
for your welfare."
Joy in Budapest. In Little Rock, Nashville and Charlotte, the racist crowds
branded those who opposed them as proCommunist. But it was, in fact, Orval
Faubus and his followers who gave aid and
comfort to Communism. Headlined Beirut's Communist daily AL-Shara: AMERICA
X
names as Loafer's Glory, Bug Tussle, Hell
for Sartain, Hog Scald, Nellie's Apron—
and, perhaps most remote of them all,
Greasy Creek in the Ozark forests of the
northwest, where Orval Faubus was born
47 years ago in a candlelighted cabin.
There the night fog wisps early along
the creek valley, and the silence is broken
only by the howl of timber wolves. There
Orval Faubus, prematurely born and
weighing only 4 lbs., "growed like a weed"
in the hardest of all soil. There Orval
learned about politics from his father,
"Uncle Sam" Faubus, a sort of mountain
Populist. Last week in the Ozark woods,
Uncle Sam, crippled from arthritis but
still scratching a living from his hillside
VERGES ON CIVIL REBELLION. Sneered
Italy's Communist L ' U n M : " I t is hard
to imagine a country where the new scholastic year opens in an atmosphere other
than serene, where the thought of desks,
notebooks and blackboards is mingled with
visions of rifles, tear gas, spring knives
and clubs . . . Such a country does, however, exist, and it bears the high-sounding
name of 'United States of America.' " In
Budapest, Hungary's ruthless Premier Janos Kadar fairly kicked his heels in joy.
Cried he: "Those who tolerate that a
people should be persecuted because of
the color of their skin have no right to
preach human liberty and human rights."
In the United Nations, after a darkskinned Ceylonese delegate denounced Soviet intervention in Hungary, Bulgaria's
Peter Voutov retorted: "Something worse
could happen to you if you go to Little
Rock."
In neutral and non-Communist countries (most of them with their own race
problems), the U.N. debate on the sacking of Hungary was drowned out by the
news from Little Rock. Said the Times of
Indonesia: "Americans must ask themselves if a Faubus is not a greater traitor
to their country than a small fry caught
selling atomic data to foreign powers, and
whether Governor Faubus should not be
hauled before the Un-American Activities
Committee for alienating half the world
from the U.S." In Japan, a conservativeminded citizen asked quietly: " I f Americans regard Negroes as inferior, how do
they really regard Asians?" Millions of
brown-skinned Asians, unaware of great
U.S. constitutional issues, saw only darkskinned American children being held
away from school by the rifles of white
American soldiers.
Hell for Sartain. All this—trouble in
his own state, trouble in the South, trouble in the U.S. and trouble in the world—
Orval Faubus had wrought. Why? The
answers lie deep within a politician .who
fought his way out of a peckerwood background and a backwoods wilderness—and
never wants to return.
Arkansas, part delta and part mountain, part magnolia and part moonshine,
where a horse is a "critter" and a heifer
is a "cow brute," is given to such place
TIME, SEPTEMBER 23, 1957
:
:• v .. -.n-ii-.... .
U N C L E SAM
Francis Miller—Life
FAUBUS
"Little O r v a l , he was d i f f e r e n t . "
farm, mused on his son's fame. "Little Orval," said J. Sam Faubus, "he was different to most boys. Kids like to get into
mischief, but ail_ he ever did was read
books. He never done anything if he
couldn't do it perfectly. You'd never find
a weed in his row of corn."
One Thing He Hated. Orval Faubus
did not learn about segregation in the
Ozarks. "He never saw a Negro until he
was a grown lad," said Uncle Sam. "Then
he went away North to follow the strawberry crop when he was about 18. Weonly had one Negro family in Madison'
County in those days, and they lived way
down on the crick where nobody ever saw
'em. I told Orval not to hate anybody of
any race. I told him people would think
he was narrow-minded and would look
down on him." Then Old Sam provided a
key to the understanding of Orval Faubus: "That's one thing Orval always hated
—to be looked down on."
Orval spent a lifetime clawing his way
up so that he would not be looked down
on. He found what he wanted in politics.
For years he bounced from one meager job
to another: country schoolteacher, itinerant farm hand, lumberjack. He ran for
local offices (circuit clerk and recorder)
and won, later wangled an appointment
as postmaster. In 1948 he helped throw
Madison County to liberal Sid McMath,
who was elected governor. McMath named
him to the nonsalary state highway commission, later responded to a Faubus plea
("I'm broke. I need a payin' job") by
making him an administrative assistant at
$5,000 a year. Orval Faubus moved to Little Rock—and (to him) the big time.
A Scheme for Security. Elected governor on a fluke in 1954, re-elected last
year, Orval Faubus was right where he
wanted to be. He was the chief executive
of a sovereign state; he hobnobbed with
political bigwigs; he was, at last, looked
up to. Orval Faubus planned to stay in
Little Rock. Politics had given him position and respectability; he had nothing to
go back to. But how would he hang on?
Arkansas has a strong tradition against a
third term for a governor. Moreover, his
popularity was slipping: he had raised
taxes, alienated his liberal followers by
granting rate increases to railroads and
utilities. He needed new support and he
needed it badly. His solution: to win
votes in conservative eastern Arkansas ,
by setting himself up as a segregationist hero.
Last Aug. 20, Orval Faubus set his plan
in motion: he called Deputy Attorney
General William Rogers in Washington,
asked what the U.S. Government would
do to prevent violence in Little Rock.
Rogers said that it was primarily a matter
for local law enforcement, but volunteered to send Arthur Caldwell, head of
the Justice Department's civil rights section, to Little Rock. Caldwell, a nativfe
Arkansan, explained the law, outlined federal injunctive powers, asked Faubus why
he thought there might be violence in
Little Rock. Faubus replied that his evidence was "too vague and indefinite to be
of any use to a law-enforcement agency."
Caldwell returned to Washington convinced that Orval Faubus meant to play
politics with Little Rock integration.
"I'm Already Committed." Faubus lost
no time playing politics: the very next
day he went into a state courtj testified
that integration would mean bloodshed in
Little Rock, won an injunction against i t
—which was promptly overruled by U.S;
District Judge Ronald Davies. Then, the
Sunday before Little Rock schools were ^
to open, word came to adopted Arkansan
Winthrop Rockefeller, chairman of the
highly successful Arkansas Industrial De-" :
velopment Commission, that Faubus was
going to call out the National Guard to
: stop integration.
Rockefeller rushed to the executive •
mansion, pleaded against the move for
more than two hours, argued that it would;;;/
give the state a bad name with industry. ,
It was no use. A close Rockefeller associate quotes Faubus as saying: "I'm sor-- /
:
13
:
- ';'
�International
NASHVILLE'S HATTIE COTTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
A sound like a whisper from God.
ry, but I'm already committed. I'm going
to run for a third term, and if I don't
do this, Jirn Johnson and Bruce Bennett
| segregationists who are his probable opponents for governor next year] will tear
me to shreds." That was it: at 9 o'clock
on the eve of school opening, Arkansas
National Guard troops clanked into Little Rock. An hour later Orval Faubus
appeared on television, explained that he
had called out the militia to prevent
violence.
Neither then nor thereafter did Governor Faubus consult with the man charged
by the Arkansas constitution with keeping law and order in Little Rock: Mayor
Woodrow Wilson Mann."There was no indication of unrest whatever," says Mann.
"We had no reason to believe there would
be violence." For one thing, Little Rock
had jvorked out for itself a seven-year
integration plan, carefully picking and
choosing among the Negro students most
likely to do well, so as to minimize the
possibility of trouble in a city with betterthan-average race relationships. Even so,
to be on the safe side, Mann and his 175man police force had made carefully detailed plans to keep order. Orval Faubus
never gave the mayor's plans a chance—
and Woodrow Wilson Mann, who had
twice supported Faubus for governor, is
eloquent in his anger. Says he of Faubus:
"His words spell sedition, his defiance rebellion. His words and actions echo another tragic period in our history when
irresponsible men plunged this nation into
a Civil War."
Order from the Court. Orval Faubus
claimed to be unworried by Mayor Mann's
criticism. He was holed up in his executive
mansion, protected from intrusion by the
National Guard, enjoying congratulatory
telegrams, listening to piped music,
watching Kinescopes of himself on television (he liked them), preparing to reap
new publicity benefits.
14
Even as Orval was basking in his new
fame, pressures agaii^t him were building
up. Across town from the executive mansion, U.S. District Judge Davies, was
reading a 400-page report prepalre'd for
him by the FBI, which had 50 agents
comb the Little Rock situation. The report showed not a shred of evidence
supporting Faubus' claim that Little Rock
had been ripe for violence. Example:
where Faubus had said Little Rock stores
were selling out of knives and pistols
("mostly to Negro youths"), the FBI
agents checked 100 shops, found that
weapon sales had actually been below
normal. The report read, Judge Davies
issued a summons commanding Faubus
to appear in his court this week to show
cause why an injunction should not be
issued against him.
U.S. Marshal Beal Kidd, an old friend
of Faubus, passed through the National
Guard lines and handed Faubus the summons on the executive lawn. The summons genuinely worried Faubus: the man
who hated to be looked down upon began
to fret about the trouble his new prominence might bring him.
More Than He Could Handle. Faubus
had other qualms. The political effect of
his stand was not quite what he had expected. His old boss, Sid McMath, was
busy rounding up liberals to denounce
what Orval had wrought. Little Rock's
respected Congressman Brooks Hays, top
Baptist layman (president of the Southern Baptist Convention), checked with
the city's leading citizens, found them
shocked and ashamed.
Hays started to move: first he called
the White House, talked to his old congressional friend, Presidential Assistant
Sherman Adams. He suggested that Governor Faubus and President Eisenhower
meet. Hays himself set forth three conditions: 1) the request for a meeting would
have to come from Faubus, 2) Faubus
would have to be assured that his bid
would not be rebuffed, and 3) there must
be a real possibility that the meeting
would result in something "constructive."
Adams asked the President what he
thought of Hays's plan. The answer was
emphatic: yes, let him come.
Then Hays went to Faubus, spent a
quiet hour talking in the book-lined
second-floor study of the executive mansion. By this time Faubus was worn thin
under the increasing pressures. He agreed
to cooperate fully (but not to capitulate).
Brooks Hays called Adams and said that
a telegram was on its way from Faubus
to the President at Newport, R.I.
The telegram was delivered to President Eisenhower just as he holed out on
the 435-yd. first hole at the Newport
Country Club. The President read it
slowly. Press Secretary James Hagerty
scratched an answer in pencil on the back
of the telegram, handed it to the President. Ike changed a word or two, initialed the bottom: "DDE." The historic
confrontation was arranged between the
President of the U.S. and a governor of
Arkansas who had wrought a lot more
than he could handle.
Weeds in the Corn. Back in the Ozark
hills Uncle Sam Faubus unknowingly told,
in just a few words, why Orval had done
all he had done. In the little house near
Greasy Creek, he turned to his wife and
exclaimed: "Why, Orval is the secondmost thing in the papers these days."
Replied she: "Firstmost thing." "Yep,"
agreed Uncle Sam. "Well, that's the way
Orval always wanted i t . "
But now there were weeds in Orval's
row of corn. They reached out of the
field and out of the hills and around the
world. They had created ugly patches on
good ground, and before they stopped
growing, they might well kill the very
ambitions that Orval Faubus had cultivated with all his might.
i
i
J
..1/..
j
The Battle of Nashville
Dawn broke overcast and muggy over
Nashville (pop. 187,000), the graceful and •
leisurely capital of the state of Tennessee. I t was back-to-school week, and for
the first time in the city's history Negro
children would go to school with white
children. The way had been prepared carefully; the integration would be selective
and limited. Only twelve carefully chosen J
little Negro children, first-graders all, .
would go to five schools that were p r e - / a
viously all white. But the air was charged M
with tension. "We are in the backwash of - j f
a thing that's going on too close to us,"'^«j
said School Superintendent W. A. Bass.rg
"The Little Rock situation is giving the
impression of possible victory to thosej
people who would defeat the Suprem^
Court decision."
Nashville's city officials, though brought!
up for the most part to believe in racia""
segregation, were determined to preserVij!
the law as a necessity of their communf
ty's everyday life. "Desegregation," sai
School Board Chairman Pro Tern Elme
L. Pettit, "is something that has becomf
law, and we must learn to live with it
TIME, SEPTEMBER 23, 195
�Back of the local officials stood Tennessee's Governor Frank Goad Clement, who
called oul the National Guard last year
to enforce integration and (he law in Clinton, Tenn., and this year sharply turned
down a segregationist delegation that
urged him to follow the lead of Arkansas'
Orval Faubus.
"Pull Their Black Curls!" Before 7
a.m. on back-to-school day crowds of
white people began to gather outside the
schools where Negro children had been
registered—and it was clear that Nashville was in for serious trouble. There
were scrawny, pinch-faced men in T shirts
and jeans, vacant-faced women in curlers
and loose-hanging blouses, teen-age boys
in tight pants and greased ducktail hairdos. They daunted Confederate flags and
placards, e.g.,
WHAT GOD HAS PUT ASUN-
DER LET NOT MAN PUT TOGETHER.
