A Mighty Long Way Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword: by President Bill Clinton

  Prologue: Remembering Central High—Fifty Years Later

  Chapter 1 - A Different World

  Chapter 2 - The Playing Field

  Chapter 3 - Birth of a Tiger

  Chapter 4 - Wait and See

  Chapter 5 - D-Day

  Chapter 6 - The Blessing of Walls

  Chapter 7 - Star-Studded Summer

  Chapter 8 - Just a Matter of Time

  Chapter 9 - First-Semester Senior

  Chapter 10 - An Explosive Night

  Chapter 11 - Scapegoats

  Chapter 12 - Graduation and Good-bye

  Chapter 13 - Finding Focus

  Chapter 14 - A Season of Loss

  Chapter 15 - Finding My Voice

  Chapter 16 - Peace at Last

  Chapter 17 - Touching the Future

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Juanita and Cartelyou Walls, who taught me determination, commitment, and perseverance so I could take the journey with confidence.

  To my sisters, Loujuana and Tina, who learned the same lessons and took them to another level. My love for you is immeasurable. You share in every bit of recognition I receive.

  To my comrades, who shared the journey with strength and courage:

  Ernest Green

  Minnijean Brown

  Elizabeth Eckford

  Thelma Mothershed

  Melba Pattillo

  Gloria Ray

  Terrence Roberts

  Jefferson Thomas

  To my loving husband, Ira (Ike), whose support, patience, and wisdom have encouraged me to stay on track.

  To my son and daughter, Whitney and Brooke, who continue to bring me joy. I am glad I completed the journey so that you could explore your own paths freely and with conviction. Carry on knowing that you have my unconditional love.

  And to generations yet unborn who will adopt the spirit and carry on the Walls-Cullins-LaNier legacies.

  FOREWORD

  by President Bill Clinton

  I was eleven years old on September 25, 1957, when Carlotta Walls, Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, and Jefferson Thomas, supported by their mentors Daisy and L. C. Bates, bravely walked into the halls of Central High School, and into the pages of American history.

  I lived fifty miles away in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and although I had never attended school with black children, I supported integration and was pulling for those kids. So were my mother and grandparents. In his small grocery store, in Hope, Arkansas, my grandfather served both black and white working people. He treated them equally, including giving them food on credit when times were tough and they were doing their best.

  Seeing the Little Rock Nine face down the angry mob fascinated me, and inspired an emotional bond that has lasted a lifetime. In the 1970s, I became friends with Ernie Green, the only senior in the group. Our friendship has grown stronger with the years.

  In 1987, on the 30th anniversary of Central High’s integration, I invited the nine to the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, where Governor Faubus had laid his plans to keep them out of school and use the turmoil to win himself a third term. Hillary and I had a great time with them, a group of survivors and achievers who enjoyed one another’s company and seemed able to relive their historic moment without being imprisoned by it. I was very impressed by the youngest of the nine, Carlotta Walls LaNier—by her intelligence, her controlled energy, and the kind, wise look in her eyes.

  I met Carlotta again, in 1997, when the Little Rock Nine celebrated their 40th anniversary at Central High School’s campus. Governor Huckabee and I held open the school’s doors for them as they walked in, doors that once led to hostility and harassment, now open wide in welcome, respect, and gratitude.

  We had come a long way, but not all the way. Just a few months earlier, I had established the President’s Initiative on Race to engage millions of Americans in assessing the current state of race relations, and offer specific proposals on how to close our remaining racial divides. My final meeting with the Little Rock Nine as president was in 1999, when they came to the White House to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

  I was thrilled when Carlotta and the rest of the Little Rock Nine asked me to serve as Honorary Chair for the 50th anniversary celebration on September 25, 2007. After a wonderful banquet the night before, there was a celebration on the steps of Central High. All nine spoke, each in their own way, about what that long ago event meant to them, and in the process, revealing the people they had become in the five decades since. Carlotta spoke with the clarity and force that have made her the de facto “mother hen” of the nine.

  As she and the others went their separate ways after high school, they never forgot their historic bond. They established the Little Rock Nine Foundation, with Carlotta as president. By the fifth anniversary, the Foundation had raised $800,000 to fund a scholarship program to help underserved students overcome their educational obstacles. In return for the scholarships, each group of recipients is required to mentor the next year’s scholarship winners. This process will help to preserve the history of the Little Rock Nine, deepen their legacy, and produce students who understand the importance of giving back while moving forward.

  This wonderful book is Carlotta’s story. She reminds us that the Civil Rights Movement was led, in no small measure, by people she calls “unlikely candidates.” This book shares how the Little Rock Nine, in a simple quest for a good education, opened new horizons for themselves and for future generations, but only after they paid a very high price. And it is the personal testament of Carlotta Walls LaNier who, of them all, spent the most days at Central, enduring day after day of being kicked, pushed, spit upon, and verbally abused.

  A Mighty Long Way will make you ashamed and proud, angry and hopeful, heartsick and happy. Carlotta tells it as it was, a story we all need to know.

  PROLOGUE

  Remembering Central High—Fifty Years Later

  All week, I managed to keep my composure.

