GOVERNMENT MAY TRY FOR AN INJUNCTION
AGAINST FAUBUS
—Arkansas Gazette, Saturday, September 7, 1957
Governor Faubus had written a long telegram to President Eisenhower, asking for understanding and support. He was also complaining that he had not had his day in court to show that he had been forced to call out the National Guard to prevent integration because the threat of violence was so great.
I spent Saturday morning worrying that Eisenhower would take Faubus’s side and school integration would be swept beneath some carpet for my grandchildren to retrieve. Between my dish-washing, reading the homework assignments Mother gave me, and answering hate phone calls, I managed to restyle my hair, and try on everything in my closet, searching for a proper disguise. I was consumed with only one thought: Grandma, the wrestling matches, and my sneak date with Vince. I worried about leaving Mother Lois and Conrad home alone at night; maybe the shooter would come again. But that worry was erased when Mother’s sister, Auntie Mae, and her husband, Uncle Morris, said they’d come for dinner and stay late.
As the morning turned into afternoon, I was busy keeping to myself so I could apply my grown-up makeup. It was an art I had not yet acquired since I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup. Even by the third try I resembled a circus clown. But as I looked in the mirror for a final check, I was proud of the job I had done. I was a new person.
Promptly at five, Grandma breezed into the front hall. She was dressed in churchgoing clothes, her Ladies Day outfit, a blue suit with a matching hat that swooped down from its mischievous perch on the side of her head.
“Well, don’t just stand there, child, help me find my parasol.” I couldn’t help smiling. The frantic search for the umbrella was a familiar scene. It made me feel that at least some part of my life was left intact.
“We’d better go without it,” I said. We were running late, and if we didn’t hurry, the bus would leave us behind. I had been patiently waiting, hoping that at any moment my grandmother would signal her approval of my grown-up outfit, upswept hairdo, and high-heeled black patent shoes. Layers of forbidden makeup and dark glasses completed what I thought was the perfect disguise. The white people would never, ever recognize me from any picture they might have seen. Of course, my one big worry was that Grandma might say it was too grown-up, but she only peered at me with a strange and lingering expression.
“Let’s go, Grandma, we’re gonna be late,” I said, trying to coax her toward the front door. I was praying Vince wouldn’t grow impatient waiting for me and leave, or, worse yet, allow himself to be talked into spending the evening with one of the other girls.
“Why don’t you take a seat. I’ll be back in a moment,” Grandma said, sounding quite strange, beckoning me to remain there in the hallway by the door. I heard her and Mama whispering in the other room. As I settled into a chair, I thought about all the earlier times when we had gone together to the wrestling matches.
Those matches were big events in my life because we traveled downtown to the Robinson Auditorium, a place usually reserved for white people only. Those were the times when I got to go outside my neighborhood, outside the world where I spent most of my life. We sat in the same room with white folks, able to observe them close up. I wanted to get to know them better, to see what it was they had that put them in charge.
Besides, the wrestling matches had always been just plain fun. Sure, we suspected it was 30 percent wrestling and 70 percent make-believe. We couldn’t have enjoyed it if we’d thought the wrestlers were really in pain, bleeding real blood and breaking real arms.
Grandma India would adjust her hat, and then we would both strut down the aisle to the seats that Mr. Claxton had saved for us. He would always be there waiting for us with the best balcony seats our people were allowed to have.
After we got settled, I would complain about my thirst, and Grandma would grant permission for a trip to the soft-drink stand. There I would meet Vince, as we’d planned, and take him to join Grandma and Mr. Claxton, explaining that our meeting had been accidental. I had enjoyed eight evenings of double-dating with Grandma and Vince, and she didn’t even realize it. I knew full well my family would never have allowed me to date. They had said all along that when I was eighteen and going to college, I could go out with boys, and then only in the company of a chaperon.
As the evening wore on and the matches got really heated, Grandma India and I would behave as we behaved nowhere else. She would pound the floor with her parasol and shout and wave her fist until her hat was twisted on her head and her churchgoing outfit was rumpled. Once she had even dropped her glasses and broken them in a fit of rage when her tag-team favorites, Mud Mountain and Blue Moon Hog, were counted out by the referee.
When it was all over, she would revert to her quietest and most cultured tone, speaking barely above a whisper. “Magnificent, child. That’s the way a body gets rid of aggression without misbehaving. Now, Melba, straighten yourself up, honey, time to present ourselves as the ladies we are.”
“SORRY, child, you can’t go with me to the matches, not tonight,” said Grandma, grabbing me from my happy recollections. “Maybe next time, when the integration settles down.”
“But why?” I felt tears coming, but I had promised Grandma I wouldn’t cry.
“It’s just too dangerous for you to go there amongst all those white people.”