"Here come the niggers," was the first
battle cry as two six-year-old Negro girls
in neat green dresses, their hair done up
in braids, came into view. "Pull their
black curls out!" screeched one white
woman. As the Negro six-year-olds tripped
quietly into the schools, the crowds grew
wilder. A white waitress raised a tattooed
arm, threw a rock and hit a Negro woman
on the chest. A Negro woman guided her
grandchild quietly through a gauntlet of
hissing whites until she broke under the
strain, undid one button of her blouse and
drew a knife. " I f any of you jump me,
I'm going to use this," she cried. All pretense at education collapsed as the Battle
of Nashville got under way.
"Bloodthirsty Race." That evening
white crowds concentrated outside the
War Memorial Building beneath a granitecarved quotation from Woodrow Wilson:
America is privileged to spend her blood
and her might for the principles that gave
her birth and happiness and the peace
which she has treasured.
From the steps of the state capitol
Frederick John Kasper, 27, the tall, hawkfaced agitator from Camden, N.J., began
to whip up the crowd. "The Constitution
of the U.S. gives you the right to carry
arms," he said. " I f one of these niggers
pulls a razor or a gun on us, we'll give it
to 'em . . . When they fool with the white
race they're fooling with the strongest
race in the world, the most bloodthirsty
race in the world." Hot-eyed Rabblerouser John Kasper mentioned the name
of one of Nashville's Negro civic leaders
and dramatically held up~ a rope, then
talked hazily about dynamite.
City officials stood by, disdaining to interfere for fear of infringing the right of
free assembly. They knew that the tradition of segregation was hard to break,
and they were tolerant of the protesting
crowds, which broke up without open disorder. But before another dijwn Nashville
was to be blasted into a changed mood.
Half an hour after midnight the city
was rocked by a thunderoiis dynamite
blast that shattered a wing of the sevenyear-old, $500,000 Hattie Cotton Elementary School where one five-year-old
Negro girl had registered the day before.
The blast ripped doors off hinges, cracked
plaster and scattered bricks and glass ,in
thick, ugly layers across the surrounding
schoolyard and walks. "A hellish'explosion—just like God had whispered in my
ear," said one nearby resident.
The Realization. Dazedly the good
people of Nashville began to recognize the
horror of what had occurred. Those elements of officialdom, press and public that
had stood aside from the battle were
shocked into a new appreciation of law
and order. "Ain't things got terrible?"
wailed one frail old woman who had demonstrated against integration only the day
before. "This is no longer a matter of
segregation or desegregation," said one
school official. "This is a matter of sheer
Associated Press
RABBLE-ROUSER JOHN KASPER
A low type of vagrant.
lawlessness. We're up against thugs."
When white segregationists rallied outside the schools for a second day's harassment of Negro children, they found themselves facing hard-eyed policemen and
barricades, backed by a city of conscience
aroused as rarely before. At one point a
Negro minister escorting a little girl from
school was bombarded with stones; he
turned upon the white crowd and drew a
pistol. The police arrested him, but he
was quickly freed on bond. After the minister made a public statement regretting
his resort to force, one of the arresting
officers spoke with a kind of tolerance
that was different from the previous day's.
"These people," he said, "have been
pushed pretty hard."
Day in Court. Next day the Battle of
Nashville moved to a climax in the courts.
The first blow was struck by City Judge
Andrew Doyle, who read a crushing lecture to Rabble-rouser Kasper, hauled up
during the week on charges that ranged "
from parking in a no-parking zone through
vagrancy to incitement to riot. " I consider you guilty of the lowest possible
degree of vagrancy," said Judge Doyle.'
"You came into this town to cause racial .
disorder. You and others like you are responsible for any blood that may be shed.
I only wish we had enough policemen to
take you by the seat of your britches and ;
the nape of your neck and throw you outside the city limits." At week's end Kas-'
per, in the county jail on charges of
incitement to riot, and unable to raise
$2,500 bond, was confronted by new tes- .
timony, relayed by the FBI, linking him
to the dynamite bombing of the Hattie .*
Cotton school.
';
To guard against future violence, Fed- '
eral Judge William Miller, who issued the
original integration order, now issued a
1
Don Cravens, Black Star—LIFE
NASHVILLE'S GLENN SCHOOL
A reality to be lived with.
.TIME, SEPTEMBER 2 3 , 1957
15
�Sweeping restraining order against any
more interference with integration of the
Nashville first grade. The effect: anybody
who shows up outside the schools and
demonstrates against integration can be
haled into court for contempt.
Thus the weight of law and order, misused in Little Rock, aroused in Nashville,
achieved a notable triumph. By week's end
even the weakening rabble-rousers were
beginning to reconsider. No Nashville
white had shouted more loudly against
integration than a burly, tattooed man
named George H. Akins, who had been arrested by the police after some disorderly conduct. As he stood trial in City Judge
Doyle's court, his eight-year-old daughter
standing beside him began to cry, anguished
by the spectacle of her father at bay.
The man saw the child's distress, reached
out one hand and smoothed down her
blonde bangs, pulled out a handkerchief
and began to mop her eyes. Suddenly
a look of pain broke across his face. " I
didn't go out there to cause any trouble,"
he blurted. He too burst into tears.
FOREIGN RELATIONS
Enlightened Liberation
Into Pittsburgh one day last week rolled
a cream-colored station wagon loaded with
Polish highway officials and powered by
high-octane U.S. diplomacy. Shepherded
by a U.S. Bureau of Public Roads official,
the four visiting Poles peppered Pennsylvania experts with questions on roadbuilding materials and, mechanization,
marveled at superhighways, ogled multicolored U.S. cars. Thflugh few Pennsylvanians stopped to ogle back, the Poles
were nevertheless important. Like another
Polish delegation busy lagt week observing U.S. corn-raising te'ehniques in Iowa,
they were flesh-and-blood manifestations
of a new warmth in U.S.-Polish relations.
The warmth was kindled a year ago
when President Eisenhower and Secretary
of State Dulles pledged that rebellious
Poles and Hungarians could ^enceforth
"draw on our abundance to tide themselves over the period of economic adjustment." Crushed by Russian tdnks, the
Hungarians were unable to take advantage of the U.S. offer. But the Poles, determinedly establishing themselves as the
freest of Russia's satellites, could and did.
To Washington came an economic delegation that negotiated an agreement for $95
million worth of U.S. aid and went home
with the possibility of receiving even
more. In addition, the U.S. eased restrictions on the shipment of strategic goods
to Poland, upped exports so that more
dollars worth of goods have already been
delivered so far this year than were
shipped all of last year. The Poles have increased exports to the U.S., e.g., canned
hams, Christmas ornaments, have leveled
the ratio of their trade to the East and
West from 70-30 a year ago to 55-45 now.
Trade is only one element in this U.S.
strategy of "enlightened liberation." While
exchange teams come to the U.S. to study
highways, farming, home building and
steel production, U.S. experts tour Poland to inspect and suggest. Ten times as
many U.S. citizens are visiting Poland this
year as went last year. American movies
SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN THE SOUTH
A Report Card
A T THE time the Supreme Court struck down the old
separate-but-equal doctrine, on May 17, 1954, public
school segregation was maintained by law in 17 states and in
the District of Columbia. Last week, with a new school semester under way, a few headline-making blots of disorder in the
South obscured the fact that approximately 122,000 Negro
children are actually sitting in Southern classrooms with
white children in formerly segregated schools. And this figure
does not take in the federally operated schools (e.g., on military posts) that have integrated since May 1954, or Roman
Catholic parochial schools, which in several Southern states
are well ahead of state schools in integration.
Integration's most striking success story unfolded right in
the nation's capital. Prodded by President Eisenhower's appeal for trail-blazing, the District of Columbia's board of
education was ready with an
integration plan one week
after the Supreme Court
handed down its decision. At
first white high-school students boycotted classes and
booed Negro newcomers, but
these protests soon ended
when school authorities sternly threatened to ban troublemakers from athletic teams
and other extracurricular activities; Washington, D.C.
schools are now fully integrated (but 20% of the Negro schoolchildren, living in
Negro neighborhoods, go to
all-Negro schools), and 58,500 Negroes attend classes
along with white children in
what one school official
called a "miracle of social adjustment." The rapid march
to total integration is all
16
the more noteworthy because Negroes make up a 68% majority among District of Columbia public school children.
Border States
None of the states have carried integration quite so far as
the District of Columbia, but the six Border States, on the
whole, have made heartening progress. Three-fourths of their
800 school districts with both white and Negro pupils
have at least started along the path, and some 60,000
Negro children are attending integrated schools. Every one
of the tax-supported colleges and universities in the six
states is open to Negroes.
Delaware. Out of 61 school districts with both white and
Negro children, 18 have wholly or partly ended segregation,
with Wilmington entirely integrated and the southern half of
the state still segregated. But
the U.S. District Court has
ordered the easygoing state
board of education, which
had left integration up
to local choice, to draw
up a statewide integration
program.
. •: Kentucky. About 80% of:
i • the state's Negro children
live in school districts that
have made at least a start
toward integration. The se-:
£V-;mester; just begun has seen '.v:!
'...•t-no serious disorder even in ^
; the coal town of Sturgis;-'^
••• ''-where only a year ago ^a^?*
v--white mob turned back Ne^jj'
f : gro pupils trying to enter?
.7. the white high school.
^^.-/Maryland. Baltimore un-"||
^^-dertook integration prompt-^
fefely after the Supreme Court's''
decision, and counties soon
TIME Map by ft. M. Chapin. Jr. ,
TIME, SEPTEMBER 23, 19574
�arc being shown again for the first time
since the Communists took control of the
country. Both the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations arc arranging grants to provide exchange students. One of the most
dramatic examples of the new policy at
work was the success of the American exhibit at the Poznan Fair (TIME, June 24).
Watching the flow of aid. trade and
ideas, a State Department observer last
week summed up the U.S. attitude towards its Polish experiment: " I t is a
calculated risk; But what we could gain
is great, what we could k>se is relatively
insignificant."
DEMOCRATS
Really, No—Maybe
In the ten months since Adlai Stevenson tiredly conceded that he had loet an
election but gained a grandchild, he has
been busy influencing friends and winning
column inches. Showing slight interest in
settling down to the nonpolitical routine
of his Chicago-New York-Washington law
practice. Stevenson toured Africa and Europe on a three-month. 16-nation jaunt,
wrote articles, delivered speeches, held
press conferences, appeared on television
shows, enjoyed publication of his biography and his collected 1956 campaign
speeches. At intervals, he thumped away
at the man who beat him twice—and at
some politicians in his own party. Stevenson openly disapproved of the civil rights
compromise approved by Presidential
Prospect Lyndon Jobnson, snorted loudly
at the independence and interdependence
scheme for Algeria advanced by Presidential Prospect John Kennedy.
All this began to tpuch off speculation
about Adlai's hopes and aims: in the
event that none of the new presidential
hopefuls seems to have a commanding
lead, might not seasoned old gladiator
Stevenson be sent out in i960 for yet another battle? Gossiped Chicago Tribune
Columnist Herb Lyon: "Same of Adlai
Stevenson's most avid Chicago followers
are plotting to get him to try ^gain."
Last week Stevenson took painful pains
began following along. After the southernmost county on the
Western Shore admitted Negroes to white schools last fortnight, only two counties out of 23 remained 100% segregated.
Missouri. With seven new districts partially integrating
this semester, integration in Missouri is well along. No serious
integration disorder has been reported since compliance with
the Supreme Court's order got under way three years ago.
This year the state legislature finally repealed the old segregation statutes, passed a law making segregation illegal.
Oklahoma. Integration has marched along with surprising
speed, a notable absence of strife. Only 51 districts out of
1,639
s'i' entirely segregated.
West Virginia. The integration story came to the beginning of the end last week as the school board in the last fully
segregated county changed its mind and admitted Negro
applicants to a white elementary school.
a r e
1
The Complying South
Of the eleven states that made up the Confederacy, only
four have done any integrating, aside from universities and
colleges.
Arkansas. All eight tax-supported colleges are open to
Negroes, and as the new semester began a fortnight ago,
about 50 Negroes in ten districts had enrolled in white elementary and high schools. Things seemed peaceful enough—
until Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard.
North Carolina. In a token appeasement of the Federal
Courts, Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem this semester admitted a total of 13 carefully screened Negroes to white
schools. The lone Negro pupil at Charlotte's Harding High
School withdrew last week in the face of continuing harassment. The Greensboro and Winston-Salem pioneers were still
holding on.
Tennessee. Mob violence, sparked by Rabble-rouser John
Kasper, flared in Clinton a year ago when Negroes entered
Tennessee's first integrated school. Last week eight Negro
pupils sat in Clinton High classrooms, and the town was
reassuringly peaceful. But when Nashville admitted twelve
Negro first-graders to white schools, Carpetbagger Kasper
butted in again—with explosive results (see The Battle of
Nashville).
