A Mighty Long Way

by Carlotta Walls Lanier

  During the same reception, my husband told me that there was another woman in a wheelchair who was eager to see me. He led me to her, and I was surprised to see that it was Elizabeth Huckaby. We both smiled, and I extended my hand to her. She clasped it tightly. She, too, looked well, and I was glad to see her. We spent some time catching up on each other’s lives.

  I felt good about how well the nine of us were doing in our lives. We were raising families, giving back to the community in myriad ways, and enjoying success in our various careers. I had been in business as an independent real estate broker for the past twenty years. Coolheaded Ernie had earned a master’s degree in sociology after Michigan State, had worked in the Carter administration, and was rising up the corporate ladder in the finance industry at Lehman Brothers. He was based in Washington. Melba, who seemed born for the spotlight, earned a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University, worked as a reporter for NBC-TV and a communications consultant, and had recently authored a successful memoir about her experiences at Central. She was living in San Francisco. Gloria, the brainy one, had graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a degree in math and chemistry and moved to Sweden to work as a systems analyst and technical writer for IBM. While there, she also became a patent attorney and later founded and edited her own magazine, Computers in Industry. She was living and working in the Netherlands. Terrence, a philosopher and professor long before he got the degrees to back it up, earned a bachelor’s in sociology from California State University, a master’s in social welfare from UCLA, and a doctorate in psychology from Southern Illinois University. He was living and working in Los Angeles as a college professor and clinical psychologist. Jefferson, the perpetual jokester of the group, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Los Angeles State College, served his country in Vietnam, and was working as a government accountant in Columbus, Ohio. Minnijean, who had become famously known for fighting back that first year at Central with the so-called chili incident, attended Southern Illinois University, earned a bachelor’s degree, and moved to a farm in Ottawa, Canada, with her husband and six children. She worked as a writer and social worker and got involved in grassroots human rights groups. Thelma, quiet and fragile because of a heart condition, had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from Southern Illinois University. She worked twenty-seven years as a home economics teacher in St. Louis before retiring in 1994. And then there was Elizabeth, who had been the most scarred among us by the events of 1957. The image of her alone, surrounded by the shrieking mob, has endured more than any other as a testament of the courage it took to survive that year. She attended college in Tennessee and Ohio and served in the army before returning to Little Rock to work for a state welfare agency. But Elizabeth struggled mightily to find her way out of the darkness of the past. In 1996, when seven of us had appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with some former white classmates to discuss the first year of integration at Central, Elizabeth refused to join us. When we gathered again for the anniversary, it was clear to me she was still battling old ghosts.

  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 a threatening white mob.

  Newsweek had sent one of its top photographers, and we spent about two hours with him snapping pictures of us all around the school. As it turned out, though, we were bumped off the cover of the magazine by CNN founder Ted Turner, who’d announced the week before the anniversary that he was donating $1 billion to charity. Our story ended up as a nice centerpiece.

  Another enduring photo was snapped at the reunion, of Elizabeth and Hazel Bryan Massery, one of the white tormentors in that iconic photograph from 1957. Hazel had called Elizabeth in the 1960s to apologize for tormenting her that day, and photographer Will Counts—who had taken the original photograph of Elizabeth and the mob with Hazel at its center—arranged for the two women to meet at the fortieth reunion. The meeting would lead to what seemed to me an odd friendship between Elizabeth and Hazel, who together made television appearances and speeches about their newfound relationship. There was even talk of a contract between the two to do a book and movie together. While I believe in forgiveness and reconciliation, I was suspicious from the start. I wondered whether the contrition making headlines was sincere and worried that Elizabeth might get hurt. I shared my concerns with her, but initially Elizabeth—who even during our worst times at Central tried to find the good in our tormentors—was excited and believed Hazel to be sincere. But Elizabeth later told me that Hazel was growing tired of being seen as “the bad guy” as they told their story from place to place. The two women would go their separate ways. The reconciliation photo, which was made into a poster while the two were on the speaking circuit, is still sold with other Little Rock Nine memorabilia, but Elizabeth insisted that a sticker bearing a quote from her be attached to each one. The sticker says: “True reconciliation can occur when we honestly acknowledge our painful but shared past.”

  After the fortieth reunion, the honors kept coming. Just two years later, President Clinton awarded the nine of us the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal. But four days before we were set to travel to the nation’s capital with our closest family members to accept the award, I received a call from Ernie, who had bad news: Mrs. Bates had died. We mentioned to the family members planning her funeral that we were set to receive the Congressional Gold Medal on November 9 in hopes that they would choose a different day for the funeral. They did not, forcing us to make a difficult decision. With so much federal red tape involved in the medal ceremony, I knew there was zero chance of getting it postponed. Mrs. Bates would want us to accept the award, I figured. When we were kids, she had escorted us to many such events herself, and in one case, she’d even insisted that she receive the honor, too. Ernie came up with a solution: He would fly to Little Rock the morning of the funeral and represent the nine of us by laying a wreath on the bier of Mrs. Bates’s coffin as she lay in state. He would then return to Washington in time for the early afternoon medal ceremony.

