A Mighty Long Way

by Carlotta Walls Lanier

  I didn’t see Police Chief Gene Smith until the next morning. I knew Chief Smith because I mowed the yard of one of his neighbors, and he would come over to talk with me and my friends when we were in the neighborhood. This morning, however, he made like he didn’t even know me.

  “I had nothing to do with the bombing,” I told him.

  But he was so determined. And determined to get somebody black, it seemed to me. During this marathon day with the authorities, and after I had asked for an attorney, which I kept doing, they would beat on me, three and four at a time.

  They had prepared a confession. I kept asking for an attorney. I never got an attorney, but they were successful in breaking me. I signed something.

  The next day I was arraigned, along with Maceo, who apparently was somewhere in the station, but in a different room. At the arraignment, Mr. Bates came down and told me I was being railroaded, that whatever was going on was just a smoke screen to throw shame onto blacks.

  After I had been arraigned and bail was set, Dr. Routen, a prominent black physician, covered my bail for me. He put up his property, knowing that I wouldn’t skip out. I would show. It was my own word, and I would honor Dr. Routen’s trust in me.

  The trial, it was a kangaroo court. Every black person in the courtroom knew it. But it was my life that was being railroaded, nobody else’s. I knew I was in trouble when Judge Kirby got impatient at one point when the jury left the room. He turned to the bailiff and said aloud:

  “Get that convicting jury back in here! We don’t have any more time to waste.”

  My attorney turned to me and said, “Oh my, you don’t stand a chance. Did you hear what the judge said?”

  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. But I had some connections; my uncle was able to get me a job that wasn’t a part of the farm work. Blacks were often given the job of cooking or driving. I was a driver and would often make trips off-site to run errands in Pine Bluff for the officials.

  I wasn’t doing any of the hard labor. In some ways, the place was run by the prisoners, and back then, it was still segregated. Some prisoners knew people in Little Rock who had ties to the legislature. They were in, and quickly they were out. Because Cummins wasn’t that far from Little Rock, I had visitors. My family stayed supportive.

  I always believed I would be able to get out. In high school, I used to work part-time as a waiter at the country club, and a lot of powerful politicians and attorneys used to come in there. I thought one of them might be able to help.

  But one afternoon my daddy was downtown, and he ran into Charles Bussey. Everybody knew him. He became mayor of Little Rock in 1981, but back then, he was a black deputy sheriff, and he had real good political connections. He asked about me, and Daddy told him I was still in jail for the bombing. Everybody knew that I didn’t do it. Bussey said he would arrange a meeting with Governor Faubus, and he did.

  My parents went to see the governor. They told him I was still in jail for a crime that I didn’t commit. He promised them that he would see to it that I was released. It’s kind of ironic that the man who had caused all of this trouble in the first place ended up helping me get out. About three weeks after that, in June 1963, I got out. I got out early. I had a five-year sentence, but I served twenty months of actual jail time.

  I was planning to leave Little Rock right away, but everybody I ran into was kind. They all knew I had been railroaded. They knew I was innocent. Little Rock had been my home, so I had lots of friends. It’s like a small town, so I was bound to run into the people who had put me behind bars. I saw Earzie Cunningham going up Oak Street one day in our old neighborhood. He pulled his car up beside me and apologized. I said to him, “Why did you lie about me?” He told me that they pressured him, that he could have been arrested for something he had done, but he made a deal.

  Not long after that, I took my car to be serviced, and I ran into Frank Holt. I went up to him and said: “You convicted me of something I didn’t do.”

  He responded by saying, “You said you did it.”

  My last words to him were something along the lines of, “So, that’s what you call police brutality.”

  Still later, one Sunday morning when I went to get a newspaper, I saw Judge Kirby.

  “Why don’t you come to my office? I have some things I want to discuss with you,” he said.

  Judge Kirby knew I was innocent, but that line about the “convicting jury” made me want to stay as far from him as I could. I didn’t trust him, not one bit.

  I heard that Cunningham was shot by a woman; he died in 1982. I think both Holt and Kirby are dead, too.

  I ended up staying in Little Rock longer than I thought I would. A plumber who belonged to the church my family attended, First Baptist, hired me to work for him. Then, in 1963, a friend of mine introduced me to Dora. She was from Jackson, Mississippi, but she was living in Little Rock. We hit it off, and three years later, we got married. Another friend of mine had moved to Detroit and liked it. He told me job opportunities were wide open there. I had an uncle who lived there, and he promised to help me get a job in the automobile industry. I just felt like there was something better out there. So in August 1968, I packed up and moved to Detroit. I found a job at a General Motors subsidiary in Lavonia, Michigan. When I got settled a few months later, I sent for Dora and Rod, our son, who was two at the time. We’ve been here ever since.

