This story was originally published in The Denver Post on May 16, 2004.
Carlotta Walls LaNier has never talked much about it with her children, Whitney and Brooke.
About how in 1957, as a child of 14, she was escorted by armed soldiers through a riotous mob of 1,000 so she could attend the same school as whites as a nation watched on TV.
How she endured racial taunts, mob intimidation and threats on her life to graduate with honors from Central High in Little Rock, Ark.
How she was the youngest of the famous “Little Rock Nine,” one of the first black students to integrate a public school in the South.
How she ensured equal access to education not only for her children but for generations of children.
Carlotta Walls LaNier never talked to her mother, Juanita, much about it, either. How her father, Cartelyou, a brick mason who built Little Rock schools, churches and homes, was blacklisted and had to travel the country to find work.
How her home was bombed her senior year. How her father was held by the FBI as a suspect for three days. How her childhood friend, 17-year-old Herbert Monts, was convicted by a white jury and sent to a state prison for five years for a crime that LaNier doesn’t think he committed.
She never talked much about it.
It’s been too painful.
Now, LaNier, a 61-year-old Denver real estate agent and University of Northern Colorado alum, has decided her story is too important not to tell on the 50th anniversary of the historic Brown vs. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.
On May 17, 1954, the court outlawed racial segregation in public education. Three years later, the nation watched as LaNier and eight other black children tried to enter all-white Central High on Sept. 23, 1957. It became a battleground in the struggle for civil rights.
Of the nine, only three would graduate from Central. LaNier was one of them.
“If Brown vs. the Board of Education was the vehicle for change, the Little Rock Nine were the designated drivers,” LaNier recently told a group of high school scholars from Denver’s Mount Gilead Baptist Church. “We hope America has profited from what we set out to prove in 1957.”
LaNier needs to look no further than those closest to her. Her younger sisters, Loujuana and Tina, both graduated from an integrated Denver East High School. Her son, Whitney, 32, and her daughter, Brooke, 29, graduated from an integrated Cherry Creek High School.
But some, such as Che’ Starks, 18, a George Washington High School senior, question whether LaNier’s sacrifices are already lost on today’s generation.
At the close of LaNier’s talk to the Mount Gilead scholars, as audience members were drying their eyes, Starks asked this question: “I see kids ditching classes, almost killing each other over colors, dropping out at 16. You fought so hard to go to school. How does that make you feel?”
LaNier simply responded that children need support from home. But later she privately admitted she’s troubled by the notion that minority youths are slamming the door she opened for them.
“That’s hurtful, no question,” she said. “But if they don’t know what I’ve done — either from school or from home — it’s not their fault for not knowing.”
“Don’t waste what Carlotta did for you,” the Rev. Acen Phillips, of Mount Gilead, implored the scholars. “It took a lot of work to get these doors open. If you don’t go through them, they will close on us.”
“Remember nine African-American young people risked their lives to get an education, and they didn’t just do it for themselves. They did it for all of us,” said Carolyn Ash, recent program director for the national Minority Student Achievement Network.
Legacy hidden in textbooks
The lessons of the Little Rock Nine may or may not be studied in Colorado schools.
It’s up to the teachers on how they teach civil rights and whether they even mention the Little Rock Nine, said Sue Schafer, accreditation manager for the Colorado Department of Education.
Though two of Colorado’s six history content standards are “diversity and change in society” and “historical inquiry,” they don’t require specific teachings.
LaNier’s daughter, Brooke, a University of Colorado graduate studying for her master’s in organizational psychology at Columbia University, vaguely remembers her mother’s legacy in textbooks.
“I remember something in a big book with an American flag on it when I was 11 or 12,” she said. Later she took a history elective at Cherry Creek High School that covered the Little Rock Nine.
Brooke LaNier’s introduction to the Little Rock Nine was a 1981 made-for-TV movie she saw when she was 7 called “Crisis at Central High,” as the 25th anniversary approached. But the perspective was through the eyes of a white school administrator who was not central to the real-life drama.
“Mom didn’t talk about it too much when we were kids,” Brooke LaNier said. “There was a blurb in the American history textbook, and there were pictures I had seen around home. But since I went to school with others that didn’t look like me in an integrated school, it didn’t really click.”
While Brooke had scant formal education on the Little Rock Nine, she was their direct beneficiary without knowing it. She attended Belleview Elementary and West Middle School in the Cherry Creek School District before graduating from Cherry Creek High in 1993.
Her brother, Whitney, a Denver real estate agent, was bused from his Southmoor neighborhood to help Denver Public Schools achieve integration, his mother said.
When the family soon moved to the Atlanta public school system to accommodate father Ira’s job transfer, Whitney received a firsthand education in racial prejudice.
“My son was the only black kid going to the school. He and the little boy from Argentina were ostracized. It was very disheartening,” Carlotta LaNier says.