“They’ll never recognize me—see, see!” I twirled about to show her that I was really a new person.
Grandma India moved closer to me and cupped my face in her hands. “You’re staying home, baby. It’s for your own good.”
“Everything’s being taken from me!” I cried.
“Your grandmother’s right, honey.” Mother Lois put her arm around my waist, trying to convince me it was not the end of the world. “Suppose one of those people who saw us at Central recognizes you and tries to pick a fight? What about the risk to your grandmother?”
“I’ll never go back to Central!” I ran from the room and locked my bedroom door, burying my face in the pillow so no one could hear me cry. Later, I wrote in my diary:
Freedom is not integration.
Freedom is being able to go with Grandma to the wrestling matches.
The next day, in the Sunday paper, I saw a pitiful closeup photograph of Elizabeth, walking alone in front of Central on that first day of integration. It pained my insides to see, once again, the twisted, scowling white faces with open mouths jeering, clustered about my friend’s head like bouquets of grotesque flowers. It was an ad paid for by a white man from a small town in Arkansas. “If you live in Arkansas,” the ad read, “study this picture and know shame. When hate is unleashed and bigotry finds a voice, God help us all.”
I felt a kind of joy and hope in the thought that one white man was willing to use his own money to call attention to the injustice we were facing. Maybe the picture would help others realize that what they were doing was hurting everybody.
Seeing that ad was the beginning of a wonderful Sunday. Just before church started, Vince walked right up and said to me flat-out, “I want you to be my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?” I repeated the word, desperately groping to find just the right response. I’d never been asked before.
As the organ music began, we found our usual seats in the pews to the right of center. From the pulpit, the minister looked down on us, two hundred or so parishioners seated in that magnificently spacious room with a ceiling that rose two stories above us. The choir began with “The Old Rugged Cross,” followed by “Were You There”—familiar hymns that were supposed to settle us into a state of grateful worship.
As the sermon began, I felt guilty that I didn’t have my mind on prayer. Instead, I was wondering whether Vince would give me a friendship ring or the letter from his sweater. It pushed all thoughts of Central High, Governor Faubus, and integration into the back of my mind.
The minister was urging us to pray for Governor Faubus and do what
ever was necessary to heal any sour feelings we had against white people. He had been organizing other ministers in Little Rock to speak out and condemn the governor for dispatching the troops. He said we should pray for the judges and city officials and the President to make the right decisions—to let us into Central High.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn to what the prayer ladies were saying. They were calling my name, asking God to protect me when I walked into the lion’s den at Central. I remembered what Grandma had said: “Church is the life’s blood of our folks’ community.”
I knew very well that without the church and the help of the people sitting around me, I had little chance of making it through that school year. Certainly I couldn’t count on the police. If I got into trouble and really needed protection, it would probably be the network of phone calls initiated by Reverend Young that would set off a rescue and construct a web of safety.
Church was also the place where we exchanged the real news of what was going on within our community. It was the way we fit together the bits and pieces of information we got from our limited relations with whites. First one and then another would recount what they overheard in white ladies’ kitchens, on their other jobs, or maybe on a bus. Already, we knew that the stories of our people buying up guns and knives were untrue. We didn’t have that kind of money. Instead, one man said, some of our folks were digging in attics and closets, dusting off rusty hardware.
“Reasonable folks smell trouble. There’s too many strangers in town, too many people with Mississippi attitudes,” he continued. “Ain’t no way we’re out there buying hardware like the governor is saying. He’s a stone-faced liar.”
The big discussion on the lawn after church was all the questions white folks were asking our people about who was and was not planning to send their children to Central and who was in favor of our going there. I heard rumors that two people were fired as maids at a local hotel because their answers weren’t acceptable.
“You’re doing the right thing, girl; we’re proud of you!”
“It might hurt a little while, but when it stops we’re all gonna feel real good.”
“You’re making a mistake, but you’re making it for all of us.” Those were some of the whispered good-byes after church. Lingering among the crowd as I always did, I discovered things weren’t exactly normal, not even at church. Several people stood back and stared at me in silence. When I returned their gazes, some of them smiled, but others frowned.
“Smile, no matter what,” Mother said. “Remember, not everyone approved of what Jesus did, but that didn’t stop him.”
U.S. COURT SUMMONS SERVED ON GOVERNOR
—Arkansas Gazette, Wednesday, September 11, 1957
A week after our first attempt to get into Central, I was still rushing to get each morning’s newspaper to read about the people who gathered daily in front of the school to see that we didn’t get in. The President had agreed to give the governor a ten-day respite to sort out his response to the court order. There would be a meeting at Eisenhower’s vacation spot in Rhode Island after that.