Texas. After a promising start, the pace of integration has
slowed down. Of 800-odd school districts with both white
and Negro children, 122 have at least partly integrated, and
so have several state-supported colleges. But in eastern Texas,
TIME, SEPTEMBER 23, 1957
to scotch the idea. Said he: " I am not a
candidate: I will not be a candidate, and
I don't want the nomination." The tone
was familiar. There was once a candidate
who said, " I do not dream myself fit for
the job—temperamentally, mentally or
physically. And I ask therefore that you
all abide by my wishes not to nominate
me." This was Adlai Stevenson, speaking
to his Illinois delegation six days before
he accepted his first Democratic presidential nomination, in 1952.
REPUBLICANS
Gouges from Goodie
For two weeks California's Governor
Goodwin Knight watched in fuming silence while U.S. Senator William Fife
Knowland rushed around the state running hard for governor without even
declaring for the job (TIME, Sept. 16).
This week Goodie Knight broke his silence and fired point-blank at Knowland
on the issue of labor policy.
Before a California Federation of Labor
where 90% of the Negro schoolchildren live, segregation
fences are as high and unscalable as ever. The segregationist
camp showed its power this year when the state legislature
passed a law'under which any school district that integrates
without first holding a local referendum loses its share of
state school funds. With that law on the books, no more
white schools have opened doors to Negroes. But a fortnight
ago a federal district judge directed the city of Dallas to start
integrating its schools next semester regardless of state laws.
The Defiant South
In seven states of the South integration has proceeded not
with "all deliberate speed," as the Supreme Court ordered,
but with all deliberate dillydallying.
Alabama. Negroes and whites attend classes together only
in two small private colleges. When an ill-advised Negro
preacher in Birmingham tried to enroll Negro children at a
white school last week amid growing tension fanned by the
recent emasculation of a Negro and the news from Arkansas,
rowdies beat him and drove him away.
Florida. Governor LeRoy Collins bills himself as a moderate, but even private colleges are still segregated. As the
new semester began, no Negro parents even tried to enroll
their children in white schools. Pending is a Federal Court
suit challenging the constitutionality of the state's pupil
assignment law.
Georgia. Total segregation, from colleges to kindergartens.
Louisiana. Some court-ordered integration at the college
level, none in elementary or secondary schools. But the Federal District Court, in a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court,
has ordered officials to integrate New Orleans schools.
Mississippi. No integration, no suits pending, not even any
token efforts by Negroes to enroll children in white schools.
South Carolina. No integration, but the trustees of one
school district (Summerton) are under a Federal Court order,
upheld by the Supreme Court, to start.
Virginia. Negroes are now admitted to some formerly
white-only colleges, but otherwise the state government's
"massive resistance" program, with its ingenious network of
segregation laws, has kept the barriers intact. Last week in
Alexandria, just across the Potomac from the nation's capital,
Federal Judge Albert V. Bryan dealt "massive resistance" a
hard blow in ruling that school authorities in nearby Arlington "can no longer refuse admittance" to seven Negro children turned away when they tried to enroll in white schools.
17
�V
ens'
THE
.1,1
fift
EYESXJN THE PRIZE, the fourteen-part television series
and related educational materials, was created and produced byyBlackside, Inc., 486 Shawmut Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02118.
/
\
/
This book is c»ne of several publications produced in
conjunction with the television series, which is available
for rental by institutions from PBS Video (1-800-3443337). For information on other publications, see pages
727-728.
EYES
ON THE
PRIZE
For information on the coHege telecourse, of which this
book is the text, contact PfiXAdult Learning Service,
1320 Braddock Place, Alexan^ia, Virginia 22314
(l-800-ALS-ALS,8).
CIVIL RIGHTS READER
D O C U M E N T S , SPEECHES, A N D
This book is/a revision of, and replace^. Eyes on the
Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, A Reader and Guide
(general editors: Clayborne Carson, DavicKJ. Garrow,
Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine)^ublished
by Pengtiin Books in 1987.
//
\
Special thanks to the Charles H. Revson Foundafion for
itS/Support of this book and the Eyes on the Prize
telecourse.
F I R S T H A N D ACCOUNTS FROM
THE
BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE,
1954-1990
General
\
Editors
Clayborne Carson
David J . Garrow
Gerald Gill
Vincent Harding
Darlene Clark Hine
VIKING
�F I G H T I N G BACK
T H E EYES ON T H E P R I Z E C I V I L R I G H T S READER
n to public schools as soon as practicable on a nonduCnmii^tpry basis. To effectuate this interest may call for elinmiation
pra .varietysof obstacles in making the transition to schpol systems
operated in\accordance with the constitutional princ^les set forth
in:
May 17M954, decision. Courts of equity ma/properly take
into account the^public interest in the eliminaticHJof such obstacles
in ia systematic aHd effective manner. But U^should go without
spying that the vitalky of these constitutionsu principles cannot be
allowed to yield simply because of disagpeement with them.
i^While giving weightlo these public and private considerations,
tiie-courts will require that the defendants make a prompt and
rSeasonable start toward fuUcompnance with our May 17, 1954,
ruling. Once such a start has^eeii made, the courts may find that
additional time is necessary t o X r r y out the ruling in an effective
manner. The burden rests upon the defendants to establish that
such time is necessary in the public interest and is consistent with
od faith compliance at the earliest practicable date. To that end,
die courts may consider problems related to administration, arising
from the physical condition of the school V > the school transportation system, personnel, revision of school districts and attendance areas in/to compact units to achieve a system of
determining admission to the public schools ort. a nonracial basis,
d revision of local laws and regulations which inay be necessary
solving the/foregoing problems. They Vill al^p consider the
equacy of any plans the defendants may propose^to meet these
roblems and to effectuate a transition to a radallyVondiscrimiatory sch«H>l system. During this period of transitioik the courts
retain jurisdiction of these cases. The . . Xjcasts, except
Delaware, are remanded to the lower courts] to tak-e sWh proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this
opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public school^on
ially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the
parties to these cases. . . .
a n t
97
Daisy Bates
The first serious confrontation between federal authority and southern
resistance to school desegregation occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in
the fall of1957. In this selectionfromher 1962 book. The Long Shadow
of Little Rock, Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and
editor-in-chief of the black newspaper the Arkansas State Press, describes her role in the efforts to integrate Central High School in spite
of the concerted opposition of Governor Orval Faubus.
3
It was Labor Day, September 2, 1957. The nine pupils who had
been selected by the school authorities to enter Central High
School—Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Elizabeth Eckford,
Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Terrance
Roberts, Gloria Ray, and 'Minnijean Brown—were enjoying the
last day of their summer vacation. . . . About mid-afternoon young
Jefferson Thomas was on his way home from the pool and stopped
at my house for a brief visit. While Jeff was raiding the refrigerator,
a news flash came over the radio that the Governor would address
the citizens of Arkansas that night.
" I wonder what he's going to talk about," said Jeff. The youngster
then turned to me and asked, "Is there anything they can do—
now that they lost in court? Is there any way they can stop us
from entering Central tomorrow morning?"
" I don't think so," I said.
About seven o'clock that night a local newspaper reporter rang
my doorbell. "Mrs. Bates, do you know that national guardsmen
are surrounding Central High?"
L.C. [Bates] and I stared at him incredulously for a moment. A
friend who was visiting us volunteered to guard the house while
we drove out to Central. L.C. gave him the shotgun. We jumped
into our car and drove to Central High. . . . Men in full battle
dress—helmets, boots, and bayonets—were piling out of the trucks
and lining up in front of the school.
As we watched, L.C. switched on the car radio. A newscaster
.•
'•tits
�98
• T H E EYES ON T H E P R I Z E C I V I L R I G H T S READER
was saying, "National guardsmen are surrounding Central High
School. No one is certain what this means. Governor Faubus will
speak later this evening."
I don't recall all the details of what Governor Faubus said that
night. But his words electrified Little Rock. By morning they
shocked the United States. By noon the next day his message
horrified the world.
Faubus' alleged reason for calling out the troops was that he
had received information that caravans of automobiles filled with
white supremacists were heading toward Little Rock from all over
the state. He therefore declared Central High School off limits to
Negroes. For some inexplicable reason he added that Horace
Mann, a Negro high school, would be off limits to whites.
Then, from the chair of the highest office of the State of
Arkansas, Governor Orval Eugene Faubus delivered the infamous
words, "blood will run in the streets" if Negro pupils should
attempt to enter Central High School.
In a half dozen ill-chosen words, Faubus made his contribution
to the mass hysteria that was to grip the city of Little Rock for
several months.
The citizens of Little Rock gathered on September 3 to gaze
upon the incredible spectacle of an empty school building surrounded by 250 National Guard troops. At about eight fifteen in
the morning, Central students started passing through the line of
national guardsmen—all but the nine Negro students.
I had been in touch with their parents throughout the day.
They were confused, and they were frightened.'As the parents
voiced their fears, they kept repeating Governor Faubus' words
that "blood would run in the streets of Little Rock" should their
teen-age children try to attend Central—the school to which they
had been assigned by the school board.
On the afternoon of the same day, September 3, when the school
was schedulea to open, Superintendent [Virgil] Blossom called a
meeting of leading Negro citizens and the parents of the nine
children . . . [and] instructed the parents not to accompany their
F I G H T I N G BACK
99
children the next morning when they were scheduled to enter
Central. " I f violence breaks out," the Superintendent told them,
"it will be easier to protect the children i f the adults aren't there."
During the conference Superintendent Blossom had given us
little assurance that the children would be adequately protected.
As we left the building, I was aware of how deeply worried the
parents were, although they did not voice their fears.
About ten o'clock that night I was alone in the downstairs
recreation room.
I sat huddled in my chair, dazed, trying to think, yet not knowing
what to do. I don't recall how much time went by . . . before some
neighbors entered. One of them was the Reverend J. C. Crenshaw,
President of the Little Rock branch of the NAACP.
"Maybe," I said, "maybe we could round up a few ministers to go
with the children tomorrow. Maybe then the mob wouldn't attack
them. Maybe with the ministers by their side—"
I called a white minister, Rev. Dunbar Ogden, Jr., President of
the Interracial Ministerial Alliance. I did not know Mr. Ogden. I
explained the situation, then asked i f he thought he could get
lome ministers to go with the children to school the next morning.
Tensely I waited for his return call. When it came, he sounded
apologetic. The white ministers he had talked to had questioned
whether it was the thing to do. Some of the Negro ministers had
pointed out that the Superintendent of Schools had asked that no
Negro adults go with the children, and that in view of this they
felt they shouldn't go. Then he added gently, "I'll keep trying—
and, God willing, I'll be there."
Next I called the city police. I explained to the officer in charge
^ that we were concerned about the safety of the children and that
j* we were trying to get ministers to accompany them to school the
- next morning. I said that the children would assemble at eight
4
•3
.1
•n
�100
• . T H E E Y E S ON T H E P R I Z E C I V I L R I G H T S R E A D E R
thirty at Twelfth Street and Park Avenue. I asked whether a police
car could be stationed there to protect the children until the
ministers arrived.
The police officer promised to have a squad car there at eight
o'clock. "But you realize " he warned, "that our men cannot go
any closer than that to the school. The school is off limits to the
city police while it's 'occupied' by the Arkansas National
Guardsmen."
By now it was two thirty in the morning. Still, the parents had
to be called about the change in plan. At three o'clock I completed
my last call, explaining to the parents where the children were to
assemble and the plan about the ministers. Suddenly I remembered Elizabeth Eckford. Her family had no telephone. Should I
go to the Union Stadon and search for her father? Someone had
once told me that he had a night job there. Tired in mind and
body, I decided to handle the matter early in the morning. I
stumbled into bed.
A few hours later, at about eight fifteen in the morning, L.C.
and I started driving to Twelfth Street and Park Avenue. On the
way I checked out in my mind the possibilities that awaited u s . . . .
The bulletin over the car radio interrupted. The voice announced: "A Negro girl is being mobbed at Central High. . . ."
"Oh, my God!" I cried. "It must be Elizabeth! I forgot to notify
her where to meet us!"
L.C. jumped out of the car and rushed to find her. I drove on
to Twelfth Street. There were the ministers—two white—Mr.
Ogden and Rev. Will Campbell, of the National Council of
Churches, Nashville, Tennessee—and two colored—the Reverend
Z. Z. Driver, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the
Reverend Harry Bass, of the Methodist Church. With them also
was Mr. Ogden's twenty-one-year-old son, David. The children
were already there. And, yes, the police had come as promised.
All of the children were there—all except Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, whose dignity and control in the face ofjeering mobsters
had been filmed by television cameras and recorded in pictures
flashed to newspapers over the world, had overnight become a
FIGHTING
BACK
101
national heroine. . . . The first day that her parents agreed she
might come out of . seclusion, she came to my house, where the
reporters awaited her. Elizabeth was very quiet, speaking only
when spoken to. I took her to my bedroom to talk before I let
the reporters see her. I asked her how she felt now. Suddenly all
her pent-up emotion flared.
"Why am I here?" she said, turning blazing eyes on me. "Why
are you so interested in my welfare now? You didn't care enough
to notify me of the change of plans—"
Litde by little Elizabeth came out of her shell. Up to now she had
never talked about what happened to her at Central. Once when
we were alone in the downstairs recreation room of my house, I
asked her simply, "Elizabeth, do you think you can talk about
it now?"
She remained quiet for a long time. Then she began to speak.
