A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School

“Whenever the Dodgers played in St. Louis, six or seven of us—Mother, Daddy, Grandpa Cullins, and various other relatives—piled into the car for the big game. Big Daddy was usually working. We most often left late at night and travelled until morning without stopping because hotels and restaurants throughout the South didn’t admit black customers. Daddy meticulously mapped out the eight-hour trip so that we could stop along the way at relatives’ homes for bathroom breaks and rest. If we slept there, the children who liked in the home gave up their beds to the adults and joined the rest of us on blankets spread across the floor. Likewise, our home in Little Rock often felt like Grand Central Station because we had so many relatives stopping though on their cross-country road trips.”

LaNier describes the extra obstacles faced by her family when doing something seemingly ordinary, like travelling to a baseball game. Because their family is Black, Daddy must specially plan each trip to avoid segregated places and keep his family safe. This is an example of Collective Care in Black Communities: Even distant family members open their homes to give travelling families safe places to sleep.

“Many of Dunbar’s teachers had advanced degrees and often spent their summers taking classes at northern universities. What they lacked in resources, they made up for in creativity and dedication. Educating black children was more than a job back then; it was a mission—one that for most of the teachers was rooted in the teachings of historically black colleges and universities created in the wake of the Civil War to educate freed slaves.”

Dunbar’s teachers go above and beyond for their students. Enslaved people were often not allowed to read or write and were not given formal education. The teachers at Dunbar are driven by lineages of Black educators at historically Black colleges and universities who provided education as a form of empowerment.

“One of the most vocal segregationists was Reverend James Wesley Pruden, the founding pastor of Broadmoor Baptist Church and an active member of the Citizens Council. He ran newspaper ads to help whip up the public frenzy. The ads asked questions that seemed to reveal the underlying source of all the fear: Would black boys and white girls be allowed to dance together at school dances? Would black boys and white girls be paired in romantic love scenes in school plays? The mere thought that their white daughters would be in such proximity to black boys petrified white mothers and fathers throughout Little Rock.”

One of the fears animating segregationists were racist beliefs about interracial romantic and sexual relationships. Anti-integration propaganda would stoke segregationist’s racist beliefs, specifically ones about the sexualities of Black men and boys. The Black male students attending Central are warned by Blossom not to “look” at the white girls in school, and his warning reminds LaNier of the recent lynching of Emmett Till.

“Finally, we were staring into the faces of the Arkansas National Guard. The guardsmen had formed a ring around the school. They blocked the entrance, but I was certain that when they saw us, they would just step aside and allow us through. They were, after all, there to protect us and keep out the troublemakers, I thought. But not one of them budged. Instead, the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Marion Johnson, whose name I was to discover later, stepped forward. Commander Johnson assumed Reverend Ogden was our leader and began addressing him. The rest of us gathered closely around. I stood to the side of Johnson, who had both hands clutched unnaturally tight around a billy club. His knuckles looked white. Ernie, pressing his lips together nervously, stood beside me. That put him almost face-to-face with the officer. Gloria stood behind me, and behind her, Jane towered over us all. Johnson told Reverend Ogden that on the orders of Faubus, we would not be permitted to enter the school. There was a huge disconnect in my head. The guardsmen weren’t there to protect us; they were there to keep us out.”

This moment marks LaNier’s first disillusionment with law enforcement. Before this, she thought that since she was a citizen and integration was legally mandated, she would receive equal protection under the law. When she is turned away by the Arkansas National Guard, she begins to realize that the nation’s institutions are not objective.

“Every face in the crowd was white, and they all seemed to be staring at me, sneering at me. A group of slick-haired boys with their black leather jackets and white T-shirts with cigarettes rolled in them—poor imitations of James Dean and Elvis Presley—purposefully walked too close, bumped me hard with their shoulders, and swaggered off, laughing at ‘that n*****.’ The word was slung at me so often that day that my heart turned almost numb.”

This is an example of the type of daily abuse that LaNier faces at Central. Quick instances of physical abuse and racist slurs were commonplace. The leather jacket boys style themselves after popular “rebel” aesthetics of the time. They become some of LaNier’s most regular tormenters.