  I got involved in the union ’long about 1972. Vietnam veterans were returning from the war to their old jobs in the General Motors plants, and they felt like the union didn’t really represent them. They were in a different mood, rebellious. They wanted change. Most of the people in office were older. Some of my friends and co-workers encouraged me to run for office, so I did. I was elected as an alternate on the committee that handled grievances, health and safety issues for the union. In the next election, I was elected a full member to the committee. I went to work for the union full-time, and I just kept rising through the ranks from there.

  Although I’m retired, I still get called on from time to time to do work for the union, and every now and then, I volunteer for political campaigns. I’m a grandfather now, too. My son, Rod, is a journalist. He got a master’s degree from Wayne State in Detroit and worked as an editor for NBC Online. Now, he and his wife own a public relations firm.

  It’s kind of funny how life works out because I used to want to go into journalism when I was in high school. I used to work for the school newspaper. My second choice was the military. But after everything that happened, I didn’t really have that chance.

  Things turned out all right for me, though. Yes, things turned out just fine. There is no record of Herbert’s case at the Pulaski County courthouse, where his trial was held. The attorney who represented him is deceased, and the attorney’s family members were unable to find any records related to Herbert’s case among his old files. It’s as though he were never charged.

  Herbert doesn’t know what might have happened to his criminal file. For all these years, he has believed it was right there in Pulaski County, though he never had any interest in digging it up. If there was any justice in this case, I suppose that’s it—that this innocent man doesn’t have to live the rest of his days with a criminal record.

  But, no doubt, Herbert suffered in ways that can never be measured. Dreams died. A seventeen-year-old boy entered manhood behind the bars of a maximum-security state prison and spent the first twenty months of his adult life there. And even now, among those old-timers in Little Rock who remember the bombing, Herbert’s confession, and his trial, there may be a few who still wonder whether he was involved.

  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 has been vindication enough. For me, knowing his full story has left me more convinced than ever that he is innocent. Sharing it and doing what I can to clear his name has helped to bring my soul what I have most sought: peace.

  CHAPTER 17

  Touching the Future

  Wherever I go to talk to students, I usually encounter some who know little or nothing about the Little Rock Nine. Sometimes they’re African American. Sometimes they’re white, Latino, or Asian. But when they hear my story, often they get angry, like the white kid whose hand went up slowly in the back of the room after my first speech at Ponderosa High School in a Denver suburb many years ago.

  “Why am I just learning this?” he asked. “Why haven’t I learned this in school before now?”

  I hear that often from high school and college students who feel their school systems and parents neglected to share important pieces of American history. I don’t blame the children for not knowing. I blame the parents and schools. I bear some responsibility as part of a generation that I don’t believe has done enough to ensure that our children and their children know and fully appreciate our collective history, particularly the hard-fought battles of the 1950s and 1960s for African Americans to gain full access to educational opportunities and civil rights.

  It distresses me to see that the nation’s public schools have largely become resegregated. But even more, I’m disturbed by the low regard for education in many of these schools. I didn’t go to Central because I felt a strong desire to sit next to white people in class. I put my life on the line because I believed Central offered the best academic opportunities. I had hoped that the resulting interaction with people of another race would be a bonus, a great exchange of cultures and ideas. It is hurtful now when I hear that in many urban schools, where the student populations tend to be overwhelmingly black, it is not considered cool to be smart. It makes me downright angry when I hear that smart black kids often feel a need to play down their brainpower just to fit in. How did we—particularly black men and women who endured the struggle and benefited from it—allow such a cultural shift from the time when education was widely viewed in our community as the way to a better life?

  Entertainer Bill Cosby was severely criticized by some black scholars and activists for comments he made in 2004 on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education about the decline in parenting and personal responsibility in poor black communities. But I think he was on to something. Many of the problems that we see today, such as single mothers, deadbeat fathers, and extreme poverty, are not new. They are as old as people. But there was a sense in my day that the fate of black people, poor or not, was collective. Thus, our standards were defined by the best among us, not the worst. Our parents—whether Daddy was living at home or not—our grandparents, our teachers, and all of the adults in our realm of influence held us to high expectations at home, at school, and in the community. While the problems that plague the poorest among us today—rampant crime, poor education, and broken families—are indeed multidimensional, I believe strongly that better parenting and greater outreach from those of us in a position to help can go a long way toward restoring education to its vaunted place. So, too, can efforts to reconnect students to their history.