  Everything went as planned. When it was time to bestow the awards, President Clinton captured what many of us in the room felt:

  “This is a special day for me—a happy day and a sad day, an emotional day,” he said, calling Mrs. Bates “a good friend to Hillary and me.” He told a story about the day he wheeled Mrs. Bates around the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis when the exhibit on Central High School was dedicated. She was greatly amused when she saw that it featured a statue of Governor Faubus on one side and her on the other, he recalled.

  “And even though by then she had to get around in a wheelchair, she got a big laugh out of that,” he said. “And what a laugh she had.”

  President Clinton shared the same story with a larger audience the following April when we all attended a memorial service for Mrs. Bates in Little Rock. The service drew an overflow crowd of local and national political and civil rights leaders, as well as local residents who remembered the woman who had dared to stand up to Jim Crow. This time, my comrades asked me to speak on behalf of the nine of us.

  I recalled how Mrs. Bates had hired me as a ten-year-old “paperboy” to deliver her and her husband’s Arkansas State Press and how she used the ne
wspaper as an instrument of hope as well as a megaphone to protest the injustices endured by the black community. I talked about our transition from news messengers to news makers as the story of the Little Rock Nine played out around the world. I also thanked her for the role she had played in supporting the nine of us and our parents as we fought for justice in the delivery of education in this country. On a more lighthearted note, the audience laughed when I said that Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, and newsman Ted Poston discovered the hard way that you didn’t want to play poker with Daisy Bates if you intended to win.

  “Mrs. Bates ‘walked the talk’ of freedom for all, strode confidently forward, aware of the dangers she faced but determined to see the walls of segregation come tumbling down,” I said. “This is the Daisy Bates that the Little Rock Nine remembers. This is the woman who put her life on the line for the cause of justice. This is the American whose vision for educational equality moved our nation forward.”

  As I took my seat, I thought about the irony of the moment. While we were at Central, I would have been the last one Mrs. Bates asked to speak for the group. She knew me well enough to know that I shunned the limelight. But here I stood, before an esteemed crowd, bidding a final farewell to the one who for many years had spoken for my comrades and me.

  Here I stood, on my own, speaking for us all, finally confident in the voice emerging from within.

  CHAPTER 16

  Peace at Last

  Even after years of talking to students and other groups about Central High School, I had a difficult time discussing the bombing of my family’s home. Every time I mentioned how my father had been held as a suspect, I choked up. It was just as tough to talk about Herbert.

  I still blamed myself for it all. But the deeper I dug into my past, the more difficult it was to avoid the questions: Why Herbert? How did he end up in the hands of Little Rock police? How long did he stay in prison? What happened to him there? How did he get out? What was his life like now?

  A piece of my life had intertwined forever with Herbert’s on that fateful night in February 1960. I had come to realize that to make peace with my own past, I first had to face it—all of it. That meant facing the part that was Herbert’s, too. I decided to call him.

  First, I called Herbert’s younger brother, Dr. Lester Monts, then senior vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Michigan, to get Herbert’s telephone number. Then, while in Chicago in August 2003 to take care of some business for my then 104-year-old aunt M.E., I made the call. It was good to hear Herbert’s voice again. I explained to him that I had been thinking a lot about Little Rock and what happened to my family’s home and told him that I wanted to talk to him. I asked if I could drive to his home in Michigan to talk face-to-face. Herbert seemed happy to hear from me and agreed without hesitation to get together. The next day, I drove four and a half hours to Southfield, just outside Detroit, where Herbert had been living the past fifteen years.

  When I arrived in town about seven p.m., I called Herbert, and he met me on the highway and led me to his home. I felt proud of him as I drove through his neighborhood, an upscale suburban community with towering old trees, meticulously manicured lawns, and expansive multistory homes. Southfield was widely known throughout Michigan as home to many of the area’s prominent African American politicians and automobile industry executives. It had evolved since my time in Michigan as a jurisdiction with one of the highest per capita incomes for black men and women in the country. Herbert pointed out later that the town’s first black mayor, police chief, and several council members were among his neighbors.

  We were met inside by Herbert’s wife of more than forty years, Dora, a manager for a major department store. A warm and friendly woman, she broke the ice right away and insisted that I stay overnight at their home, instead of in a hotel, as I had planned. The three of us sat in the family room and chatted amiably about Little Rock and family for a couple of hours, and then she headed upstairs to bed.

  Herbert and I kept talking, first about work. He had just retired after working thirty-three years as an officer for the United Auto Workers union in various elected and appointed positions. In his union work, it seemed Herbert had found a noble purpose, a way to help protect the average worker from multimillion-dollar corporate giants. The job meant more than a paycheck to him, he said, because he knew better than most what it was like to be defenseless in the face of power.