"You remember the day before we were to go in, we met
Superintendent Blossom at the school board office. He told us
what the mob might say and do but he never told us we wouldn't
have any protection. He told our parents not to come because he
wouldn't be able to protect the children if they did.
"That night I was so excited I couldn't sleep. The next morning
1 was about the first one up. While I was pressing my black-andwhite dress—I had made it to wear on the first day of school—
my little brother turned on the TV set. They started telling about
a large crowd gathered at the school. The man on T V said he
wondered if we were going to show up that morning.
"Before I left home Mother called us into the living room. She
•aid we should have a word of prayer. Then I caught the bus and
got off a block from the school. I saw a large crowd of people
Standing across the street from the soldiers guarding Central. As
I walked on, the crowd suddenly got quiet. Superintendent
Blossom had told us to enter by the front door. I looked at all the
people and thought, 'Maybe I will be safer if I walk down the
Wock to the front entrance behind the guards.'
�102
EYES ON T H E PRIZE C I V I L R I G H T S READER
"At the corner I tried to pass through the long line of guards
around the school so as to enter the grounds behind them. One
of the guards pointed across the street. So I pointed in the same
direction and asked whether he meant for me to cross the street
and walk down. He nodded 'yes.' So, 1 walked across the street
conscious of the crowd that stood there, but they moved away
from me.
"For a moment all I could hear was the shuffling of their feet.
Then someone shouted, 'Here she comes, get ready!' I moved
away from the crowd on the sidewalk and into the street. I f the
mob came at me I could then cross back over so the guards could
protect me.
"The crowd moved in closer and then began to follow me,
calling me names. I still wasn't afraid. Just a little bit nervous.
Then my knees started to shake all of a sudden and I wondered
whether I could make it to the center entrance a block away. It
was the longest block I ever walked in my whole life.
"Even so, I sdll wasn't too scared because all the time 1 kept thinking that the guards would protect me.
"When I got in front of the school, I went up to a guard again.
But this dme he just looked straight ahead and didn't move to let
me pass him. I didn't know what to do. Then I looked and saw the
path leading to the front entrance was a little further ahead. So I
walked until I was right in front of the path to the front door.
" I stood looking at the school—it looked so big! Just then the
guards let some white students through.
"The crowd was quiet. I guess they were waiting to see what
was going to happen. When I was able to steady my knees, I
walked up to the guard who had let the white students in. He too
didn't move. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his
bayonet and then the other guards moved in and they raised their
bayonets.
"They glared at me with a mean look and I was very frightened
and didn't know what to do. I turned around and the crowd came
toward me.
"They moved closer and closer. Somebody started yelling,
'Lynch her! Lynch her!'
" I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob—someone
who maybe would help. I looked into the face of an old woman
103
F I G H T I N G BACK
and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again she
spat on me.
6
"They came closer, shouting, 'No nigger bitch is going to get in
our school. Get out of here!'
" I turned back to the guards but their faces told me I wouldn't
get any help from them. Then I looked down the<block and saw
a bench at the bus stop. I thought, ' I f I can only get there I will
be safe. I don t know why the bench seemed a safe place to me
but I started walking toward it. I tried to close my mind to what
8
k e p t
S a y i n g
t 0
m
s e l [
I f 1 c a
0
r rn I ^ bench I - u ^
y
' '
" " l y make
it to the K T ^ will be safe.'
"When I finally got there, I don't think I could have gone
another step. I sat down and the mob crowded up and began
shounng
again Someone hollered, 'Drag her over to This
tree! Let s take care of that nigger.'Just then a white man sat
down bes.de me, put his arm around me and patted my shoulder
He raised my chin and said, 'Don't let them see you cry '
a l l
a
l a d y
S h e
V e r y
n i c e
s h e
C a m e
o v e r
on ^
l^Tu
7
me
on the bench. She spoke to me but I don't remember what she
wid. She put me on the bus and sat next to me. She asked my
name and tried to talk to me but I don't think I answered. I can't
remember much about the bus ride, but the next thing I remember
I was standing in front of the School for the Blind, where Mother
7. A Roundtable Discussion
«™™fca6fe dtscuhigmoderated by Mrjjo^nn Ricketts. Four of the
toZwZrZ
f ^ ^ - i ^
Dean Parker, Kay Bacon,
J Z I
» °»dJo'eP?l^n^o
were black-Ernest Green and
Jfaw^r
Brown. Mtnntej^d
not finish the school year in Little
Md faZdTlTll
' M * * ^ '
students!she was susand finished thyfear at an impendent school in New York
1
MRS. R.CKyf s: Do y6u think it is possible to s t a ^ o r k i n g this
* O on a ntfre sensible basis than violent demonstrator, >
W
�^HAPTER
THREE
^IN'T SCARED OF YOUR JAILS
(1960-1961)
Introduction by Clayborne Carson
r
he years 1960 and 1961 were a time of profound change,
growth, and development in the civil rights movement,
.^ithough the Supreme Court's Broum v. Board of Education decision
^had outlawed school segregation in 1954, few changes in discrim•jinatory practices had occurred. But there was a restlessness that
2was slowly building in the black community. The 1959 controversy
* over Robert F. Williams's advocacy of armed self-defense for
| | blacks was an early sign that some blacks were moving away from
;4jthe NAACP's cautious reform strategy. Even more than the
^example of Williams, however, memories of Emmett Till's brutal
(i]killing in 1955 and of Elizabeth Eckford walking alone to Little
^Rock's Central High School profoundly influenced young blacks.
?|k was out of this festering discontent and an awareness of earlier
[visolated protests that the sit-ins of 1960 were born. Though few
ifrealized it when the sit-ins began, they would eventually attract
national media attention and federal intervention in the South.
Mtudent activism galvanized established organizations, brought
"about the creation of new ones, and generated mass support for
Jhe civil rights movement among all segments of the black
populace.
^ffhe first sit-in occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, on
February 1, 1960. The four North Carolina Agricultural and Tech;
107
�'
R I G H T S READER
F I G H T I N G BACK
™ « theseparate-butl
nools.
'•Board of Education^'
Sieved its m o s t i m n ^
^ classification based & l
"<lment to the U.S. c f
"guson ruling, whicllnaii
" " e . f l ^ , more thai an*
' revoluUon" i A m ^ a
f 8 Primacy ofequalilya'f. however, the l i m i t a b W
•^ed, the second ahmH"
' year later, restricted' th«
southern states with the
" o f desegregation. '
^e research findings o f '
*»riy *-ork« cited in t
psychologist Kenne
l'ce and discriminate
V that valued whiten^
American children eaia
Wack children were'l
d education had to enj
equating it with tti
therners almost unive^.
^•oned the right of thl
tHig blow. While blacll
orchestrated the leg "
des and sit-ins, anotht
quest took shape: the]
and the evolution of
*rs engaged m massive
posiiion.
n
1(
1
tss
:er
' « » m e d manv forms.,
•snien and social and
mncils. These leaders
»d used intimidating
'SS'e- O f the many
63
proponents of massive resistance, none remained more intransigent than Tom P. Brady, a circuit judge from Brookhaven,
Mississippi. Brady delivered the extremely vitriolic speech that
white Citizens' Councils published as a pamphlet, Black Monday:
Segregation or Amalgamation . . . America Has Its Choice. Brady attacked the Brown decision, intermarriage, and black intelligence.
Further, he charged that a number of black rights organizations
were nothing more than a part of an international Communist
conspiracy to destroy white supremacy.
The intervention of the federal government and the deployment
of the National Guard in the 1954 Little Rock crisis, and again in
1963 when the enrollment of James Meredith desegregated the
[University of Mississippi, highlights the role of federal power in
/'promoting social change during this era. President Dwight D.
^Eisenhower's use of federal troops in Little Rock, and President
Ij'ohn F. Kennedy's deployment of the same forces in Oxford,
Represented a departure from the reluctance of earlier presidents
jj|tq display federal power in the South, especially to protect the
ilives of black citizens.
^ilriterposition holds that a state may reject a federal mandate it
Considers to be an encroachment upon the state's rights. An array
off/southern governors, such as Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross
jfiarnett of Mississippi, and George Wallace of Alabama, acquired
(national notoriety in their bold display of defiance to court-ordered
fclesegregation of secondary schools and state universities. Their
fstibborn challenges and adherence to the doctrine of interposition
^helped to provoke the confrontation between state and federal
j|aiiithority. But this is only half of the explanation of how the
[^confrontations originated, especially in the Meredith episode. The
?|pther half involves the protracted delays, and considerable vacill^lation, of the Kennedy administration before it finally acted
^decisively to protect Meredith's life and his right to attend "Ole
^iss."
A little-considered dimension of these dramatic events involves
the transformative impact of school integration on white and black
students in Little Rock, Arkansas. As shown in one of the documents in this chapter, a group of white and black students at
Central High School discovered that through frank discussion of
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�FORTY-FOU
T
mm
he most indelible images of America that fall came from
Little Rock, scenes captured by still photographers and,
far more significantly, by movie cameramen working for
vork television news shows. Thefirstand most jarring of these
ages was of angry mobs of white rednecks, pure hatred contorting
heir faces, as they assaulted the nine young black students who
fdared to integrate Little Rock Central High. The second and almost
pqually chilling image came a few weeks later, showing the same
f black children entering the same school under the protection of elite
|U.S. Army paratroopers. The anger and hatred that had been smolfdering just beneath the surface in the South since the enactment of
fBrown v. Board of Education hadfinallyexploded, and now because
|of television, the whole nation and soon the whole world could watch
aerica at war with itself.
�6 6 8
D A V I D
HA
It was bound to happen sooner or later, but
would happen in Little Rock. Arkansas was a mocl
much a Southwestern state as it was truly Southerniftl
law schools had been integrated a decade earlier, 1$
court order. Orval Faubus, the governor, was conside
and there was no feverish quality to his voice when
issues of race. He seemed to lack the terrible hatred ttf
many Southern politicians. In 1955, when Brown-jM
down, Faubus had said: "It appears that the Court lefrs
of decision in these matters to the Federal District coiirj
this will guarantee against any sudden dislocation. .
must be upon the good will that exists between the races
will that has long made Arkansas a model for other Spu
in all matters aflfecting the relationship between the rails
In his successful 1956 campaign for reelection, ?Fatf
mentioned the race issue, and the Little Rock plan forf:
was so gradual that initially only nine black students we
a white school. The plan called for integrating at the highff
and working downward, one grade, one year at a time'l
Virgil Blossom, the school superintendent, wanted tdldc
opposite—beginning at the lower levels and working upwar
theory that younger children would have less learned prejuiS
he found that white parental fear in the lower gradeSM
intense: parents were less nervous about their teenagers'^
first-graders.
Blossom wanted only the ablest and most mature •:biS
dents. A list of eighty at the old Horace Mann School
interested in transferring was drawn up. School officials|
whittled the number down to thirty-two. That was easy: As E
explained to parents and children the pressures they would-si
subjected to, many dropped out. Blossom and his staff me
thirty-two families—both parents and children. Some studf|
told they were not ready for either the social pressure or i '
work. A few good athletes were told they might be better pfp
at Horace Man because at a white school they would hiveXpi
possibility that other schools might cancel games as a result
being on the teams. The list shrank to seventeen names, and|
rumors and doubts continued, only nine. That pleasedituj
leadership. The entire process had been designed to VMtity,
emotional impact of integration on the whites. If the Idea
leadership was not entirely thrilled with the cautious appfj
had accepted it as law, for the Blossom plan clearly met the
1
�THE
F I F T I E S
6 69
Supreme Court and had been approved by the federal district
t. Virgil Blossom was an affable man, whom Harry Ashmore,
executive editor of the liberal Arkansas Gazette, thought of as a
tural-born Rotarian." He was named Little Rock's man of the
in 1955, and both newspapers, the Gazette and the Democrat,
veil as the city council and the chamber of commerce, backed his
n. Everybody in the local establishment seemed to be on board.
Harry Ashmore was the liberal working editor of the liberal
kansas Gazette, one of the South's best newspapers and, as far as
was concerned, Little Rock reflected the gradual evolution taking
ice in much of the urban postwar South, with the ascendance of
nore moderate generation of white leadership. These younger men,
ost of whom had fought in World War Two, and who had in some
ay been broadened by that experience, did not welcome integraon, Ashmore thought. Most of them, in fact, probably preferred
lings the way they were. But unlike their parents, they were not
iolently opposed to integration. It was not as emotional an issue
/ith them as it had once been. They were businessmen first and
oremost, and they understood that the world had changed and that
ofightto maintain white supremacy would be self-defeating—it was
probably a lost cause. They accepted the idea of "social justice"—
that is, a fairer legal and political deal for blacks—but they remained
wary of what they considered "social equality"—which implied an
integrated dance at a country club, for instance. That went against
everything in their upbringing. At the heart •£ their position was a
desire to do business as usual and an acceptance thttf whenJt came
to the crunch, the presence of a white redneck mob in the street was
a greater threat to tranquility and daily commerce than was the
integration of a school system or other public facilities. Thus they
accepted the law of the land because they saw it, in long-range
business terms, as the path of least resistance,
f
A few days before the schools were to open, Benjamin Fine, the
education editor of The New York Times, came to town to cover the
event, and years later Ashmore was amused by Fine's initial purpose:
to find out why Little Rock was handling so sensitive a matter with
such exceptional ease. Fine visited Ashmore in his office, and the
local editor predicted that there would be little more than routine
verbal protests at the coming desegregation. In fact, just about everyone locally expected a rather peaceful transition. But Orval Faubus
had started playing his cards ever closer to his vest, Ashmore noted.