“Then, each of us was assigned a military escort to accompany us through the day. The troopers usually waited outside the classroom door until it was time to move to the next class. But I learned early that while the soldiers were there to make sure the nine of us stayed alive, for anything short of that, I was pretty much on my own. They were in a precarious position, for sure. But it seemed to me that too much just seemed to escape their ears and eyes.”

Eisenhower sends the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to quell the mob of segregationists and protect the Little Rock Nine. Like how LaNier is disillusioned with the objectivity of the National Guard, she realizes that the soldiers are only following orders and look the other way when the nine are tormented.

“I had heard all of my life both at home and at school that I was a representative not just of my family, but of the entire race. White folks would forever judge the race by what each of us said and did, my parents and teachers had told me. Likewise, Mrs. Bates said, white folks would judge how well integration was working by that the nine of us said and did.”

LaNier experiences The Pressure of Being “the First.” Due to the high visibility of her experience, many people judge the success of integration writ large on the individual story of the Little Rock Nine. This is a specific iteration of a larger trend wherein people in positions of systemic power, like white people, negatively judge all marginalized peoples based on the actions of a few. By contrast, these same people rarely see bad actions of individual white people as representative of all white people but rather as isolated bad apples.

“The media also took note of one special guest who had attended the graduation with Ernie’s family: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time, Dr. King was clearly on the rise, having achieved acclaim as leader of the successful Montgomery bus boycott.”

Ernest becomes the first Black person to walk across the graduation stage at Central. LaNier listens on the radio and experiences profound joy. The moment has special significance due to the attendance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who in 1958 was a growing beacon for civil rights. Dr. King’s attendance marks just how historic Ernest’s walk across the graduation stage is. Ernest’s graduation shows The Pain and Necessity of Educational Integration: The nine experience profound racial trauma and yet the same time their fight becomes a symbolic victory to many.

“By the time the Supreme Court issued its order, Faubus had already called a special session of the state legislature and pushed through six anti-integration bills, which gave him extraordinary powers over the school system. Just hours after the Supreme Court announcement, Faubus made his stunning move: He signed the anti-integration bills into law and utilized his new power to shut down all three public high schools in Little Rock. And just like that, thirty-seven hundred students, black and white, were left wondering: What now?”

When the Supreme Court rules against the Little Rock schoolboard and declares that integration must proceed, Faubus abuses his gubernatorial power by shutting down all public high schools. This extreme move displaces thousands of students. However, his move is calculated: He leases the school to all-white private schools and other white students are well-off enough to temporarily live in other states. Faubus’s move was specifically meant to disenfranchise and harm Black students.

“I was chilled by yet another new reality: My decision to go to Central and to stay no matter what had brought violence, not only to my home, but to my neighbors, to the people who’d watched out for me since I was a toddler.”

LaNier believes that her decision to go to Central is directly harming people around her, including the friends and neighbors who provided collective care for her as a child. She personally shoulders this guilt and responsibility, incorrectly blaming herself for the violent acts of segregationists even though victims of racist violence are never guilty for the actions of their oppressors.

“Later, I heard Daddy telling Mother that the police had beaten him and tried to make him sign a confession, admitting that he and Maceo had planted the bomb to get insurance money from the policy on the house. So this was what it was all about—the insurance money! In the narrow minds of the police, Daddy was just a desperate Negro willing to blow up his own home and possibly even kill his family to get his hands on some money.”

LaNier realizes that the criminal justice system is not objective but, like other systems, is animated by anti-Black racism. She knows that the police have misjudged her father but will not learn until later that their case against him was calculated to divert attention from white suspects.

“At the time of his death, Smith faced lawsuits totaling $450,000, mostly those filed by white segregationists still angry because of the actions he had taken to quell the violence on the first day of school in August 1959, while I was finishing summer school in Chicago.

Mrs. Bates said that when she heard the news, she vomited and immediately had to be put to bed.

‘This is a nightmare, it must be—but soon I’ll awaken,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘Smith is dead…Maybe we’ll be next.’

