I frequently heard complaints about the outdated textbooks, limited supplies, and inferior equipment at the black schools from the relatives and family friends who worked there. Practically everywhere I turned at Dunbar, I was under the watchful eye of an aunt, uncle, or family friend who was on staff. Among them were my Aunt Eva, the librarian; Uncle Silas, who taught auto mechanics; and Mr. Fox. My seventh-grade gym teacher also became my Aunt Whaletha when she married my mother’s brother Med, Jr. the summer after I took her class. I’d hear the adults talking among themselves about the injustice of it all, with white schools always getting the best of everything.
The disparities between Dunbar and Central can be traced to their beginnings. In 1927, the Little Rock school district spent $1.5 million to build Little Rock High School, which was renamed Little Rock Central High School in 1953. News reports called the school the most elaborate and expensive high school in the nation. School officials had poured so much of the system’s resources into the construction that little was left to build a school for black children. But private financing came forth from philanthropists John D. Rockefeller and Julius Rosenwald for the construction two years later of Dunbar, then called the Negro School of Industrial Arts. Rosenwald, part-owner of Sears, Roebuck & Company, worked with Booker T. Washington from 1912 to 1932 to build almost five thousand schools for black children throughout the South. Dunbar, which cost $400,000 to build, still sits in the same spot. It is one of a few Rosenwald schools that are still operational.
The architects of Dunbar had contributed to the design of Central, so the schools look quite similar. Both are regal-looking old buildings with columns and concrete steps that lead to a grand entrance. Their brick-and-stone facades reflect the art deco style popular in the early twentieth century. But the schools have always been far from equal. Central, with one hundred classrooms spread across six hundred thousand square feet, served as a senior high school and junior college. Meanwhile, Dunbar, with thirty-four classrooms spread over two hundred thousand square feet, operated as a junior high, senior high, and junior college. While Central’s first library was stocked with eleven thousand library books, Dunbar’s first library had only five thousand books. Central had both a gymnasium and a stadium, but Dunbar had neither until 1950, when a gym was added. The boys and girls basketball teams practiced and played at large halls or centers located in the black community, including the Masonic Temple, YMCA, and Arkansas Baptist College. At reunions over the years, I’ve heard athletes talk about having to walk as far as sixteen blocks for football practice. I’ve also seen documents showing that Central’s first principal in 1927 made a salary of $500 per month, compared with the $344 per month paid to Dunbar’s principal. By 1954, the school district was spending $102.25 per child on white students but only $67.75 per child on black students.
Despite the discrepancies, though, Dunbar was far more modern than the one-room shacks where black children were educated throughout much of the South. Its all-black staff was highly educated and helped to create an academically rigorous curriculum that in 1931 resulted in accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Most white schools in Little Rock, with all of their resources, had not achieved such status. 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 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. They were schools like Philander Smith College, which had many alumni among Dunbar’s staff.
The twenty-four-acre campus of Philander Smith sat right in the heart of black Little Rock. Before the construction of Interstate 630 in the late 1970s, the school was walking distance from the black business district on West 9th Street. Students and staff from the campus could walk a short distance to patronize the array of black-owned and -operated businesses, which included barber and beauty shops, restaurants and cafés, doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, taverns, a cab stand, a liquor store, an insurance company, and more. Then the interstate sliced a path right down the middle, leaving the university and businesses on opposite sides of a busy federal highway. But Philander Smith was a vibrant part of the black community. It instilled in its students an obligation to give back to that community. In that spirit, the Dunbar staff pushed us to excel, expected it, and drilled in us that when we stepped outside the school-house doors, we not only represented our families and our school, but also represented the race.
My biology teacher, Edna Douglas, was one of my favorites. She had taught Mother, and she was a worldly woman who traveled extensively out of the country during the summer. She wove stories of her travels into her lectures and left us captivated with her descriptions of the people and places she had seen. Mrs. Douglas did more than teach science. She took us to those faraway places and made them more than just dots on a map. She engaged me in the world beyond Little Rock and made me want to see more of it. A good education was the door to the broader world, she told her students. And when we stepped into that broader world, she said, we represented the best of Dunbar and of colored people everywhere.
Dunbar’s reputation as a top-notch school attracted black students from all over Arkansas who stayed with relatives to attend. Some were from well-to-do families who wanted their children to have access to the best possible education. Others were from rural areas that had no schools for black children. Not only did my parents graduate from Dunbar’s high school, but Mother also graduated from the junior college. After World War II, Daddy spent a year at the junior college on the GI Bill, too. They never lost their tremendous affection for their alma mater. To this day, I usually accompany Mother to the school’s big biennial reunions, which draw hundreds of proud and accomplished former students and staff to rotating venues throughout the country.