Still, the worst he expected was that Faubus would refuse to back the
local police officials, thereby preserving his ties to the segregationists
r
mi
�670
/
D A V I D
HALBEEt!
without overtly blocking the law of the land asdistrict court.
Little Rock authorities felt particularly cottifoi
Blossom plan because the nine black students:^
merely for their exceptional educational abilitie!
strength of character as well. They came from middli
black middle-class to be sure, which meant smaller inii
of white middle-class families, but they all had ;a|
home and family. Religion played an important part?
homes. Typical was Terrance Roberts, fifteen, the*s<
children. His father was a Navy veteran who worki
at the veterans' hospital in north Little Rock, and his
catering service out of their home. Though it was pju
mythology that the NAACP in New York pushed urn
to sacrifice their children to its subversive aims, the
integrate usually came from the children themselve&j
were nervous about a possible confrontation, but the;
was time to get on with integration. The Brown.dod.
handed down three years previously, when they were j
teen, and with the idealism of the young, they trusted in]
and its laws. As Terrance Roberts told a reporter.whp|
the early days whether he was doing this at the? IU _
NAACP, "Nobody urged me to go. The school bbaolj
wanted to go. I thought if I got in, some of the other el
be able to go . . . and have more opportunities." 4 !
One thing few outsiders noticed was that the in)
scheduled for Little Rock Central, a school for working-tl
while a new suburban high school, designed to serve
middle class, was not involved. The city establishmentpj '
from the world of upper-middle-class Little Rock, wa.s;
absolutely unaware that there was a double standard hi
cepted all too readily that its right to make the decision^
like this. They did not understand that others, less poi
successful, and less influential, would have to live with the
and might resent them. Daisy Bates, the head of the 1
was aware of the class tensions that ran through the cri
on the part of the poor whites because they had to bear J
of integration while the upper-class whites would be larj
fected by it. At one point Mrs. Bates, referring to the;]
tensions that lay just beneath the surface in the white;;^
told one of the town leaders, "You may deserve Orval
by God I don't!"
�THE
F I F T I E S
/
6 71
As the first day of school drew closer, Faubus's political posi,1! began to change. He was no longer Faubus, friend of moder•s. He became evasive in dealing with school-board officials and
her civic leaders. Those who thought they could count on him at
tst to remain neutral found that they either could not reach him
that if they did, he was ambivalent, in the opinion of some, or
it and out slippery, in the opinion of others. "Governor, just
iat are you going to do in regard to the Little Rock integration
an?" Blossom asked him. Faubus paused and then answered:
Vhen you tell me what the federals are going to do, I will tell you
;iat I am going to do." Blossom thought that meant Faubus
inted the federal government to act decisively and thus remove
iy responsibility for integrating the schools from local officials,
irticularly from the governor. What was foremost in Orval
lubus's mind at that moment was not the education of the nine
ack children or the 2,000 white children whom they would join at
entral High but rather his own political future in a state where, in
,e three years since Brown, race was beginning to dominate local
jlitical discourse. In Arkansas, the governor had to run for reelecjn every two years, and Arkansas voters were notoriously ungenous about handing out third terms. Faubus was not a lawyer, he
id no family wealth to fall back on, and he did not look forward
) going back to being a rural postmaster. Other governors, their
rm of office over, could make a lateral move to a powerful Little
ock law firm and earn more than they ever had while in office,
ut that was not true of Faubus.
As the day for Little Rock's school integration approached,
ther politicians from the Deep South began applying pressure on
aubus to make him toe the line—to them he was the weak link in
te chain of resistance. Mississippi senator James Eastland attacked
im as being among the "weak-kneed politicians at the state capitols.
. . If the Southern states are picked off one by one under the
amnable doctrine of gradualism I don't know if we can hold out or
ot." Faubus began to feel that he might, if he was not careful,
ecome a politician who had obeyed the law only to find his political
areer ended overnight for his good deed. At the same time feelings
/ere steadily becoming more raw, and Faubus could tell he was
>sing much of his room to maneuver. In the spring he had pushed
package of four segregationist bills through the Arkansas legislaure. They had passed by votes of 81 to 1. That vote told him
omething. The governor knew the laws were pointless, that in a legal
onfrontation with the feds the state's powers were invalid, but he
m
'II
111
ii,",
�6 72
DAVID
H A L B E R S T A M
was beginning to respond to growing pressure around him and'<
ing, if nothing else, a paper record. He was torn, as the de
approached, between doing the right thing, and taking on the fe.
government to make himself a symbol of Southern white resistt.
Elsewhere in the Deep South segregationists were forminjp
zens' Councils, local committees of white leaders pledged tS
integration. Regarding Faubus as something of a major lia)
they decided to hold a major rally in Little Rock on August^
to bring in Marvin Griffin, the racist Georgia governor, atif
Harris, the overall head of the Citizens' Councils, to st
ten-dollar-a-plate dinner. Faubus was not pleased by theit jws
knew they were trying to stoke the fires of racial resistance!
corner him. He complained about Griffin's visit to Virgil B
"Why don't you telephone him and ask him to stay;
suggested, somewhat innocently to the governor. "I'll.tl:
it," Faubus answered. But Griffin and Harris came, stays
governor's mansion, and had breakfast with Faubus. Frqr *
Blossom noted, it became extremely difficult to reach Faii
Ironically, Faubus was not much of a racist. Hisvf.
populist, but not racist populist. He was shrewd and e£
Snopes school of politics, and was more intelligent-i
skilled than most of his critics suspected. His resentmentj
reeled toward the upper class and business establishmenl
Rock, which he (rightly) suspected of looking down^pl
father, Sam Faubus, said later that Orval hated to bejl.C
on even as a little boy. There was, Harry Ashmore
thing of a contradiction to Faubus's attitude toward the eji
Rock—he liked to put them on by pretending to be npjt
good old country boy, as if he were still wearing his firs$^
suit, but when they believed him in that role, he resent
Ashmore liked to say, like an Airedale dog—a lot s:
looked. Later, after Little Rock had been torn
decision to block integration, Ashmore noted that$
plenty of earlier signs of which way he might gog '
whenever there had been any kind of crunch,
followed his sense of what the preponderant feeling^
poor whites, whom he knew so well and wither
readily identify. His politics were the politics o f j "
Faubus came from poor rural stock; he neve^
man until he was fully grown, when he wenti
strawberries, his father later said. Sam Faubus.V
back-country radical who greatly admired Bv
�THE
F I F T I E S
6 73
tpalled by his son's decision to block integration. (Sam
was not a man to criticize his own flesh and blood openly,
vrote a series of critical letters to the Arkansas Gazette under
name Jimmy Higgins.) Orval's childhood was poor: The
ante from a nearby spring, the house was made of unfinished
lumber, and the kitchen was completely unfinished. Orval
ted from grammar school in a one-room schoolhouse at the
.•ighteen. He then became one of fifty people taking_an exam
Iiird grade teacher's license, and he had gotten the highest
The certificate allowed him to teach school in Huntsville and
high school at the same time. He got his high school diploma
ige of twenty-seven. By that time, he had been married for six
nd he and his wife regularly spent their summers as migrant
nd-vegetable pickers. It was hard to find white people much
than they were and, Virgil Blossom noted, it was hard to find
that poor with so much ambition. In World War Two, he rose
rank of major, came back, and bought a weekly paper in
ville; that brought him into the orbit of Sid McMath, the
an liberal governor who was his first statewide sponsor and in
cabinet he had served. (Later, McMath, appalled by the direcis protege had taken, said, "1 brought Orval down out of the
ind every night I pray for forgiveness.") He had helped
ith with the poor white vote, and he intended to run himself,
a 1954 Faubus ran for governor; he was so much the outsider
tie Rock that when he wrote his check for the $1,500 qualifying
was not accepted until a friend who was a former state legislaidorsed it on the back. Because of his connea^on to McMath,
1 reasonably well with blacks and upper-middle-clas&\Vhites;-as
jor rural whites, he was one of them. The one thing he remem, about that race was that it was one of the hottest summers in
nsas history and all the other major candidates were traveling
id in air-conditioned cars, but he made it, stop after stop, in the
il heat, without any air-conditioning. He won even though,
cally enough, he had been red-baited for having briefly attended
all college with radical roots. As governor he appointed more
;s to state positions than any predecessor. Later, the liberalerate camp, including such men as Blossom, Ashmore, and
>ks Hays, the well-connected Little Rock congressman, cited the
of Griffin and Harris as the turning point, the moment when
bus looked at his political future, saw no middle ground, and
e his choice.
Monday, September 2, fell on Labor Day; school was scheduled
,• i-n'iili II
�6 74
mm'
v
\
DAVID
H A L B E R S T A M I
to start on Tuesday, September 3. By the beginning of theipi
weekend, Faubus decided to call out the Arkansas
Guard—on the pretext of preventing violence, but in reality l
integration. Blossom found out about this only late oniiK
'night. According to Faubus, there were caravans of white!
heading for Central High. There would be bloodshed in thef
of Little Rock if the blacks tried to enter the school.
On the Sunday before school opening, Winthrop Roclce
the member of the famed Rockefeller family who had chosen'tin Arkansas, got wind of Faubus's plan to call out the N&lf
Guard and he rushed to the slatehouse. There Rockefeller, the'|
in trying to bring industry to a state desperately short of gc
pleaded with Faubus not to block integration. The goverifc
him he was too late: "I'm sorry but I'm already committed.I'm
to run for a third term, and if I don't do this, Jim Johnson arid
Bennett [the two leading Arkansas segregationists] will tear
shreds."
^yjjj
What he did was very simple: He announced that he wi
to maintain the peace (thereby encouraging a mob to go
streets), and then he placed the Arkansas National Guard oi
of the mob: Its orders, despite the specific mandate of th ..A
court, were to keep the blacks out of the schools. The Gua
cled the school; meanwhile, the mob grew larger. The policei|p
the city was inadequate to deal with the mob, and the " " '
refused to permit the hoses of his fire wagons to be used s
The black children were suddenly very much at risk. Daisy 1
leader of the local NAACP, asked black and white
accompany them on Wednesday, September 4. She arrang
police car to protect them. But as they approached the schodifi
were abused and threatened; when they finally reached
they were turned away by a National Guard captain, w
was acting under the orders of Governor Faubus. Whatt;
orders? someone asked one of the soldiers. "Keep the nigger
he answered. The confidence of the mob grew greater by
as it found that the law-enforcement forces were on its sidei^
this, the ministers and children quickly retreated.
They were the lucky ones. One child, fifteen-year-old
Eckford, had not gotten the message the night before about !
were to assemble together. Her father was a railroadnance worker who worked nights; her mother taught at;
black children who were deaf or blind. The family did :
phone. In the morning, an exhausted Daisy Bates complet
�THE
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6 75
that she had not advised Elizabeth about the new arrangements.
Elizabeth, like most of the other children involved in the early integration cases, had made the decision to go to Central very much on
her own. Elizabeth wanted to be a lawyer, and she had heard that
Central offered a speech course that might help her prepare for law
school, while Horace Man did not. Her mother, Birdie Eckford, was
unhappy about her choice, and when Elizabeth had suggested during
the summer that they go to the school board office and get the
requisite transfer forms for Central, Mrs. Eckford gently and
vaguely agreed to do it some other time, hoping Elizabeth would
forget about it. Two weeks later Elizabeth brought it up again. Again
her mother tried to delay. Finally, near the end of August, Elizabeth
demanded that her mother take her that very day to get the transfer.
With that it was obtained. That first day of school she got up early
and pressed her new black-and-white dress, one she had made herself
to wear for her new experience in an integrated school. At breakfast
the family television set was on and some commentator was talking
about the size of the mob gathering in front of the school and
wondering aloud whether the black children would show up. "Turn
that TV off!" said Mrs. Eckford. Birdie was so nervous that Elizabeth tried to comfort her mother by saying that everything would be
all right. Her father, she noted, was just as nervous, holding a cigar
in one hand and a pipe in his mouth, neither of them lit.. Before
Elizabeth left, her mother called the family together and they all
prayed.
Alone and unprotected, Elizabeth approached the school, and
the crowd started to scream at her: "Here she comes! Here comes one
of the niggers!" But she saw the National Guard troopers and was
lot scared, because she thought the soldiers would protect her. She
tied to walk into the school, but a guard thrust his rifle at her and
)locked her way. She walked a few feet further down to get by the
;uard but was blocked again by two other soldiers. Some white
tudents were being let in at the same time, she noticed. Other solliers moved toward her and raised their bayonets to make the barrier
lore complete. She was terrified now, blocked in her attempt to get
3 the school, aware that the mob was closing in behind her. Somene was yelling, "Lynch her! Lynch her!" Someone else yelled: "Go
ome, you bastard of a black bitch!" She tried to steady her legs as
ie turned away, the school now at her back. The mob pressed
oser. "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school!" someone
'Outed. She was blocked in all directions. She looked down the
eet and saw a bench by a bus stop. If she could just make it to the
•"'•lit
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r
IS 4'
�6 76
DAVID
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bench, she thought. When she finally got there, she feltlshel
collapse.