She didn’t believe the death of the couple was a murder-suicide. She suspected both had been murdered. Of course, no one will ever know for sure what happened in the Smith home that day. But to this day, I believe it is likely that the police chief and his wife were murdered.”

The moderate police chief is accused of the murder-suicide of his wife and himself right before the fictionalized case against Maceo and Herbert goes to court; Smith was their last hope for truth. Mrs. Bates and LaNier both believe that Smith and his wife were killed because of Smith’s protection of integration and the possibility he might exonerate Herbert and Maceo, whose arrest white segregationists praised.

“At Michigan State, I was happy to just be a number. More than twenty-four-thousand students attended the East Lansing university, and nearly one thousand of us were black. My schoolmates barely even noticed when I walked past. After three years of being the center of so much negative attention, I was grateful for the chance to just blend in with the crowd.”

After being “the first” at Central, LaNier is happy to be one of many Black students at Michigan State. This begins her years-long attempt to bury the trauma of her past rather than work through it.

“I had gone through the training program when some of the black workers told me excitedly that I would be the first black employee in my new job. They were thrilled for me. I, on the other hand, was worried. I couldn’t go through that again. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, a racial symbol, or the standard-bearer of anyone’s expectations.”

After LaNier drops out of Michigan State and applies to work at a telephone company, she takes a lower-paying job than she was initially offered to avoid being the first Black person to have that job. LaNier does not want to go through being “the first” again. At Central, she faced the undue pressure of being used as a representative for her entire race, which has left lasting marks on her life. These traumas flare again when she is faced with repeating the experience.

“I even kept my distance from the two local NAACP chapters, which I suspect may have miffed some of the officers who knew my story. I couldn’t understand why two chapters of the NAACP were necessary with so few black residents in Denver. But I was too preoccupied trying to figure out my own life to ask questions. I wasn’t ready to become an envoy. I didn’t want any reminders of my past. I was disappointed in myself. I knew that I wasn’t living up to my potential.”

LaNier continues to run from her past rather than confront it. In Denver, she chooses to serve marginalized groups unrelated to her identity, such as AIDs patients, rather than work with the NAACP, which reminds her of her time at Central. She thinks that people have expectations for her that she is not fulfilling.

“This was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, but I didn’t realize then what that meant. It was clear, though, that the agency had kept a file on me. I surprised it was likely because of my role in integrating Central High School. The suspicion sent a chill up my spine. Many years later, in the mid-1970s, news broke that Hoover indeed had kept files filled with personal (and often embarrassing) information on public figures, political and civil rights leaders, particularly those with whom he disagreed.”

Along with being turned way by the National Guard at Central and the indictments of Herbert and Maceo, this event teaches LaNier about how prejudice infiltrates systems of law enforcement. This is also one of several instances where organizations collect personal information on LaNier without her knowledge; the Little Rock school board did something similar before admitting her to Central. She is one of many social activists that Hoover’s FBI kept detailed files on throughout the Civil Rights Movement. The “embarrassing” files held by the FBI include their records of Dr. King’s affairs, which they used in an attempt to blackmail him into dying by suicide (“Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).” King Encyclopedia, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Stanford University).

“The two of us stared, aghast, at the television screen as the announcer reported that King was dead. I didn’t want to believe my ears. I felt great sadness for the country, but even more for Dr. King’s wife and children, whose loss would be the greatest of all. Racial hatred was still burning wildly across America, and now it had consumed a giant.”

One of the most high-profile deaths in the 1960s was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. LaNier’s most acute sorrow is for King’s family. She knows firsthand how it feels for personal tragedy to be abstracted and depersonalized in a larger movement. King’s assassination is also distressing because it is another escalation of violence against the progress of civil rights.

“I’d soon learn, though, that burying a painful past doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve moved beyond it. It’s often still there, simmering, waiting for some unexpected moment to erupt, spewing forth every hurtful thing that you thought had gone away. That’s what happened in 1987, when the Little Rock Nine gathered in Little Rock as guests of the NAACP for the thirtieth anniversary of our landmark school desegregation fight. It was an emotional reunion because it was the first time that all nine of us had come together since Central.”