She enrolled her children in a private school in Atlanta. When the family returned to Denver, the children attended integrated public schools without giving it a thought. “In my mind, they weren’t supposed to give it a thought,” LaNier said.
“This was a gold ring”
Fourteen-year-old high school sophomore Carlotta Walls didn’t give it a thought either when she was destined for Little Rock’s Central High in September 1957.
Central felt like the natural choice. The Little Rock School District followed the Supreme Court’s mandate in Brown by integrating its high schools first.
“I was supposed to go to school there,” LaNier said. “I passed it every day on the way to junior high school. I played baseball with the white kids all summer long. It seemed like a natural progression to go to school with them. No one expected all this.
“I knew it was important, but I didn’t know what it would become,” LaNier said. “I knew it was a step in the right direction. But I credit my parents for having those dreams – for having dreams and grasping opportunity.”
She didn’t tell her parents she was one of 147 black children to sign up to attend Central in the spring.
When the registration card arrived in July — along with a note to meet with the superintendent — it generated little discussion at home.
“In my family it was expected you would reach for an opportunity,” LaNier said. “This was a gold ring.”
The difference was stark between white Central High — hailed as the largest, most expensive, most beautiful high school in the nation when it was built in 1927 — and black Dunbar High — where LaNier would have gone to school and where her mother had graduated.
Central had 11,000 library books, compared with 5,000 at Dunbar. Central cost $1.5 million to build, Dunbar cost $400,000. Central had 100 classrooms, Dunbar 34. Central had science labs and athletic facilities. Dunbar had neither. The students at Dunbar received Central’s hand-me-down textbooks.
“I knew when the white kids got new textbooks. It always made me happy because I knew we were going to get their old ones,” LaNier said.
School Superintendent Virgil Blossom told the families of the 39 black children who eventually registered at Central that the students would be expelled if they retaliated against their abusers and, to minimize conflict, they wouldn’t be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities. LaNier gave up student council and the basketball team. Others among the nine gave up track, choir and band.
“When you’re going to school with all these opportunities and you can’t take advantage of them, that’s a little hurtful,” LaNier said. “But we knew that going in.”
After the meeting, the number of black students dwindled to 10. One girl didn’t return after being confronted by the threatening mob the first day. The Little Rock Nine were born.
In 1957, Little Rock was a moderate Southern town in which whites and blacks generally got along. LaNier was able to sit where she wanted on public buses thanks to her hero, Rosa Parks, who two years earlier had refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala.
Both the medical and law schools at the University of Arkansas had admitted black students without major incident. Hank Aaron was leading the largely white Milwaukee Braves to the World Series.
But LaNier swam in a segregated pool. She was relegated to the balcony in the movie theater, was allowed at the zoo only on certain days and often had to wait until she got home to use the bathroom.
LaNier was 11 when the Brown decision was handed down.
“I knew how important it was,” she said. “It was in our Weekly Reader in the sixth grade. It was reinforced in my elementary school and my church and my community. I knew what it meant — exactly.”
She was excited by the prospect of her first day of school on Sept. 4, 1957, as she was every year.
“The first day of school was always a good day,” LaNier said. “I had never missed a day of school since I started in the first grade.”
That was about to change. As she arrived for her first day of high school, she was stunned by what she saw: a riotous crowd and National Guard soldiers brought in by Gov. Orval Faubus to deny them entrance to Central High, a school her grandfather, a mason, helped build.
“We did not expect this,” said Carlotta’s mother, Juanita Walls, 78, of Denver. “We were in shock,” she said via written questions submitted through her daughter. “Yes, I did worry about her safety, but it was my faith in God that carried me through.”
Eight of the nine met at 13th and Park streets a block from school, where they were escorted by a group of supporters — NAACP leaders, ministers and rabbis.
The ninth, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, didn’t get the message and faced the jeering mob alone amid threats of lynching.
She tried to duck into nearby Ponder’s Drug Store — now National Park Service offices — but couldn’t get in.
“I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob — someone who maybe would help,” Eckford told Southern Exposure magazine in 1979. “I looked into the face of an old woman, and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”
The nine returned to school three weeks later — on Sept. 23 — after a federal judge denied a school board request to suspend the integration plan.
Television viewers nationwide watched as rioting broke out and the students were smuggled out a side door before noon.
President Dwight Eisenhower, calling the rioting “disgraceful,” ordered 1,200 members of the 101st Airborne Division to protect the children, and he placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal orders.
On Sept. 25 — the children’s third attempt at a full day of school — they were escorted into Central by the soldiers. Each child was assigned a bodyguard.