The next day we learned that Representative Brooks Hays would go with Governor Faubus to a five-man conference that included the President, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., and Sherman Adams, Chief White House Assistant. I couldn’t stop worrying that they were going to make a decision that could affect the rest of my life, and I wasn’t getting to tell my side. What was worse was there was nobody invited who could say what was best for us.
“Did you really think they’d invite any of our people?” Grandma India said, as she stood tending her backyard garden.
“At least they could have had somebody like NAACP President Roy Wilkins, or Mr. Marshall, or some person of color.”
She laid down the shears, pulled off her work gloves, and peered above her glasses as she said, “Dream on, child. But don’t lose faith. You’ve got the most important representative of all attending that meeting—your heavenly Father.”
I read and listened to every word of news about that meeting. I saw that Grandma did, too. We all felt the suspense, waiting to see whether or not Governor Faubus would convince the President to allow him to stop integration. Newspaper pages were filled with stories of their talk. Faubus wanted Eisenhower to delay integration for at least a year. Back and forth they went with hopes for an agreement running high one day, rock-bottom the next.
Meanwhile, we nine students were forced by circumstance to look to each other for social activities; our lives were being totally dictated by preparations for what lay ahead at Central High. We were no longer a part of all those activities we had formerly excelled in, like after-school sports, student council, or choir and band rehearsals. Few of my old school friends telephoned, and when they did, they asked lots of questions about the integration, questions I couldn’t answer.
ON September 15, the Arkansas Gazette headlines read:
FAUBUS ASKING COMPROMISE, IKE REFUSES COMMITMENT;
STATUS OF TROOPS STILL UNANSWERED
Realizing that the dilemma of integration wasn’t going to be resolved quickly, everybody seemed to be concerned about our falling behind in our schoolwork. Teachers from our community along with other professionals were offering to give us books and to tutor us. Dr. Lorch and his wife, Grace, the couple who had helped Elizabeth escape the mob, organized tutoring sessions and structured them along the lines of regular classes. It felt good to dress in school clothes and go to Philander Smith, our community’s college. For part of each day, I studied schoolwork and spent time with my eight friends, enjoying a thimbleful of normality.
Being together in those classes, the nine of us were developing a true friendship—becoming closer knit than we might have been under other circumstances. We talked about our fears, what we missed at our old school, and our hopes that the integration issues would soon be resolved. While I regretted the friendships I was losing, I cherished the growing ties to the eight.
Just before the court hearing where Governor Faubus would be called to account, the nine of us were summoned to Mrs. Bates’s house to meet with the press. Nothing had changed since our last meeting. The troops were still in place around the school, and every morning the crowd of segregationists grew larger. Governor Faubus was still predicting violence.
Several very dignified and important-looking men sat in her living room. One was the NAACP attorney, Wiley Branton. I recognized another man whose picture I’d seen in the newspapers: the famous lawyer Thurgood Marshall, the man who had delivered the argument that resulted in the Supreme Court’s 1954 school integration ruling.
Judging by my father’s height, I figured Mr. Marshall was more than six feet tall, with a commanding presence, fair skin, and brown hair and mustache. He spoke like somebody on television, his sharp, quick New York accent overlaying a slight Southern drawl. “At the same time we are petitioning for a court order to force your governor to move his troops away from Central’s front door, we’ll be planning other options. Meanwhile we are asking that you be patient. Justice will prevail.” He spoke confidently, in a way that made me feel that I deserved to be admitted to Central High.
I looked at this man who seemed to have none of the fears and hesitation of my parents or the other adults around us. Instead he had a self-assured air about him as though he had seen the promised land and knew for certain we could get there. We had only heard rumors of freedom, but he had lived it, and it showed in his every word, his every movement, in the way he sat tall in his seat.
He urged us to prepare ourselves to testify in federal court, if need be. Right then and there I began to fret about the truth I couldn’t tell. If I testified in court about what really happened to me, it would get printed in the newspapers, and those men would come after us again. But now I knew that, worst of all, it would give the governor yet another excuse to keep us out of school. The very basis of his argument against our integrating was that it would cause so much violence that blood would run in the s
treets. If I told the judge about the men chasing us and shooting through our windows, the governor could use my words as weapons against us.
But as I listened to Mr. Marshall speak, I felt much better. His positive attitude gave me hope that even if I couldn’t speak my truth, the scales of justice were weighted on our side. I had read that he had faced up to other Southern segregationists and forced them to let my people run for public office. He had also fought for equal rights for women. I felt honored that he would take the time and energy to fight for our rights. There was no doubt in my mind that if any soul on this earth could get us into Central High, this great man, Mr. Thurgood Marshall, was the one.
During the meeting, the upstairs had filled with a throng of news people, most of them white, with just a sprinkling of our people. We students were directed to take our seats and to answer questions as clearly and briefly as possible. For the first time, we were introduced as the “Little Rock Nine.”
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