^
A man she had never known, Ben Fine, the education
for The New York Times, who was there to write his stdrl
Little Rock had stayed so calm, came over and put his
her and tried to comfort her. "Don't let them see you cryj$
An elderly white woman (the wife of a white professor; at
college) came over and also offered her solace and tried tol
crowd down. The woman, despite the howls of the mob, i
get Elizabeth on a bus and out of the combat zone.
Among those who had been there and caught all q f j
virulence of the white mob, its rage and madness mountil
closed in, the lone young black girl who seemed to be bear
with amazing calm and dignity—was John Chancellor, a$of
porter with NBC. He had watched Elizabeth Eckford'sf
journey with growing fear: one child, alone, entrapped b y j i
He was not sure she was going to make it out alive. He haiif
a story, a good story, but this was something beyond a goqicli
a potential tragedy so terrible that he had hoped it wasn^l
happening. He was terribly frightened for her, frightened for)!
and frightened about what this told him about his countryj¥H<|
not believe that someone had so carelessly allowed this child |
to school alone, with no escort. The mob gathered there in the
was uglier than anything he had ever seen before in his life.*it|
mob of fellow Americans, people who under other conditionf
be perfectly decent people, but there they were completel;
control. Chancellor wondered briefly where this young girl foun8$
strength. It was almost as if he was praying: Please, stop allibf
please, there's got to be a better way. He watched in agoiljl
captured it all for NBC.
;
Chancellor was a relatively junior reporter for NBC in t
mer of 1957. He was thirty years old and based in Chicag6|
working for the Chicago Sun Times, he had been hired by th)^
NBC station in Chicago in 1950, ostensibly as a news writeri^jj
real reason was that his superiors thought he could cover spj
street stories—fires and accidents. On the early Camel News (
with John Cameron Swayze, he would go out in the field
cameraman and a sound man. He doubled as film editor,^
show's producer had asked him what he knew about editing
Nothing at all, he answered. Well, buy a book, and read and fil
about it, the producer had said, which Chancellor did. As a l
had become surprisingly expert in editing film, which in thpl
�THE
F I F T I E S
6 77
^as 35mm and, in the vernacular of the trade, went through the gate
t ninety feet a minute. He became in the process something of a film
, t, and he came to understand, as few others of his generation did,
he journalistic power of images. Years later he thought his tour as
eporter-film editor taught him how to write for film, a process he
^ght otherwise not have understood.
*"
Most of the big-name journalists at the networks were still
oing radio reporting when he had joined NBC. Some of the early
Revision figures, such as John Cameron Swayze, the NBC anchorman ("Let's hopscotch the world for headlines," he would say every
ight). held their positions because they had been sufficiently low
own in the radio pecking order that they had nothing to lose by
oing over to this new medium. Many others, like Chancellor, had
jots in print and were learning television the hard way, since the
jles were still being set every day as they worked.
On that Labor Day weekend in 1957, Chancellor had been
oised to go to Nashville to report on school integration in the
outh, but his superior in New York, Reuven Frank, told him that
xording to the AP wire, Orval Faubus was going to call out the
rkansas National Guard to prevent court-ordered integration,
hat sounded like a bigger story than Nashville, so without stopping
> pack, Chancellor raced to catch the last plane to Little Rock. He
as relatively new to what was now becoming known as the Southn, or race, beat. His introduction to it had come back in 1955 with
ie Emmett Till case, still primarily a print story? But there had been
brief harbinger of the future the day after the acquittal of the two
en accused of murdering Till. Chancellor happened to be in Memlis at the time and he was sent down to Sumner to do a radio report
>r Monitor, the lively NBC radio show of that period. Chancellor
abbed a primitive early-model tape recorder and drove over in the
>mpany of a man from the Jackson radio station. From the instant
: arrived, Sumner had scared him: He had an eerie feeling that
>mething terrible was going to happen as he walked up the street,
terviewing blacks and whites alike on their opinion of the trial,
iddenly, a sixth sense told him that he was in trouble and he slowly
med to look behind him. There coming directly at him was a
lalanx of eight or nine men in overalls and work shirts. Rage was
ched in their faces. His car was ten feet away, and the Jackson radio
an was in it, honking the horn. Chancellor was terrified, for he
lew the men wanted to hurt him. For a split second he thought of
nning to the car, but the men were too close. He did the only thing
could think of. He took the microphone and pointed it at the first
u
'fi'iiif
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�6 78
D A V I D
H A L B E R S T A M I
white man. "Okay," he said, "you can do what you want!*
but the whole world is going to hear about it and see i t . ' $
stopped, he later speculated, because they had mistaken''!
recorder for a camera. It had been, he decided, like holdimj
talisman to some primitive tribal chief, but it worked. With tl
walked to the car and drove away.
If print reporters and still photographers had been witnesl
their stories, then television correspondents, armed as they werfij
cameras and crews, were something more: They were not e
witnesses, but something more, a part of the story. Television're
ers, far more than their print predecessors, contributed to the S[
!
ing up of social change in America. Little Rock became the pn
example of that, the first all-out confrontation between the for
the law and the force of the mob, played out with television i
whirring away in black and white for a nation that was'bjy
largely wired.
Reuven Frank, the most powerful and cerebral figure-i
NBC newsroom at the time, who more than anyone else created'!
standards of that network's journalism, understood immediaf
that the world of television was different. The cameramen L
inherited had a newsreel vision of shooting film—their ideal wasfji
heads of state meeting and shaking hands. Frank wanted somet
different, something more subtle and more real. He believed if/|
were creative enough, you could create a mosaic of the country^
humanity, its diversity, and its tension points. He had a supple")
of the medium, and Chancellor remembered his own pleasureiwhi
Frank called to tell him after one report that his piece had "a loy! "
Mozartian unity to it." Frank emphasized constantly to his repdrte
that their role was to be, in some ways, minimal. Film was so powjej
ful that a reporter was well advised to get out of the way and letli
pictures do the talking. Certainly, that was true in Little Rockiij
images were so forceful that they told their own truths and ne
virtually no narration. It was hard for people watching at honii
to take sides: There they were, sitting in their living rooms in fl
of their own television sets watching orderly black children beha\
with great dignity, trying to obtain^ nothing-more than^a dd
education, the most elemental of/American birthrights, yet-t
aisaulted by a viciousnTob ol poorwhites. What wasTiappeninglfl|
in the country was politically potent: The legal power of the Unif
States Supreme Court had now been cast in moral terms
American conscience, and that was driven as much as anything^
by the footage from the networks from Little Rock. The Presid
�THE
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679
jneasy with the course of events, had failed to give any kind of moral
eadership, and he had deliberately refused to define the issue in
noral terms; now, almost unconsciously, the media was doing it
nstead, for the ugliness and the cruelty of it all, the white mob
•ncouraged by a local governor tormenting young children, carried
ts own indictment. The nation watched, hypnotized, from its living
ooms every night, what, in the words of television reporter Dan
ichorr, was "a national evening seance." Every clip of film diminshed the room to maneuver of each of the major players. With tele/ision every bit of action, Chancellor decided, seemed larger, more
mmediate; the action seemed to be moving at an ever faster rate.
On his arrival there, Chancellor thought, Little Rock had seemed
i sleepy town, as yet unconnected to the ever greater bustle of modern
American life. The pace of living seemed almost languid. Chancellor
emembered a vivid symbol of the older America that still existed when
ie arrived. The bellboy who took him to his room at the old Sam Peck
-lotel brought him a pitcher of iced water and then suggested that if he
vanted any female companionship later in the evening, he need only
;all. One night, early in October, after the 101st had momentarily
tabilized the situation, Chancellor had gone out to dinner with Harry
Vshmore at Hank's Doghouse in North Little Rock. It happened to be
he night that Sputnik went up, and the two of them had watched the
tews reports of this most remarkable achievement in the new space
tge. "Can you believe this?" Chancellor had said. "This means that
nen are really going to go to the moon." "Yes^tsaid Ashmore. "And
icre we are in Little Rock fighting the Civil War agai».'' It seetned to
ymbolize the time warp they were in.
At the beginning of the story, Chancellor could not broadcast
ive because there was still no AT&T equipment available. He had to
ace to the airport each afternoon for a chartered plane to take him
o Oklahoma City, where he could do his broadcast live. The NBC
how was on for fifteen minutes, which meant it contained twelve
ninutes of news. Network news was just coming of age. The previous
all, Swayze had been replaced by a new team of anchors: Chet
luntley, sturdy and steadfast, his reliability vouched for by his
trong face, was electronically married to David Brinkley, mischieous and waspish, a perfect foil for the overpowering immediacy of
elevision. It, along with the other two network shows was creating
new electronic media grid binding the nation.
Chancellor now became their first star in the field. Every night
JBC led with his story, in part, Chancellor suspected, because
Reuven Frank understood what was happening—not only on the
•iij'jj:
�6 80
D A V I D
HALBERST AM
streets of Little Rock, but in the American psyche. It was j
first time a television reporter rather than a print reporter lia
signature on so critical a running story. Chancellor not onl\
hard but, to his credit, he never thought himself a star. An!
man, he liked to say years later, was someone who ran the j _._
a relay race; and somefifteenyears later, when he did in facial
the anchorman of the NiJC Nightly News, he took the additibl
not of managing editor, but of principal reporter.
Little Rock made him famous, and the unique aspect tl
sion fame was that his face became his byline. People cameioj
ate him with the story he was covering, and they began to f
already knew him. Because of this, they were quicker to corific!
him than in print reporters. Being a television reporter, he :
meant instant access and instant connection, and in no sthi
because of his electronic fame, he soon obtained a secret:
the school. His mole. Chancellor discovered later, was a sixteen-'
old Little Rock boy named Ira Lipman, just starting his senior
Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock nine, had been a locketf
attendant at the Jewish country club in Little Rock, where Lipn
parents had a membership. On a number of occasions LipihaS
ended up driving Ernest Green home after work, and theiwlc
struck up a friendship. Lipman thought Ernest Green pleasainl
intelligent, with a rare gentleness about him. Their relationship!
in his mind underlined the madness of segregation, the fact t
two of them could not have a normal friendship and that hehad/c
managed to know him through a club where his parents wereji
leged members and Ernest Green was an attendant.
Lipman worked a few nights a week at the Arkansas Gazetted
had once met another NBC reporter, Frank McGee. Now he decid
to help Chancellor, because he felt he had a connection to NBGj
also because he had seen Chancellor on television and thought}!
decent and fair-minded, a man who was trying to tell the truth?at
a difficult situation. He would gather information and thenf
Chancellor anonymously from a pay phone just outside the set
The first of his calls took place at the very beginning of the;ci
Chancellor did not have time to check out the information befpr
filed that day, but late that night, upon his return from
City, he found the information to be accurate.
^
The next day Chancellor's youthful anonymous source <
chide him: "I'm very disappointed in you," he said. " I have aUf
terrific information and you didn't use it." Chancellor apoloj
but promised to take the information more seriously in the.fut
�T H E
F I F T I E S
6 8 I
t knowing his source's name, Chancellor comprehended in some
/ the background and the motivation of this young boy. Lipman
ays had to whisper lest another student discover what he was
ng and tell someone. The boy was placing himself in great danger.
having this source gave Chancellor a terrific edge on the story,
1 he was able to move ahead of his print rivals.
Wallace Westfeldt, a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, was
jsed by the spectacle of this reporter from the upstart institution
elevision news, who was gaining every day the grudging admirai of his older print colleagues. Westfeldt's own sources were excelt, since he had visited Little Rock several times before the crisis.
;h night he would file his own story for the early edition of his
)er and then sit in the Little Rock press club having a sandwich
1 a drink with the other reporters. As he ate, the NBC Nightly
vs would come on, and Chancellor would often have something
t few, if any, of the print reporters had. Westfeldt could see them
sing under their breath, and when the news show was over, there
uld be a quiet exodus from the press club as reporters went to the
jnes to call their offices and update their own stories. Television,
:stfeldt thought, was quickly catching up with print: I f anything,
his story the new medium might have exceeded the old for the first
ie.
As Little Rock developed, the national media force focusing on
il rights crystallized. It had its own pecking order and rules,
inny Popham, and soon his successor Claude Sitton, of the Times
the tone. There were also the legendary Homfi* Bigart, also of the
nes. Bob Bird of the Tribune, Bob Baker of The Watiiington Post,
1 soon Karl Fleming of Newsweek. The older men in this brigade
j often been war correspondents in World War Two and Korea,
ich helped—because the situation was not unlike a war on native
1; the younger men, by and large, were Southerners, because a
uthern accent was considered helpful.