A week later, the 101st Airborne turned over duties to the federalized Arkansas National Guard, and discipline problems broke out. The nine were harassed and intimidated. Gloria Ray was hit by a rock and pushed down a flight of stairs. Minnijean Brown was suspended for dumping lunchroom chili on antagonists and eventually expelled. Two white students were suspended for wearing cards that read, “One down Eight to go.”
Carlotta Walls, whose heels were stepped on so often they bled, quietly made the honor roll.
Two returned for senior year
When Faubus closed all four Little Rock high schools for the 1958-59 school year pending a public vote on integration of all grade levels, eight of the Little Rock Nine went out of state to study, where they were sponsored by NAACP officials and other supporters.
Most never returned to school in Little Rock. LaNier took correspondence courses at the University of Arkansas her junior year and lived and studied in Cleveland and Chicago, where her sponsoring families resided.
She and Jefferson Thomas were the only two to return to Central in 1959-60 for their senior year.
“After the first year, I didn’t have to go back,” LaNier said. “But I had to validate that first year with my diploma.”
“I remember I fell asleep during the graduation, and my mom had to wake me up to watch Carlotta march,” said Tina Walls, who was 5 when her sister graduated from Central.
“Our parents have always instilled in us to complete what we start. They always encouraged us not just to participate, but to go the distance,” said Tina Walls, 49, senior vice president for Philip Morris in Richmond, Va.
LaNier attended Michigan State University to study in anonymity but moved to Colorado after two years. She graduated from Colorado State College, now the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, in 1968.
Her family, which moved to Kansas City, Mo., after their home was bombed, came to Denver in 1963.
It may seem odd that LaNier never talked much with her family — or anyone — about her role in the civil rights struggle.
“I know how painful it was for my family,” she says. “I have no regrets, but I feel like it burdened my family so much. That always bothered me.
“My sisters’ upbringing was not normal. The spotlight was always on me. Then,” she paused, “our home was bombed.”
That was the rainy night of Feb. 9, 1960, LaNier’s senior year at Central.
Neighbors thought it was another explosive thunderclap at the end of a violent thunderstorm. Carlotta, her mother and two sisters, Loujuana, 11, and Tina, 5, were in the six-room brick house when the explosion occurred but were not injured.
Her father, who was working in his father’s restaurant at the time, became an immediate suspect.
“My father was held by the FBI for 72 hours for bombing his own home,” LaNier said. “I’d never seen him cry or even get tears in his eyes.
“He did that day. He was walking down the hill toward home from the bus after he was released, and he was crying. I’ll never forget that image.”
The image from 44 years ago still stings her eyes with tears. Cartelyou Walls, an Army veteran who fought for civil liberties in World War II, struggled to enjoy them himself. He died of leukemia at age 53 in 1976 and is buried in Fort Logan National Cemetery.
“I have no regrets,” Juanita Walls said. “Our daughter’s courageous action helped open the door of education for African-Americans across the nation, and it has not been in vain.”
“All of the nine are quite specific about saying it was their choice to attend Central, that their parents didn’t encourage or discourage them but basically told them to do what they thought was right,” said oral historian Johanna Miller Lewis, chairwoman of the history department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. “That the parents had to sit at home and worry, while watching the violence at the school on television, explains why the nine believe their parents have been overlooked as heroes.”
Tina Walls learned the details of the Little Rock Nine by reading books. Her parents and sister rarely mentioned it.
“I was certainly aware of why we left Little Rock (the bombing) and my parents’ views that every child should have a quality education and that my sister was part of a group,” said Walls, who sought a multicultural education in Denver.
She attended mostly black Smith Elementary School in her northeast Denver neighborhood, then largely white, and Jewish Hill Junior High outside her neighborhood. She graduated as head girl, an elected position similar to class president, at Denver East High in 1973.
“Heed their lessons”
Today, 54 percent of the 2,100 students at Central High are black.
Blacks represent 34 percent of the 894 Central students taking advanced placement or pre-advanced placement courses at Central.
Still, large numbers of black and white students attend separate schools in Little Rock today defined by a mostly black public school system and mostly white private schools, according to a study this year by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Little Rock’s daily newspaper.
Today, four of the Little Rock Nine are involved in community service, including LaNier, who is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to educational opportunities for
African- Americans.
All were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Clinton, an Arkansas native, in 1999.
“It fell to these nine Americans when they were young, as children, to become our teachers,” he said. “And because they taught us well, we are a better country. But let us not forget to heed their lessons.”
The Little Rock Nine were followed by lunch-counter demonstrations in the South, and they laid the foundation for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in places of public accommodation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which placed federal observers at polls to ensure equal voting rights.
But there’s much work to be done, LaNier says, especially in the areas of educational opportunity and career advancement for minorities.
“For students like me who have a desire to go to college, I don’t think what she did is lost on those of us who have a dream,” said Che’ Starks, the 18-year-old who is headed to Indiana State. “What she did is not in vain.”
