67 pages • 2 hours read
Carlotta Walls LaNier, Lisa Frazier PageA Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Finding Focus”
At Michigan State, LaNier’s counselor warns her that the pre-med track will be difficult due to her missed classes, but LaNier is determined to become a doctor. However, for the first time, she has social freedom. Most of her time is spent with new friends and attending football games. That quarter, she receives her first C and D grades. She continues to struggle in winter and spring quarters.
In the summer, she gets a job in New York. Mrs. Bates is staying in Harlem and invites LaNier to have dinner with Langston Hughes. LaNier spends time with Ernest and Terrance, who also work in the city, and her Aunt Juanita and Uncle Freddie.
On her way back to Michigan, she stays with an uncle in Denver who once played in the “Negro Leagues” and is starstruck by his old friend, Satchel Paige. Her Uncle Byron and Aunt Christine sense her discontent with Michigan and say that she can stay with them if she wants to attend school in Denver. The offer stays on her mind through the next year as she continues to struggle. Mother and Daddy agree to let her leave Michigan State and go to Denver.
In Denver that fall, LaNier applies to work as a teller at a telephone company and enrolls in night courses at the University of Colorado. When her family visits for Thanksgiving, they’re won over by Denver. In May, her family moves into an upper-middle-class Denver neighborhood that was formerly all white but underwent “white flight” as it became more diverse.
That summer, LaNier’s friends invite her to go with them to the March on Washington. She declines but watches on television. Three weeks later, she hears about the four Black girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. Roughly two months later, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated.
By the end of 1963, LaNier feels so overloaded that she drops almost all her classes. In 1965, she re-devotes herself to school full time. To save money, she applies for a better job at a federal nuclear power plant. Federal agents pepper her with questions about her ties to Communism and her contacts in Little Rock. She is perturbed by the questioning but gets the job. After working for six months, she enrolls at Colorado State College.
Chapter 14 Summary: “A Season of Loss”
In the spring of 1966, Grandpa Cullins dies. For the first time in six years, LaNier returns to Little Rock. When she arrives, she is thrilled to see Herbert, though they do not discuss his jail time or the bombing. She sees many other friends and family members, though the occasion is bittersweet as she mourns Grandpa Cullins.
A month before she graduates college, LaNier hears about Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. LaNier is increasingly distressed by the violent murders.
She gets a job working for the Metropolitan Denver YMCA as a program administrator and marries her boyfriend, Ira (Ike) LaNier. The two had met years earlier at a party but were re-introduced after Ike returned from military service in 1965. LaNier never tells Ike she was one of the Little Rock Nine. Though he learned of her involvement through a friend, the two don’t discuss it for more than 10 years.
LaNier has her first child, Whitney, on June 25, 1971. Around the same time, she develops an interest in real estate and begins another new job. She has a daughter, Brooke, in 1974.
In February 1976, Daddy is diagnosed with leukemia. Late March 2, he dies at 53 years old. LaNier and her family are devastated. They bury him in a Denver cemetery.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
These chapters rapidly move through 16 years of LaNier’s life after graduating from Central. They discuss her struggle in higher education, the beginning of her professional life, her marriage and the birth of her children, and an extended period of loss that culminates in the death of her father. These chapters revolve around the long-term trauma that develops because of the intense backlash around desegregation and civil rights, which can be further subdivided into personal trauma and national trauma.
After graduation, LaNier’s initial strategy is to stay “fastened on the future” with “no time for looking back” (206). However, her college career is immediately haunted by her traumas at Central, a long-term side-effect reflecting The Pressure of Being “The First.” Her counselor warns her that she is missing “high-level math and science courses” and will struggle as a pre-med student (212). For LaNier, “that comment sparked the part of [her] that couldn’t stand people telling [her] what [she] could not do. [She] took the counselor’s doubt as a challenge” (212). Through her time at Central, LaNier hardened in the face of adversity, using peoples’ attempts to get her to quit as fuel to keep going. This reactive turn toward educational persistence was her method of fighting for freedom among racist rules.