I, too, have fond memories of Dunbar. I was an honor student and active in a number of extracurricular activities. I was captain of the girls basketball team, a class representative on the student council, a member of the Junior National Honor Society, captain of the cheerleading squad, and a member of the choir. I also served as vice president of the student council two years in a row. In my day, women were never selected to be president of the council.
I was in the seventh grade at Dunbar when the school district announced plans to build two new high schools, Horace Mann for black students and Hall High for whites. Dunbar was to convert exclusively to a junior high school when the new high schools opened in fall 1956. Word of the new black high school circulated quickly among my junior high school peers, and we were excited about it. I didn’t realize then that the new schools were part of an overall plan that had been unanimously approved by the school board in May 1955 to respond to the Supreme Court decision that I had read about the previous year in the Weekly Reader.
The school system’s plan called for a deliberately slow process of desegregation that would be phased in over six years. It would start with a small number of black students entering Central High School in the fall of 1957. Selected black students in the following years then would enter previously all-white junior high and elementary schools in phases two and three, which would be implemented through 1963. The proposal would come to be known as the Blossom Plan, named for Virgil T. Blossom, superintendent of Little Rock public schools. Under Blossom’s plan, desegregation of the schools would follow the city’s residential patterns. As one school board member suggested, the plan would provide “as little integration as possible for as long as legally possible.” Mann would be built on the predominantly black east side of the city and remain all black. Hall High would be built on the other side of the city in a more affluent white area, and no black students would be admitted. Central was surrounded by working-class white and racially mixed neighborhoods and would become the first testing g
round for school integration in the city.
I watched Mann rise slowly from the dirt when my friends and I carpooled or took the bus to Gilliam Park to swim during the summer of 1955. I couldn’t help thinking that in a few years I would be a student there. Even then, I thought it made no sense that I would have to travel even more than the two miles I traveled to Dunbar when Central High School was so close to my home. But high school was on the back burner. I was just looking forward to returning to Dunbar for eighth grade. In August of that summer, though, a brutal crime nearly two hundred miles away in Money, Mississippi, rattled me to the core.
I first heard the name of Emmett Till whispered from the lips of adults, speaking in hushed tones around my house about the horrible thing the white people did to that little black boy in Mississippi. My parents subscribed to the Chicago Defender, that city’s black newspaper, and it was there that I first read the full, terrifying story. As I followed the story for weeks in the black press, I couldn’t get the images out of my head. How Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi, walked to the white-owned Bryant’s Grocery on August 24, 1955, with some friends after a long day in the cotton fields. How the teenager, unfamiliar with the deadly taboos of the South, may have whistled at a white woman while leaving the store. How Roy Bryant, the store owner and the white woman’s husband, showed up four days later with his half-brother at the home where Till was staying and dragged him away. How Till’s battered and mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River a few days later. How the body had been weighed down by a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan attached by barbed wire.
As horrible as those images were in my imagination, nothing could have prepared me for the real-life pictures I saw when Mother’s September 15, 1955, issue of Jet magazine arrived at our home. As I flipped open the magazine and turned to the story about Emmett Till’s memorial service, I gasped. The photo of his badly disfigured corpse was right there, in black and white. Part of me was so horrified that I wanted to turn the page quickly or throw the book down, but I couldn’t take my eyes off his bloated, monstrous face. It was one of those moments when legend meets reality. I had read stories before about the lynching of black folks in Mississippi and other areas of the Deep South. I’d even heard my relatives tell the story of a lynching in downtown Little Rock. A woman who appeared to be in her early forties sat on her porch about five blocks from my home every day, just staring at passersby through sad, empty eyes. Her mind was never quite right, my folks said, because her brother had been lynched on Broadway when she was still in her mother’s womb. To me, such stories were tragic yet distant history. But I knew Emmett Till. I’d never laid eyes on him before the magazine photos, but in the handsome face of the boy he had been before his murder, I saw my cousins, my friends, my classmates. He was just one and a half years older than me and as real to me as the black playmates I met on the softball field every day.
I imagined that Emmett was probably a popular teenager, eager to show off his big-city ways to his small-town southern friends, like my cousin Robert Henry, whose prowess on the field near my house (and no small amount of envy) had gotten him kicked off our neighborhood softball team. I imagined that the country store where Emmett may have acted on the dare of his friends that summer day looked like Mr. Thompson’s shop, the white-owned store across the street from Uncle Teet’s house. And what teenager hasn’t said or done something silly to impress others? But Emmett’s death said to me that for a black child, a little too much confidence, a joke, saying or doing the wrong thing, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or just being the wrong color could cost him his life.