They were at risk all the time, for the mobs perceived them as
erals, Jews, and Communists. Several Life magazine reporters
re beaten badly by the mob early in the crisis, and then the
>orters were arrested by local officials for having been beaten up.
e network people, because of their high visibility, the familiarity
their faces, and the obvious presence of their cameramen, were
rticularly vulnerable. Chancellor soon found that when he walked
wn the street, he would often be followed by cars full of segreganists, hate contorting their faces as they stared at him. At first he
uld panic. Should I run? he would ask himself, but he soon learned
�6 82
D A V I D
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merely to keep walking. The locals became angrier and angrier^
television, in particular, was holding up a mirror of these people
the outside world to look at it, and the image in the mirror was!
pretty. If you went to the sheriff's office to do an interview, Chan
lor remembered, you gave your name and organization to thei
uty, who would holler back so the entire office could hear, "She
there's some son of a bitch out here from the Nigger Broadcasi
Company who says he wants to see you."
Because of the dangers, there were certain rules—a repb:
never carried a notebook that he could not hide in a pocket-.;!
ham's first rule of coverage was: Never take notes in front of,$
crowd. It was better lo dress casual than sharp. A reporter'ne\
went out on a story alone. One did not argue with the segregatiot
or provoke them. Whatever moral abhorrence a reporter felt at
the events taking place in front of him, it was to be kept bottledt|
Ben Fine of the Times, an indoor man in the vernacular, had I
cool when he comforted Elizabeth Eckford. He had started io are
with the mob and the Times had been forced to bring him 1
New York.
Watching these journalists in Little Rock, as he had M
them almost two years earlier in Montgomery, Alabama, was am
named Will Campbell. A native of a tiny town called Liberty in s
Mississippi, he had earned a bachelor's degree from Wake.Fpf
and a master's from the Yale Divinity School: He was technical
Rev. Will Campbell, though for most of his life he never/hao
church. He liked to describe himself as "a Baptist preacher, but nl;
on Sunday." The contradiction between his own liberalism and^l
conservatism of his church amused him, and he liked to say thatf
"was a Baptist preacher of the South, but not a Southern-.BaF
preacher." During the early days of the civil rights movement)!
became an important but anonymous player. Sometimes his|
would appear in the back of a photograph taken during some ]
ular confrontation, but he would almost never be identified.-i'ji
his name would never appear in the news stories themselv
agreement with the journalists for whom he had already
valuable source. He was quoted hundreds of times in newspaf
never by name, instead, always as an anonymous reliable^
which he in fact was. He was a shrewd recorder and interpret
only of the facts but of the intentions of the many differehfcpj
involved, and he had important friends on all sides in these c^
tations. His first job after school had been to serve as the;cr
at the University of Mississippi, but his liberal views on intej
:
;
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6 83
had almost immediately gotten him fired. Although violence had
never been directed at him at Ole Miss, at one reception he had given,
a turd had been discovered in the punch bowl. That had convinced
him his days at Ole Miss were numbered. In 1956 he took a job as
a kind of roving field agent for the National Council of Churches
based in Nashville. Acting as a friend and adviser to those blacks
threatened or in trouble, aiTd connecting them to sympathetic people
and agencies in the North, he was a ubiquitous figure, always on the
move. The national reporters discovered he was able to move back
and forth between different groups, bringing them information and
making quiet, astute suggestions about what was likely to happen
next.
Will Campbell, then thirty-three, understood as much as anyone
the growing power of the media and what it meant to the Movement.
Earlier in Montgomery, he had gained a sense of how it could define
this story in moral terms. But one day early in the crisis at Little
Rock, he had an epiphany about the importance of the media. He
had been out in the streets watching the mob when a friend nudged
him and pointed to a slim young man who seemed to be talking into
the air. "That's John Chancellor of NBC," the friend noted. Campbell had never seen Chancellor in the flesh before, though he had
heard of him. There seemed nothing remarkable about his appearance, nor did he seem to know anything more than Will Campbell
himself about the violent situation playing itself out in front of them.
But a few hours later, back in his hotel room, Campbell happened to
turn on his television set and there was ffife very scene he had witnessed earlier in the day: Chancellor, shrunk rfbw to about three
inches on his screen, was calmly giving a summary of what was
happening as the mob jostled and jeered behind him. The commentary, for most Americans, was chilling, and it struck Campbell in
that instant that these modern journalists, both print and television,
were the new prophets of our society. Moreover, they had, because
of television, what the prophets of old had lacked—a mass audience
to which they could transmit with stunning immediacy the events
they witnessed. It was in their power, as it had been in the power of
the prophets before them, the tent and brush-arbor revivalists, to
define sin, and they were doing it not to a select few of the chosen but
to the entire citizenry. They did not think of themselves as modern
prophets and they did not think they were actually defining sin, but
what they were doing, in Will Campbell's view, was just that, for
there was no way that an ordinary citizen could watch these events
through their eyes and words and pictures and not be offended and
iK
ll
"r. 'II
ii l
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�6 84
D A V I D
H A L B E R S T A M
mowed. What John Chancellor might as well have been do:
thought Campbell, was letting the film roll and repeating agaihii
acjm. "This is a sin . . . this is a sin . . . this is a sin . . ."
Locally, Harry Ashmore had never had any doubt what
iissoded to do with his paper once Faubus drew the line, but
wtcned the paper's elderly owner, J. N . Heiskell. what the prict
tchng the truth and upholding the law would be. Heiskell b:
A^iunore's warnings aside. He had no desire to accommodate
ddtdgoguery even if it meant losing subscribers and advertisi
(wibch. in a subsequent boycott of the Gazette, it did). "I'm ah'Sli
irun," Heiskell answered, "and I've lived too long to let people
thi£ (Faubus] take over my city." Most editors at American newspi
pas of the era were not so brave. More often than not, they put thi
own survival first and tried not to offend local sensibilities. Oftenll
nvments of crisis, their instinct would be to protect the commuiui
ajunst its critics, to soften accounts of its failings and, above alll
Wane outsiders. Harry Ashmore was having none of that. Thistwi
tie moment, he was sure, when he would be judged with a finalii
Ashmore was fearless not only in how he covered the crisis mi
own paper but also in opening up its resources to visiting repor
Ttrat was true not only at the beginning of the crisis, when most
tie Little Rock establishment supported the integration plan, buti
fie months to follow as well, as people (including, most notably,?h
cnnpetitors on the rival Arkansas Democrat) who once praisednj
pirn began to falter and switch sides. Relatively early on, aiibj
Jc-ace Department official called Ashmore to get a reading on wi
wfc happening: " I ' l l give it to you in one sentence," he answe
"VLK police have been routed, the mob is in the streets and we'
cUse to a reign of terror."
His paper became the general press headquarters. Visiting:
pnters would head over there every day, in effect to be briefed|
Asnnore and his reporters on the day's events. Then, if they wantj
u. diey could go out for dinner with him as he talked on intdj
nKQt- regaling them with stories of Arkansas politics. Orval Failb
inait have been able momentarily to block the school integratio
ftdaestrate the mob, and confuse the President of the United Star
a; his true aims, but he had met his match in Harry AshmC
(snne thirty years later, at a conference at Fayetteville where ]
tu? looked at the events of Little Rock in retrospect, Faubus
u sanitize his version of what had happened. His view by.itt
crnied to tidy up his place in history, was that through his
i t aad only been trying to push President Eisenhower to actijij
1
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6 85
one thousand people, almost all of them pro-integration, were attending the symposium, and one morning just before Faubus spoke,
he and his old antagonist Ashmore had breakfast together. Faubus
ittve his version of what he was going to say, and Ashmore wished
lim well in getting away with it. "But remember, Orval," he said as
he latter had gotten up from the table to give his speech. "This time
i've got the mob on my side.")
Both the nation and the world watched with horror and fascinaion as Faubus steadily moved into the vacuurncreated by the Eisenicwer administration. Largely unsympathetic to the idea of
ntegration, the President had given little thought to the question of
vhat might happen if the Southern states rebelled. Despite the contant rumblings about the possibility of serious Southern resistance,
Eisenhower seemed ambivalent about the events unfolding so dranatically in the month after the Brown decision. Meanwhile, the job
',rew steadily more difficult, until in Little Rock the governor seemed
o be openly defying the law of the land. A few men around Eisenlower, more committed to civil rights—Herbert Brownell, Richard
>)ixon, and Bill Rogers—thought that the President had underestinated Faubus from the start and that Faubus was aiming for a
lajor constitutional confrontation for his own political gain.
Soon after the Brown decision, Attorney General Brownell, as
he chief law enforcement officer of the country, had met with the
ttorneys general of the Southern states and sgoke informally about
/hat they could all do together to expedite the pfocess of integration.
Ie had asked for suggestions on how federal and state forces could
lake the transition as easy as possible. When he finished he was met
y thunderous silence. Afterward one state attorney general took
im aside and pointed out that each man in this room intended one
ay to become governor of his state. None therefore wanted to be
:en as partners of the U.S. government in carrying out local integraon. In fact, the state attorney general added, Brownell should exect significant opposition rather than assistance.
Ike was very much in conflict within himself over whether interation was right or wrong; his essential sympathies were with neiicr the nine children nor the mob in the street but primarily with his
JW and extremely wealthy and conservative Southern golfing and
anting friends, those old-fashioned Southern traditionalists who
'und integration objectionable. As such the President remained
lent on the issue and continued to dally. This was alien and exemely uncomfortable territory for him. Conservative by nature, he
w even the smallest change in the existing racial order as radical
:iv;I
�6 8 6
D A V I D
HALBERSTAM'
and upselling. In the brief period while he was president of CDoli
University it had been decided (but not by him) to giVi
Bunche an honorary degree. Bunche was then at the
career at the UN, and possibly the most honored and leastjl
versial black man in the country. But Ike was uneasy with the;
because it meant Bunche and his wife would have to join the'
recipients for drinks and dinner. It wasn't that Ike wasVat
Bunche receiving the degree, he confided, but he wondered^
other recipients would object to socializing with the Bunches.'
considerable surprise, the evening went off smoothly and seveiSS
the other recipients went out of their way to seek out the Bunf
The man to whom Eisenhower told this story, his friend Gyf
berger, was quite shocked; it showed, he thought, not only:
biased Ike was about black people but how little he underst
own bias. Now, in the midst of a major constitutional crisis.it
who suggested that he speak in favor of integration on the 1
moral and religious principles if nothing else, he answered so:
disingenuously that he did not believe you could force peopj'
change what was in their hearts. To those who suggested heis
.:«S!
with black leaders to talk about the nation's growing racial fe:
and the threat of increased white Southern resistance, he ans'
in a particularly telling moment, that if he did, he would have toi;
as well with the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.
Eisenhower did finally meet with Faubus in Newport,
Island, much against Brownell's wishes. The attorney Mgeni
warned the President repeatedly that the governor was thinking:
of his reelection campaign. Faubus at first played Eisenhowi
tremely well: He had come not to exploit the issue, he claimed^
as an anguished moderate who wished only for a little more
Ike, it seemed, was amenable to that: a little more time to do s;
thing that he himself could not readily understand. He began!
speak of a compromise solution. Faubus later wrote that Eisenha
turned to Brownell in one of their sessions and asked, 'Herb;
you go down there [to Little Rock] and ask the Court to
this thing for a few days?" Brownell answered, "No, we can't do'
It isn't possible. It isn't legally possible. It can't be done." Brd'
explained that the case was in the jurisdiction of the courts.'
seemed uncertain. Faubus noted: " I got the impression at
that he was attempting to recall just what he was supposed to ]
me, as if he were trying to remember instructions on a subj
which he was not completely assured in his own mind." Eisenh
with no moderate solution available, finally turned up the beat]
�THE
F I F T I E S
6 87
believed that he had gotten Faubus to agree to back down. But then
as soon as Faubus returned to Little Rock, he reneged on his promise. When asked if he hadn't backed off his promise made at Newport, he answered, "Just because I said it doesn't make it so."
That did it as far as the President was concerned. "Well, you
were right, Herb," he angrily told Brownell. "He did just what you
said he'd do—he double-crossed me." If Eisenhower did not entirely
comprehend the moral issue at stake, or for that matter the legal one,
he certainly understood a personal challenge. A man who had been
afive-stargeneral did not look kindly on frontal challenges by junior
officers. After vacillating for so long, he came down hard, seeing the
issue not as a question of integration so much as one of insurrection.
He sent in troops of the 101st Airborne to protect the nine children
and he federalized the Arkansas National Guard. For the first time
since Reconstruction days, federal troops were sent into the South to
preserve order. Little Rock, Dean Acheson wrote Harry Truman at
the time, terrified him, "a weak President who fiddled along ineffectually until a personal affront drives him to unexpectedly drastic
action. A Little Rock with Moscow and the SAC in the place of the
paratroopers could blow us all apart."
More than thirty years later, John Chancellor could still talk
about the day the 101st Airborne came to Little Rock as if it had
happened yesterday: The soldiers marched into the area and set up
their perimeter. Their faces were immobile'&nd, unlike the Guardsmen's, betrayed no politics, just duty. As they mat<efied in^the clear,
sharp sound of their boots clacking on the street was a reminder of
their professionalism. Chancellor had never thought much about the
Constitution before; if anything, he had somehow taken it for"
granted. But he realized that day that he was watching the Constitution in action. There was something majestic about the scene: it was
a moment at once thrilling and somehow frightening as well.