  Through the touching anniversary speeches by politicians and civil rights leaders. Through the lunches, dinners, and a reception at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Through a provocative musical drama that told the story of the Little Rock Nine. Even through a preview of the new visitors’ center for the high school where the real-life drama took place fifty years ago. Through it all, I hardly shed a tear.

  I walked around the multimedia exhibits inside the center and watched the black-and-white television footage captured on that day—September 25, 1957. But something wouldn’t let me linger. I didn’t want to see the fourteen-year-old black girl, climbing those steps in her new, store-bought dress, surrounded by armed military men under presidential orders to keep the spitting, clawing white mob at bay. I didn’t want to know her fear again.

  Then, on the last day of city-sponsored events celebrating the golden anniversary of the Little Rock Nine, President Bill Clinton cracked my armor. As I sat on a makeshift stage at the foot of the steps that I had climbed the same day five decades earlier, the former president’s words took me back. He was talking about courage, gratitude, and the responsibility that each of us has to contribute to the world, to do something more than talk, even when stepping up comes at a cost. He turned slightly away from the podium and looked sideways at us, the gray-haired men and women seated behind him.

  “These nine people
didn’t just have an opinion,” he said. “They didn’t just say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if someone did something to change things.’ These nine people and their families stepped up and said, ‘Here am I, Lord, send me.’”

  My lips started to quiver. Instinctively, my hands went up to cover them, as though they were a shield, as though they could keep back all of the memories and pain. I thought about Mother, sitting out there in the audience, still beautiful and elegant at eighty-two. And I remembered watching her soft, jet black hair turn gray during that tumultuous and uncertain school year. I thought about Daddy, a devoted family man and World War II veteran who didn’t live long enough to see this day. And I remembered the chilling fear that crept into my soul when the FBI took him away late one night for questioning and held him for at least two days after our home was mysteriously bombed during my senior year. I thought, too, about Herbert, my childhood friend and neighbor, who was convicted by an all-white jury for the bombing and served nearly two years in a maximum-security prison, next to death row inmates, for a crime that I believe to my core he did not commit. I looked to my left and right on the stage and caught glimpses of my eight comrades, my dear friends, some of whom are now grandparents. We’d come a mighty long way, and all nine of us were still here. By now, nothing could keep back the tears.

  Here am I, Lord, send me.

  I hadn’t intended anything heroic when I signed up to attend Little Rock Central High School, which was less than a mile from my home and, at the time, all white. The school system had come up with a plan to phase in the desegregation order issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. So when the homeroom teacher in my ninth-grade class at the all-black Dunbar Junior High School passed around a sheet of paper in spring 1957 and instructed those of us who lived within the boundaries to sign if we would be interested in attending Central the following fall, I did so without hesitation. I didn’t ask my parents’ permission or even mention it to them right away. It was just a given that I would pursue the top-quality education that Mother and Daddy had always preached about at home. But that simple declaration changed the course of my life, my family’s, and that of countless black students for generations to come.

  The change would have to be forced, though. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and staunch segregationists throughout Little Rock resisted with all their might. In a show of federal force, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ultimately sent the U.S. military to escort the nine of us, who came to be known around the world as the Little Rock Nine, to integrate Central High School for the first time. White students ostracized and harassed us daily, and many teachers looked the other way. My father lost jobs and had to travel cross-country, sometimes for weeks, to find work.

  Eight of us survived that turbulent first year. But for me, the story did not end there. After Faubus shut down all three of Little Rock’s high schools for the entire school year to avoid integration, just two of the original nine of us returned to Central. I was one of them, and that was my senior year. Then, just three months before my graduation, my home was mysteriously bombed, and my father and childhood friend were targeted as suspects by an unjust legal system. But I persevered through it all and became the first black girl ever to walk across the stage to receive a diploma from Little Rock Central High School.

  The morning after my graduation, I took the first train out of Little Rock and promised never to look back. Shaken by the bombing and its traumatic aftermath, the rest of my family soon followed. We eventually settled in the Denver, Colorado, area, about as far away from home as we could get in both distance and character. There, I met my husband, Ira, and raised two children: a son, Whitney, born in 1971; and a daughter, Brooke, who came along three years later.

  For thirty years, I didn’t utter a public word about what had happened to me and my comrades at the place once known as “America’s Most Beautiful School.” I rarely even talked about it at home. To this day, Mother and I still have never sat down and held a serious conversation about that time. Part of it, I suspect, is just our nature. We’re not prone to dwell in the past, examine our feelings publicly, or show much emotion. The wounds opened in Little Rock—I’ve come to realize—are deep and, in some cases, still raw. For Mother, a kindhearted soul who was ushered through adulthood idolizing the glitz and glamour of black life portrayed in the Ebony and Sepia magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, it’s easier just to paint on her characteristic pink smile and never look back.

  Not so, though, for me.