After leaving Little Rock, the same methods do not work. LaNier is “having trouble focusing mentally” and can’t find the motivation to plow forward as she always had. She realizes that she missed out on the rest and socialization vital to teenagers' development, yet another pressure exerted on from being the first to integrate and a long-term Pain of Educational Integration. LaNier unenrolls at Michigan State and moves in with family in Denver to get a job. These chapters plow through large periods and significant changes in LaNier’s life quickly. Through it all, she tries to move forward as if the trauma of her past does not exist, even though its shadow haunts her over the next decade-plus.
LaNier and the country face a series of traumatic deaths. In late 1963, four young Black girls are killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Like Mrs. Bates’s house, which was also subject to bomb threats and burning crosses in the yard, the church had been a known civil rights meeting area. Three Ku Klux Klan members were suspected, but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t believe the evidence against them is strong—one KKK member wasn’t tried and found guilty until the late 1970s, and the second two not until 2000.
When applying for a federal job around the same time, LaNier is doggedly questioned by the same FBI. She obliquely refers to the later-public knowledge that the head of the FBI, Hoover, was “a bigot, a racist and a homophobe—a conspiracy theorist who amassed and abused enormous power, pursued his enemies unscrupulously and trampled on the civil liberties of law-abiding American citizens” (Goldberg, Nicholas. “Column: Why do we still honor J. Edgar Hoover’s racist, homophobic legacy?” Los Angeles Times. 2 May 2022). LaNier says she was questioned by “J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, but I didn’t realize then just what that meant” (226). More than 10 years later, news breaks of the illegal dossiers Hoover collected on public groups and figures, “particularly those with whom he disagreed” (226)—LaNier is one of these people. She is a person of interest just because of her high-profile story.
There is a flurry of assassinations of civil rights leaders and allies. In 1963, President Kennedy is assassinated. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated. LaNier says that these deaths show that “white supremacists [are] determined to silence the strongest voices for racial equality” (232). This rapid national loss of public figures shows the great personal risks taken by public civil rights leaders and allies. Other notable deaths in this era not included in LaNier’s account are the assassinations of Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Fred Hampton in 1968.
In addition to these national losses, in 1966, Grandpa Cullins dies. Capping off this season of loss, Daddy dies of leukemia in 1976. LaNier’s recounting of this event focuses mainly on her emotions surrounding her father’s death and her struggle to “face the most difficult moment of my life: turning away and walking into the rest of my days without him” (238). However, she also gestures to his premature death at 53 and the news that he “experienced unexpected complications, and the doctors were not able to save him” (237). This obliquely draws another facet of systemic racism into LaNier’s account: that of the Black mortality gap and racial health care disparities. Even in the 21st century, “due to racial disparities in mortality, Black Americans die younger at almost every age” (Flagg, Anna. “The Black Mortality Gap, and a Century-Old Document.” The Marshall Project. 30 Aug 2021). The wide-stretching effects of systemic racism as established by enslavement are largely to blame for this gap: Key factors include centuries of “lower levels of income and generational wealth; less access to healthy food, water and public spaces; environmental damage; overpolicing and disproportionate incarceration; and the stresses of prolonged discrimination” (Flagg) and health care disparities. It is important to understand the role systemic racism plays in the premature deaths of individuals like LaNier’s father and how it results in highly publicized murders and assassinations of civil rights activists and allies.
These two chapters provide glimpses of the continued Collective Care in the Black Community. Mrs. Bates remains an important figure in LaNier’s young adulthood, hosting her in New York and introducing her to Langston Hughes. Aunt Juanita, Uncle Freddie, Uncle Byron, and Aunt Christine watch over her and guide her. When the latter two sense her discontent at Michigan, they invite her to Denver, which changes the direction of her and her parents’ lives since they follow her there. Despite the challenges of her life, LaNier has been fortunate to have an extended network of relatives and concerned friends looking out for her as she makes her way.
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