With the arrival of the 101st, the nation yet again witnessed a
stunning spectacle on television: armed soldiers of one of the most
honored divisions in the United States Army escorting young black
children where once there had been a mob. When the segregationists
in the street protested, the paratroopers turned out to be very different from the National Guard soldiers who had so recently been their
pals. The men of the 101st fixed their bayonets and placed them right
at the throats of the protestors, quickly moving them out of the
school area. That first morning, an Army officer came to Daisy
1
i'? ?|
�Bates's house, where the children had gathered, and saluted
"Mrs. Bates," he said. "We're ready for the children. We will returiw^
them to your home at three-thirty." It was, said Minniejean Brov^^.^jy
one of the nine, an exhilarating moment. "For thefirsttime in my Ufe-V^
1 felt like an American citizen," she later told Mrs. Bates. ;*< f$& ",V
?•
'
For the moment, the law of the nation had been upheld agaitotS^i^
the will of the mob and the whims of a segregationist politician. The^-.t
black children were escorted to and from school every day byttheyfe
soldiers. Little Rock seemed to calm down. Faubus screamed abbut$lS,
the encroachment of states' rights by the federal government arifaf'^S?
bemoaned the fact that Arkansas was occupied territory. Why^He'-^
himself, he said, had helped rescue the 101st when it was pinneSi**^
down at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (which was U^Js*
true—by the time his outfit had arrived, the 101st had already$Si?
stopped the last German drive).
'^'•• ¥m$lffl
After a few weeks, with the situation seemingly under controllil^
the government pulled out the 101st and put the federalized Ark^-jSiS
sas National Guard in charge. With that, the situation begani|d^4
deteriorate. The mob was no longer a problem, but inside the schpol^^
there was a systematic and extremely well organized assault uponithe.-^A,
nine children by high-school-age segregationists. They not bnlyl'^,
harassed the black children but, more effectively, any white chUcfn^
who was courteous or friendly to them.
It was a calculated campaign (organized, school officials; ^
pected, right out of the governor's mansion). The school bulU^ij ^
behaving like youthful Klansmen, knew they had behind them
full power of the state government and the increasingly defianti^^^
kansas population. That meant the job of protecting the nine feU.ioh^
a handful of teachers and administrators in the school. Theiiine/i'
students were in for a very hard and ugly year. There was a relentle|
assault upon them—kicking, tripping, hitting them from
harassing them with verbal epithets as they walked down the|
pouring hot soup on them in the cafeteria. Their lockers were.brbl
into regularly, their books stolen. The school administrators!!
exactly who the ringleaders were but found them boastfully5pr|
One girl told Elizabeth Huckaby, the vice-principal, that she|
entirely within her rights. All she had done, the girUsaid, was t
the word nigger. It was as if her rights included harassing <
racial reasons.
How, in retrospect, the nine children stood all of this is i
but they did, showing remarkable inner strength and cha
again and again turning the other cheek. On many occasioil
4
J
:
1
�THE
i
F I F T I E S
6 89
seemed ready to break, and one or two would show up in Ms.
Huckaby's office in tears, exhausted by the cruelty and on the verge
of quitting. It was the job of Ms. Huckaby and others to plead with
them to keep going and to remind them that if they faltered, it would
merely be harder on the next group, because the segregationists
would be bolder with success. Only one of the nine did not finish the
first year: Minniejean Brown. Perhaps the most enthusiastic and
emotional of the nine, she seemed to be the one least able to turn
away from the harassment. Soon, the segregationists realized that
she was the weak link and turned their full force on her. Minniejean
on occasion fought back. Tormented in the cafeteria one day by her
enemies, she dumped a soup bowl on the head of a student and was
suspended. She tried desperately to control herself but in time responded once too often and was expelled. Immediately, cards were
printed up that said, ONE DOWN, EIGHT TO GO.
Some of the black children's parents wanted them to pull out at
various times during the year, fearing the price was simply too high.
But Daisy Bates was strong: She reminded the children again and
again that they were doing this not for themselves but for others,
some as yet unborn. They were now, like it or not, leaders in a moral
struggle. That year Ernest Green graduated, and twenty years later,
he was perhaps the most successful member of the graduating class:
As an assistant secretary of labor in the cabinet of Jimmy Carter, he
was the featured speaker at the twentieth reunion of his classmates.
In a way, everyone seemed to have gotten something out of
Little Rock. The civil rights leaders leiarned how to. challenge the
forces of segregation in front of the modern media, most notably
television cameras. The networks, new and unsure of their role, had
found a running story composed of almost nothing but images,
which would not only prove compelling to viewers but which would
legitimize its early reporters for their courage and decency (just as the
broadcasts of Ed Murrow and his CBS colleagues had been legitimized radio during World War Two). In the months after the quizshow scandals rocked the networks, there was a calculated attempt
to address the resulting loss of prestige by giving the news shows ever
greater freedom to cover such important events as Little Rock. Not
just the news shows but the networks themselves were suddenly in
the business of building respectability. John Chancellor in time
would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in American
journalism and public life, as anchor of the Today show, as head of
the Voice of America and, finally, as anchorman of the NBC news.
No one, of course, gained more than Orval Faubus. He por-
�6 90
D A V I D
H A L B E R S T A M
trayed himself as the victim of massive federal intervention;ItL
lonely man who believed in states' rights and the will of his oj|_
people. No longer could any good (white) citizen of Arkansas be:fc(|
segregation and against Faubus. A third term, which had seeme
unlikely before Little Rock, was guaranteed. With two moderat<
candidates running against him in 1958, he beat their combined totajl
of votes by more than two to one. A fourth term followed. And!?
fifth term. And finally a sixth. On occasion there was talk of retir
ment, but he had, wrote the Arkansas Gazette, ridden off into more
sunsets than Tom Mix. His decision to block integration set the staje
for a generation of Southern politicians, most notably George Wall
lace, who had learned from Little Rock how to manipulate the angerl
within the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and howl
to make the enemy seem to be the media. The moderate position 1
been badly undermined at Little Rock, and an era of confrontatioijS
was to follow, Harry Ashmore wrote prophetically in Life in 19581
A year after Little Rock, Daisy Bates suggested that she COE
to the White House with the nine children. It would be a wonderfu
thing, she suggested, for the children, who had endured so mucl
hatred and violence, to be received by the President of the Unit
States. The idea terrified Eisenhower's White House staff. In trutr
it was a hard thing to say no to. Sherman Adams, the White Hotibfe
chief of staff and the boss of Frederick Morrow, the one black man
on Ike's staff, shrewdly put the ball in Morrow's court. Adams asked
Morrow: Was Mrs. Bates's request a wise one? No, said Morrpjv
because it was not a question of whether the President sympathized
with the nine children. Rather, if he met with them, it would it •*
enrage Southern leaders that it would diminish his role as a leader^ n
such issues in the future. In addition, he added, the meeting would
only subject the students "to more abuse than ever before, jaiid
certainly the President does not want to be a party to this kindibf
affair." "You are absolutely correct," Adams told Morrow, "il
was my thinking on the meeting." Adams had one more movetlej
Would Morrow please call Mrs. Bates to tell her? It was, Moil
noted, a call he dreaded making, but he knew the rules and he I
what he was there to do. He was a team player, so he did itwj
suggested that if she and the children came to Washington, he :WO|
set up a specially conducted tour of the White House.
<-'4ii'
No aspect of the crisis, particularly the role played by'O
Faubus, escaped the notice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Hal
nothing if not political, and he understood the emerging politic
protest brilliantly. King knew from his experience in MontgbmCT
�THE
F I F T I E S
6 91
where television news was making its earliest inroads, that what
he was doing was no longer merely local, that because of television,
for the first time the nation was convening each evening around 6 or
7 P.M.
King and his people were conducting the most perilous undertaking imaginable, for they knew that the more skillfully they provoked their enemies, the more dramatic the footage they would reap,
and also the more likely they were to capture the moral high ground.
King was appealing to the national electorate at the expense of the
regional power structure, which he considered hostile anyway. He
needed some measure of white backlash, and he needed, among
other things, proper villains. He wanted ordinary white people to sit
in their homes and watch blacks acting with great dignity while
Southern officials, moved by the need to preserve a system he hated,
assaulted them. As such he was the dramatist of a national morality
play: The blacks were in white hats; the whites, much to their surprise, would find themselves in the black hats. A play required good
casting and Martin King soon learned to pick not just his venues
carefully, but also his villains.
Montgomery, for all its successes, had lacked villains. Certainly,
the local officials in Montgomery had mistreated the black protestors, but there was no one brutal figure who had come to symbolize
the evils of segregation and who could be counted on, when provoked, to play into the hands of the Movement. But Orval Faubus
was a different matter, a man who made ordinary Americans recoil.
As the Movement grew, King was offerecksfarious cities as platforms
for his protests, but he was always careful to select those with the
ugliest and crudest segregationists—such men as Bull Connor, in
Birmingham, and Sheriff Jim Clark, in Selma. In the past, segregation had been enforced more subtly, often through economic threats.
Blacks would lose their jobs if they signed petitions asking schools to
desegregate, for example. Racial prejudice had been like a giant beast
that never came out in the daytime; now King and others like him
were exposing it to bright light, fresh air, and the eye of the television
camera and the beast was dying.
The timing of King's protest was critical: 1955 and 1956 marked
the years when the networks were just becoming networks in the true
sense, thanks in large part to the network news shows. Along with
John Kennedy, King was one of the first people who understood how
to provide action for film, how, in effect, to script the story for the
executive producers (so that the executive producers thought they
were scripting it themselves). It was an ongoing tour de force for
S
:
�6 92
D A V I D
HALBERST
A]
King: a great story, great action, constant confrontation,plenty of moral and spiritual tension. There was a hypnoti<$
watching it all unfold; King treated the television reporters?!,
to him well. He never wanted a confrontation that theine
newsmen could not capture on film and feed to New Yorkjltii
he, if at all possible, want the action too late in the day that it i
the deadlines of the network news shows. So it was that the*!
ment began and so it was that television amplified and sf
the process of political and social change in America.
One of the most powerful currents taking place and charigi:
American life in this decade—taking place even as few reco
it—was the increasing impact and importance of black cultu
daily American life. This was particularly true in the fifties itf
areas critically important to young Americans: music and spbrl
popular music the influence of black culture was profound, mui
the irritation of a generation of parents of white teenagers.'^
Elvis was the first white country artist to use the beat, he was-iriei
part of a larger revolution in which not only were many !(if!
features of black music being used by white musicians, but*!)]
musicians were increasingly accepted by white audiences'-as?;
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, and^]
Domino were now integrated into the white hit-charts. Thetijlt
evolution, equally important, was taking place in sports, and it?jti
a significant impact on the society. With the coming of televisiii
professional sports, particularly football and basketball, hadrdf
greater national impact than they had ever had before. What|n
once happened before relatively small crowds now happened
taneously in millions of American homes; in effect, it was going !
the periphery to the very center of the culture.
%
In terms of the coming of technology and the coming oft
gifted black athletes, a dual revolution was sweeping across;
country: in the quality of athletic ability of those able to play^
in the number of people now able to watch. Professional foot
which, in comparison with professional baseball, had been vifti
a minor sport before the arrival of television, now flowered undeij
sympathetic eye of the camera, its importance growing even
nation was being wired city by city and house by house for televii
Suddenly, professional football had become a new super sport:
first true rival to Major League baseball for the nation's affebtii
In baseball the coming of Jackie Robinson had been quij
1
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Michael Waldman
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Michael Waldman was Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting from 1995-1999. His responsibilities were writing and editing nearly 2,000 speeches, which included four State of the Union speeches and two Inaugural Addresses. From 1993 -1995 he served as Special Assistant to the President for Policy Coordination.</p>
<p>The collection generally consists of copies of speeches and speech drafts, talking points, memoranda, background material, correspondence, reports, handwritten notes, articles, clippings, and presidential schedules. A large volume of this collection was for the State of the Union speeches. Many of the speech drafts are heavily annotated with additions or deletions. There are a lot of articles and clippings in this collection.</p>
<p>Due to the size of this collection it has been divided into two segments. Use links below for access to the individual segments:<br /><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0469-F+Segment+1">Segment One</a><br /><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0469-F+Segment+2">Segment Two</a></p>
Creator
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Michael Waldman
Office of Speechwriting
Date
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1993-1999
Identifier
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2006-0469-F
Extent
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Segment One contains 1071 folders in 72 boxes.
Segment Two contains 868 folders in 66 boxes.
Provenance
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Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Format
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Adobe Acrobat Document
Text
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Original Format
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paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Little Rock C.H.S. [Central High School] [2]
Creator
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Office of Speechwriting
Michael Waldman
Is Part Of
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Box 62
<a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36404"> Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763296">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Identifier
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2006-0469-F Segment 2
Provenance
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White House Staff and Office Files
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
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Adobe Acrobat Document
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Preservation-Reproduction-Reference
Date Created
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6/3/2015
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7763296
42-t-7763296-20060469F-Seg2-062-003-2015