  I’ve pushed myself to remember, even at times when my natural tendencies have tugged in the opposite direction. It’s a commitment I made to myself in 1987, the first time the nine of us returned as a group to Little Rock Central High School. Former president Bill Clinton was the state’s governor then, and we had been invited back as guests of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The stalwart civil rights organization was holding its annual meeting in Little Rock to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the city’s school desegregation battle. It was the first time I had seen most of my comrades since we’d left Central, and it was my first trip back to the school since my graduation. As I walked through those halls, it was almost as if I could hear those vile words bouncing off the walls again: nigger … nigger … nigger. I could see the contorted faces of my classmates and their snickers and jeers again. I could feel the slimy wet spit. For a moment, it felt as though sadness might suffocate me. I realized then that even though I had built a new life clear across the country, I hadn’t moved an inch from Little Rock.

  Late that night, after the NAACP event, Governor Clinton on a whim invited the nine of us to join him at his home in the Governor’s Mansion. His wife, Hillary, hadn’t been feeling well enough to join him at the NAACP dinner, but when we arrived at the mansion, she rose from her sickbed, greeted us warmly, and escorted us to her kitchen table. We sat there for hours, until about three a.m., chatting like old friends. Governor Clinton told us that as a sixth grader growing up not far away in Hope, Arkansas, in 1957, he had rooted for us. He said that we inspired him and significantly impacted how he viewed race. I was touched by the couple’s genuine curiosity and concern for how our Central journey had shaped the rest of our lives. That conversation helped me to open up and talk about my experience freely for the first time. The reunion also reconnected the nine of us, some of whom had been strangers to one another when our fates first intertwined at Central. We pledged to stay in touch—a promise that has enabled us to build deep and enduring friendships over the past two decades. The experience also set me on a quest for healing and a greater understanding of what we had been through.

  This book is the result of that journey.

  It is as much a story about the dedication of family, perseverance, and sacrifice as it is about history. It is a salute to my parents, Cartelyou and Juanita Walls, who stayed silently in the background and swallowed great risk and suffering. They were the ones who had ingrained in me the quiet confidence that, Jim Crow be damned, I was not a second-class citizen. It was that confidence that told me I deserved the quality education the Supreme Court said I was due, the confidence that steadied my feet to defy the racists with my mere presence at school every single day. My parents bequeathed to me the confidence of their fathers, both hardworking black entrepreneurs in control of their own economic lives. My family may have seemed unlikely candidates for involvement in a movement that would spark nationwide change. But then again, that is the point of this book: to show that determination, fortitude, and the ability to move the world aren’t reserved for the “special” people.

  My forever role as a member of the Little Rock Nine has defined much of the latter part of my life, and I’ve come to some peace with that. These days, the former baby of the group has become the mother hen—or at least, that’s what the other eight say. It’s true that I’m the one usually pushing to make sure we get to speaking engagements on time and that our events flow with
out a glitch. And I’m probably the most likely among us to send out an email beforehand, reminding everybody to bring their medicines. I’m a classic busybody and a stickler for detail, which is why my comrades say they chose me to head the nonprofit foundation we created. The foundation means a great deal to me because it gives us a vehicle to continue making a difference in education. By the fiftieth anniversary, we had raised more than $800,000, far exceeding our goal of half a million. We created a scholarship program to help send deserving young people to college. Each of us has taken on the responsibility of mentoring the first group of scholarship winners. The plan is for our first group of scholars to mentor our next group, and so on. In this way, we will touch the lives of children for generations to come and leave behind a legacy that extends far beyond Little Rock Central High School.

  Few people our age still have more than one good friend from high school. I’m grateful to have at least eight: Ernie, Melba, Minnijean, Elizabeth, Gloria, Terry, Jefferson, and Thelma. In the public mind, we are one, the Little Rock Nine. But we are, in essence, nine distinct personalities with nine different stories.

  This book shares mine.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Different World

  For the longest time, I wanted nothing more to do with Little Rock. After leaving in 1960, I returned only when necessary, usually for funerals. But my work as president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation brings me home often these days, and I inevitably wend my way down Interstate 630 to my old neighborhood. Most often, I go there to see Uncle Teet, who still lives in my great-great-grandfather Hiram Holloway’s old house, five houses down from the one where I grew up. But every now and then, I pull up alongside the redbrick bungalow at 15th and Valentine streets, park the car, and get out.

  This was the center of my world as a child. The place looks abandoned with its boarded-up windows and weeds where lush green grass used to grow. There is no sign of the big gardenia bush that once graced the front yard. Mother would pick a fresh flower from that bush and place it in her hair just so, like Billie Holiday. But the gardenias are long gone. So, too, is the tree in the backyard that used to grow the plumpest, sweetest figs around. The pecan tree still stands, and as I picked up a few dried nuts one scorching summer day, I was reminded of the lean Christmas in junior high school when that tree provided perfect homemade gifts for most of my family and friends. Money was tight that year, so I made date-nut cakes from the bounty in our backyard to give away as presents. There were three of those huge trees, perfectly aligned in a row from our yard to the Davises’ yard next door to the other Davis property down the street. So, of course, someone in the neighborhood was always making homemade pecan ice cream or baking pecan pies or some kind of nut cookies or cake.