  Then Herbert steered our conversation to Little Rock and the night in 1960 when both our lives changed forever.

  “I had nothing to do with it,” he said softly, as if he needed me to hear him say it.

  “I know,” I answered.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say next. But Herbert needed no prompting. He had been waiting all these years for the chance to tell me what happened. It seemed that he needed to talk about it as much as I needed to hear it. So, for hours that night, I just listened.

  In that conversation and the many since, I’ve let Herbert take me back to Little Rock, 1960, starting with that stormy evening of February 9:

  Our hangout back then was your grandfather’s place, at the corner of 18th and Pine. In its incarnation at the time, it was a Laundromat. I was there with Charles Webb and Marion Davis, some neighborhood buddies. Maceo came by; he was my uncle’s friend. It was a rainy evening, and ’long about nine or ten, Charles, Marion, and I started out for our homes. We walked up Pine, cut across an alley, and Charles went on into his home on 17th. Then, Marion and I continued up Maple to 15th, and he went into his home.

  I passed your home and noticed a couple of unfamiliar, early-1950s cars on the street. I walked on to my house just up the street. Maceo passed me in his car and turned the corner in front of your house, onto Valentine. He was behind a truck, another unfamiliar vehicle in the neighborhood. We knew the cars and trucks of our neighbors, so it was easy to tell a stranger on the roads.

  I got home within five to ten minutes after Marion went to his house. My dad was at work. He worked nights at Bell Telephone. I had two sisters, six brothers, and my mom at home. I ate a bite, saw there was nothing of interest on television, and went on to bed. I guess it was maybe fifteen minutes at the most.

  I was about to fall off to sleep when I heard a big boom. I got up quickly, went to my mother, and said: “Did you hear that?” We had had a big rain—and there was a red clay residue that had left puddles around. I looked out the window and saw a police car parked on the corner. At the time, it never crossed my mind to wonder how a police car could get there more quickly than I could get out of my bed and look out the window.

  People were gathering at the Rices’ house. I told my mother I was going on down there to see what had happened. The police came over to the Rices’ and told us to stand back. We all knew that you were at Central, and we all figured that the white segregationists had come to pay a call.

  The police suggested we break up the gathering and go on back to our homes. I went on home and back to bed.

  When I woke up the next morning, I went outside to see what was going on. The police car was still there. I went down and told the officer that I had seen several unfamiliar cars in the neighborhood when I was walking home last night.

  “We’ll send somebody out to talk with you,” he told me.

  The police came to my house the next morning, and I remember going down to headquarters and telling my story. I went by myself. They took my story, but it became clear to me that they wanted something else from me. They wanted me to take a lie detector test. I didn’t have anything to hide, so I agreed. They let me go home and picked me up again the next morning. I went by myself because I thought I’d take the lie detector test and come on back home. But things began to change. They started asking me the same questions again and again. It was night before I took the lie detector test, and I passed it. I clearly heard one of the officers say, “There’s nothing there.”

  They got Marion to come down to the station, too. Later, I found
out that most of the people on 18th and Pine were also questioned. Police tried to get some of them involved, but they had substantial evidence backing their whereabouts that night.

  After I volunteered to take the lie detector test, I requested an attorney. It was clear they were looking for a fall guy.

  “You guys are trying to railroad me. Get me an attorney,” I told them.

  That’s when I got charged.

  During the questioning, the police were telling me that Maceo had already confessed. I found out later that they were telling Maceo that I had confessed.

  Whatever I said, they would counter with: “Boy, you are lying.”

  Earzie Cunningham, who lived next door to the Foxes, across the street from you, told the police that he had seen me on the street by your house. Earzie was in trouble with the law, and they coerced him into putting me by your house at the time of the explosion. He lied. His mother even said he did not see anything, but the prosecutor, Frank Holt, found out about her statement. Before she could be subpoenaed to testify, Holt claimed that she had a heart condition and that medical reasons made it not feasible for her to testify. Word was she was whisked out of town, under a threat.

  The police kept saying to me: “Did you register to go to Central? Didn’t you go to school in Connecticut for a while? Aren’t those schools integrated?”

  All of these questions I could answer in the affirmative, but they kept repeating the questions as though my “yes” answers annoyed them.

  I had been there all day and into the night by this time, and it was the usual treatment for blacks back then—no bathroom breaks, no food, no water. They would not let me call my parents. I kept repeating my request for a lawyer. As soon as I did, they charged me with the crime and started to beat me. The FBI agents were federal employees, but it is important to remember that in Little Rock they were also, for the most part, southern white men. They were every bit as bad as the police, just as racist as the locals. They weren’t there for justice. They were on the side of the segregationists. When I asked for a lawyer, which I did repeatedly, Frank Holt came into the room, but this was after they had prepared a confession. He was the prosecuting attorney, and no help to me. In fact, he wanted me to take the fall, and it was his plan to make that happen.