LaNier’s first method for dealing with the hurt and bad memories of Central was to push them down. Returning to Central’s halls 30 years later, she realizes this method does not work. Racial trauma is a compounded emotional phenomenon, and anti-Black racism in the Jim Crow South is an extremely complex trauma. In different cities with different people, LaNier can put a temporary stopper on her pain but reunited with her comrades in Central’s halls, her past catches up with her.

“Eight of us were able to meet later in Las Vegas. I pitched the idea of starting the Little Rock Nine Foundation. Through the foundation, we could give back to the community as a group and continue the journey that we had started so many years ago toward academic excellence and equity.

‘We’re grown now, and it’s time to stop complaining about people using us,’ I told my comrades. ‘Let’s take control of our own name and get on the same page about what we accept and not.’”

Part of LaNier’s process of making peace with her past is reclaiming her own story. She gathers the Little Rock Nine and proposes that they make concerted moves toward telling their own story. They all believe in the importance of educational equity and use their collective power to start the Little Rock Nine Foundation to carry on their legacy.

“The nine of us had agreed with Newsweek magazine to be interviewed for a cover story about the anniversary. But once we all got there, Elizabeth suddenly backed out. The reporter turned to me for help in changing her mind. I went to talk to her. We needed to do this for a number of reasons, I told her, but most importantly because we wanted to tell our own stories and set the historical record straight.

‘Carlotta, I just don’t think I can get through it,’ Elizabeth responded.

‘I know how you feel,’ I told her. ‘But if I sit with you, will you do it?’

She agreed. Melba also offered to sit with her for the interview. In an empty banquet room at the Excelsior Hotel, Melba and I sat on each side of Elizabeth and almost had to hold her up as she recalled that terrifying moment when she found herself alone, surrounded by the threatening white mob.”

LaNier’s memoir mostly relates her experiences; this is the only moment the reader sees how the racism experienced at Central affects another member in adulthood. Though the nine are known by their collective moniker, their experience of racist trauma is unique, as are the way it affects them through their lives. However, the collective care they provide for each other helps each of them navigate life.

“That was it. I was sentenced to five years, the maximum allowed for the charge. I reported to Cummins State Farm in October 1961. It was a working farm. The one thing you didn’t want was a job harvesting cotton. They ran that part like a plantation; it was legalized slavery.”

As an adult, LaNier finally learns what happened to Herbert when he was arrested. He experienced abuse, was beaten into giving a coerced confession, and was sent to a prison farm. This experience is not atypical. Black men are often victims of false conviction: The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery except as a punishment for a crime. As such, the prison industrial complex expanded drastically in the antebellum era as Black men were arrested and convicted with little to no evidence and sent to work on prison farms in a “legal” continuation of enslavement.

“Somehow, though, Herbert emerged from it all strong and determined. He dreamed new dreams and built a new life—a successful and productive life of service. For Herbert, that had been vindication enough. For me, knowing his full story had left he more convinced than ever that he is innocent. Sharing it and doing what I can to clear his name has helped bring my soul what I have most sought: peace.”

Reconnecting with her childhood friend Herbert is one of LaNier’s strategies for moving through the hurt of her past. Discussing things like the bombing of her home and what happened to Herbert are more painful than ignoring her past, but working through that pain with other people brings her the closure and peace she desires.

“Tears streamed down black faces, white faces, brown faces, cream faces. Jesse Jackson, who had been on the balcony with Dr. King when the fatal shots rang out, looked genuinely overcome with emotion. Strangers were hugging. Horns were honking. Obama signs were flapping. Black news reporters, trained to maintain a poker face, were choking up, talking about their own mothers, fathers, grandparents.”

LaNier portrays Obama’s election as an interracial victory and a major high point in the continued fight for racial equity in the United States, just as Dr. King’s assassination was a major low point. The fact that so many people—in this case, Jesse Jackson—bridge those two moments shows that the ugliest events of the Civil Rights era are not that far in the past.