The NINE

I was seven years old.  Mona was nine. I was starting second grade at D A Marshall Elementary in Harrisburg, PA. with Mrs. Gibble. Mona was just beginning fourth grade at Brookville, PA elementary.  It was fall, 1957. She remembers one black student in all the time she was in Brookville schools.  

I remember none in my six years at D A Marshall. It was only when I got to Junior High, in seventh grade, that African American (we and they used only Negro or Black as a description then) school population rose to near 50% in our city schools. And in Little Rock Arkansas there had never been a black and white student in the same class. This September, there would be nine.

Known as the Little Rock Nine to the world through the simplification of newspaper headline writers, these young teens were willing, and to some extent prepared, to live out the new law of the land. Brown vs Board of Education (Topeka, KS) had been ruled on by the Supreme Court.  

Segregation by color or race  in American education was now illegal. And Arkansas, led by its radical pro-segregation Governor Faubaus was going to fight the combining of the races in his schools every inch of the way.  The first battleground of this war was Little Rock High. Central, as it is still known today. The battles were still being fought in the 1970’s in cities like Boston, MA. And the battles, in some places in America, aren't really over even yet.

The history books or Wikipedia will give you the details of the always painful and sometimes violent confrontation, instigated and basically led by Arkansas’ Governor Faubaus with the NAACP, some of his own police and National Guard, and ultimately with the 101^st Airborne Division of the Regular United States Army under orders of the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower.  Never since the Civil War, 95 years before, had Army troops been billeted on American soil in defiance of a United States Governor.

Today Vicki Crockett took us south 27 miles to Little Rock, the capital city of Arkansas.  We walked the same ground and streets the battle above was fought on. We also saw the statehouse where secession was declared from the Union in 1861.  We saw where Union troops were housed when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to U. S. Grant’s army in 1863 and the state of Arkansas became once more territory of the United States, if not just yet a state united with the rest. 

We saw the rooms where the predominantly former Confederate post Civil War Assembly refused to ratify the 14^th amendment to the constitution giving negroes full voting citizenship and we saw where the Ku Klux Clan ran over all rules of law but the ‘Jim Crow’ law of southern culture to ‘keep the black man down’.

We explored the River Front Park which rests on land called ‘Petite Roche’ for the distinctive point of rocks which jutted out into the Arkansas from its southern shore. The first French Traders came down from Canada or up from New Orleans on the Mississippi and then the Arkansas River to trade for furs with the Quapaw Indians. The first historic settlers of these banks.

Mona and I ate a Mediterranean lunch at the Park Food Court prepared by a Palestinian Christian who had traveled from Jerusalem to America 40 years ago and who cries today, as he always has, for the taking of West Bank land without reason by the Israeli government. This week another 1,000 acres of land near Bethlehem was taken for another Jewish settlement without official warning.

And we stopped by the state capital building, which strongly resembles the nation's capital in Washington, DC, and photoed a statue to Confederate women who gave of themselves to care for rebel soldiers returned wounded and ill from battles fought nearly half a continent away. This often because the Confederacy could not afford or was not able to field the kind of hospitals and care the union 'Sanitary Commission' arranged up north. 

And then we drove home those 27 miles back to our home, FROG, and had a wonderful lasagna dinner at Vicki, Clayton, Maria, and Bryan’s home in Conway till bedtime came for all of us.

As I sit and type now while Mona reads in bed, impacted by all the things we’ve seen of this day, and remembering my second grade teacher Mrs. Gibble, I hear one thing she said which I still remember (sorry Mrs. G, nothing more comes to mind at this moment. I think this does because you had to say it to me several times) which is that no matter what you may think of another, or even how they may treat you, always treat them with respect.  “They are God’s children too”.  A teacher could say that in 1957 in America.

And a thousand miles south, completely unknown to me, or Ramona, nine kids only a few years older than us were being cursed at by parents of other kids their age because their skin was darker than those white parent’s  children.

A quote I read spoken by one of the nine just a few years ago says it all. It’s on a wall at the National Park Visitor’s Center which now stands diagonally across from the very active, and very integrated, Central High School building:

 And in 1997 the white woman who cursed at one of the nine on news video sought and received forgiveness from the woman she had maligned.

And outside the school, under one of many lovely tall cedar trees, I found a plaque stating that they had all been donated a few years before by an alumni class of Central High. And that was the class of 1957.

Freedom is never given.  It is always earned.  And it must be earned over and over in each generation. This is a lesson I and Mona will continue to learn till the day our last and greatest journey is over.

-Ken