Because of what happened to Emmett Till, Mississippi became a fearsome place in my mind, and I wanted never to set foot there. That must have been the case with the adults in my family, too, because from that moment on, Daddy mapped out our road trips so that we never even passed through Mississippi. Those were the days before the interstate highway system, and sometimes we might have gotten to our destination quicker by going through Mississippi. But we weren’t taking any chances.
Somehow, though, I still did not see Little Rock through the same eyes as I saw Mississippi. Yes, Little Rock was the South. Yes, I had to sit in the back of the bus and climb to the black section in the balcony when Peggy, Reba, and I walked to the Lee Theatre for the Saturday afternoon show. Yes, I’d heard white folks make degrading comments. And even though I had relatives who lived in the predominantly white neighborhoods on the west end, around the 202-acre War Memorial Park, I knew I couldn’t swim there because the pool was for whites only. Yet in my mind, my hometown was not as bad as Mississippi. Till’s murder had set the bar for racial evil in my mind, and compared with that, Little Rock was somewhere on the other end of the spectrum—or so I thought. At that point, I had always played by the rules. I’d never stepped out of my so-called place. That would come a few years later, and I would be shocked and saddened to see my hometown for the first time as it really was.
In some ways, though, Little Rock was indeed more progressive than many areas of the South. The city’s public libraries had been integrated without any trouble in January 1951. And despite the limitations and motivations of the Blossom Plan, the Little Rock school district was among the first in the South to respond in any way to the U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating school desegregation. But black residents in Little Rock were growing restless of being treated like second-class citizens. With the massive show of black togetherness and power taking place in Montgomery, Alabama, at the end of 1955, some black residents were also starting to feel empowered.
I recognized the infectious power of the Montgomery movement one day in early 1956 when my cousin Delores and I decided to ride the bus downtown. As we stepped on board, we noticed Alexine Duncan, one of the granddaughters of the older couple who lived across the street from me. Alexine was in her twenties and had spent some time in Denver, Colorado, where her father operated an upscale men’s clothing store. Like me, she had traveled up north and lived another way. Delores and I waved hello and we sat across from her in the middle of the bus, where the black section began. The bus grew more and more crowded as it traveled down Park Avenue. Suddenly, at one stop, a white passenger boarded, and the driver looked up into his rearview mirror at Delores and me and shouted over his shoulder:
“You two girls, get up!”
We knew he meant for us to go to the back and clear that row for white passengers. Without question, we were about to comply when I heard a sharp reply from across the aisle:
“Oh, no, you don’t! You stay right there!”
Delores and I froze in our tracks and looked up. It was Alexine. She was fuming. Her arms were folded across her chest, and she was staring the bus driver down. We had a right to sit there, she demanded. Hadn’t he heard about the Montgomery bus boycotts?
I had felt such pride reading about how the black people of that city were refusing to ride public buses to protest the system’s segregated practices. I eagerly followed the news stories and photos in black newspapers and magazines, showing how fifty thousand black men and women there were working together, walking and carpooling to work, church, and everywhere else they had to go, while empty buses crisscrossed the city. I knew the whole story—how a small act of defiance by Rosa Parks had ignited the boycott. What a gracious lady. I imagined that she was just bone-tired that day when she quietly refused a white bus driver’s order that she give up her seat to a white passenger. I had sat on the bus next to many black women like her in Little Rock. They would be headed home from jobs cleaning, cooking, and sewing in white people’s homes and businesses, so tired they could barely keep their eyes open. When I saw that iconic black-and-white photograph of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after her arrest for taking such a bold stand, I thought of all the hardworking women she had lifted by keeping her seat. And she became my forever she-ro.
I knew that Alexine was probably thinking of Rosa Parks and fe
eling the call of history to take her own stand. But as she grew louder, refusing to back down even after the bus driver threatened to call the police, I grew more frightened. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to run off the bus. I wanted to tell her that I knew she meant well, but that I just wanted her to be quiet—please—and let me go to the back of the bus. I’ve never been the kind of person to make a scene, and that was the last thing I wanted right then. But it was too late. The next thing I knew, the police were climbing aboard to escort Alexine off the bus. Delores and I got off, too, and quietly walked back home.
I never talked to Alexine about what happened that day, but I always felt horrible that she had landed in the hands of the police for standing up for me on that bus. Little did I know that another integration battle was heating up in my hometown. And soon, I would take my own stand.
A Mighty Long Way Page 5