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 101st 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 14th 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
Clayton had
offered to let me audit one of his Religion classes at the University of
Central Arkansas (UCA) and I took him up on it at 2 pm today. I was really thrilled to sit in. Its been a
few years since I was in a room with knowledge hungry students.
The small class of 10 are studying the work of
Thomas Kuhn whose 1962 book “The Power of Scientific Revolutions” is one of the
must reads today for students of philosophy.
Tonight we
sleep like the dead. Literally. Right beside Primrose UMC’s well kept cemetery
in the small town of Dixon, Arkansas, about 10 miles south of Little Rock. I
must discover why there are no Confederate War Graves marked in this yard. I learned from the church website that the
community began as primarily German immigrants in the 1820’s but by the time
the church was founded, 1867, I would have expected this to be a politically
involved town. But I know many newer European
immigrants had a hard time supporting secession, so that may have been the case
here.