  In recent years, the federal government, the state of Arkansas, and some respected artists have taken great strides to make the history of the Little Rock Nine more tangible. For the fiftieth anniversary in 2007, the National Park Service constructed a powerful new multimedia exhibit just across the street from Central High School. The high-tech building features a photo gallery with black-and-white images from 1957. Film footage from that year also runs constantly on large television screens posted throughout. Visitors can pick up telephones and hear my comrades and me sharing parts of our story. They can hear old recorded interviews of Governor Faubus and Gazette editor Harry Ashmore and more. Park rangers—including Minnijean’s daughter, Spirit Trickey—share what happened inside the walls of Central as they guide guests on tours of the school. Some parts of the exhibit are still tough for me to see and hear, but that just speaks to its power.

  Another touching monument of the nine of us stands on the north end of the Arkansas State Capitol. Life-size bronze statues capture each of us as the children we were then in a memorial simply called Testament. Editorial cartoonist John Deering and his wife, Kathy, spent seven years bringing his idea to fruition after getting permission from the Little Rock Nine Foundation. When it was unveiled on August 30, 2005, it was the largest bronze statue in Arkansas and the first monument honoring the civil rights movement on the grounds of a southern state capitol building. State lawmakers not only agreed to pay the bulk of the costs to finance the memorial, they also agreed to locate it on the Capitol grounds within view of the governor’s office. That made me proud. I’d like to think that whenever the Arkansas governor has to sign a bill, especially education or human rights legislation, he will think twice about his actions when he glances out his window. There we are, nine bronze statues, staring back at him in a silent testament to history.

  These days, I am inspired by the hope and optimism I feel in the air, motivated mostly by the successful campaign of President Barack Obama. If nothing else, the high visibility of the new First Family—our smart and eloquent president, his equally intelligent and charming wife, both committed to their two beautiful daughters—will have a lasting, positive impact on the psyche of black people everywhere. The Obamas are bound to transform not only how black people see ourselves collectively, but how others see us. It is a proud day in America—one, I admit, I did not see coming.

  I was in the crowd in Denver’s Mile High Stadium that night in August 2008 when then senator Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president. It marked the first time that an African American had headed the ticket of a major party for the nation’s highest political office. The crowd of eighty-four thousand supporters—an amalgam of people, representing the country’s diversity—was absolutely ecstatic.

  From my spot in the crowd, I soaked up every bit of this historic moment—the faces, the cheers, the energy, the joy, the hope for this young man who looked like me. I had seen this country at its worst, and now I was able to see and touch the monumental change unfolding before me.

  “I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring,” Obama said as the crowd roared its approval.

  Fireworks shot up into the clear, dark night. Confetti rained down over us all. Something was stirring indeed.

  I had been late to get on the Obama bandwagon. Hillary Clinton was my candidate. I had known her personally since that evening my Little Rock comrades and I chatted the night away with her and then Governor Bill Clinton at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion in September 1987. When I made it back to Denver, I told my husband that Governor Clinton was considering a run for the White House.

  “What do you think of him?” Ike asked.

  “I like him. He’s smart,” I responded. “But the smartest one is his wife.”

  That’s how I truly felt about her. But I also believed her to be genuine, experienced politically, a good manager, and a tough woman capable of making the difficult decisions that would be needed down the road. I had nothing against Obama; I just thought Hillary was the better, more experienced candidate. The color of a candidate’s skin had never been—and would not be this time—the driving factor in how I voted. I’ve always voted my conscience. But Obama had tapped into something that Hillary just couldn’t overcome: the overwhelming desire for change. When it became clear to me that Hillary was in trouble, I began listening to Obama with a more willing ear. I watched him on the campaign trail and in the debates and scoured the news coverage of his proposals for change. He was sounding all the right notes on the issues that mattered a great deal to me, particularly health care, the war in Iraq, and the tanking economy. He came across as supersmart and unflappable. The more I listen
ed and learned, the more I liked him. When Hillary exited the race, I began volunteering for Obama’s campaign in Denver and worked as hard for him as I had worked for her.

  But as proud as I was of Obama that night in Denver when he accepted the Democratic nomination, part of me was worried. I sat in the stadium, taking in every moment because I thought that would be the highlight, the most significant political moment I would ever witness: a black man accepting his party’s nomination for president of the United States. Part of me was worried that Obama just couldn’t win. I’d seen too much hate, the kind that had fueled the white mobs of my youth and then took Dr. King, the Kennedys, and those four little girls who died in the church bombing in Birmingham. I’d seen, too, the more subtle (but no less destructive) racism and discrimination, the kind that flies below the radar and often makes the accuser seem paranoid, the kind that had forced my friend Horace Walker finally to give up his dream of earning a doctorate. The black man always has to do more and prove more, and more times than not, he still falls short in their eyes, Horace would say in his most frustrated moments. And this from a man who succeeded anyway, who through hard work and sheer determination rose to the ranks of vice president of two major corporations before his death in June 2001.