The following story was originally published in The Denver Post on May 23, 2004.
With excitement and trepidation I recently wrote about the legacy of the Little Rock Nine, the courageous black children who in 1957 integrated white Central High School in Arkansas – a group that includes Denver’s own Carlotta Walls LaNier.
The nine were testing Brown vs. the Board of Education, the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in public schools. Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the May 1954 landmark ruling.
I was excited because I had so much to learn, panicked because I knew so little.
As a white guy growing up in white schools, I was provided scant education about the civil rights movement. When writing about LaNier and the Little Rock Nine, I was unprepared for the range of emotions I would feel.
LaNier, her parents and her two younger sisters, moved to Denver in 1963 – six years after the nine fought for the right to equal education and three years after their Little Rock home was bombed in LaNier’s senior year.
But she seemed uninterested in reliving those years when I tried to contact her. For weeks she announced in phone messages that she would be unavailable.
“A lot of them shut down their memories because it’s so emotionally painful,” said historian Johanna Miller Lewis, of the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, hired by the National Park Service to conduct an oral history of the nine. “Even today, Carlotta can be extremely wary when she meets people for the first time.”
I searched the Web and found pictures that instantaneously transported me to Little Rock in September 1957. The hatred and the violence of a riotous white mob stopping children from going to school. The fear on the children’s faces.
The story of these children drove me to tears. As a father, I tried to comprehend what their parents experienced.
When LaNier finally called, she invited me to a speech she gave the next day. During her remarks she vividly recalled how as a 14-year-old sophomore and the youngest of the Little Rock Nine, she was shocked to see National Guard troops and the angry mob denying her entrance to the school.
“I couldn’t believe they were telling me I couldn’t go to school,” she said.
The Little Rock Nine were turned back that first day but returned three weeks later escorted by federal troops called in by President Dwight Eisenhower. Racial taunts and abuse chased the nine students the whole year.
When LaNier finished telling her story, the audience of young scholarship winners and their parents dried their eyes, overcome by what LaNier and others had done for them. And it struck me how LaNier’s legacy has had concentric impacts.
She helped to create an opportunity for her younger sisters, Loujuana and Tina; her children, Whitney and Brooke; and children throughout the United States to receive an equal education.
When LaNier allowed me to interview her after the speech, I was awed by how she, as a child, was a powerful force that changed the tide of American society.
“I stood on the shoulders of others,” she told me. “And others have stood on my shoulders.”
Suddenly I had a strong desire to introduce my 9-year-old son to LaNier, so he could meet living history, so he would have a personal attachment to the Little Rock Nine when he learned in school of their sacrifices.
But when I called the Colorado Department of Education to find out when he would get this important lesson, I was stunned – angry – to discover my son may not be taught about what happened in Little Rock. It’s not required. Teachers decide whether they teach about the civil rights movement.
The story of the Little Rock Nine is a true story full of life lessons more dramatic than anything on fictional TV, and it may or may not be taught in Colorado’s classrooms.
Then I wondered how many youngsters would stay in school and persevere under difficult circumstances if only they knew how these pioneers, mere children themselves, risked their lives and dignity to lay a path for generations to come.
“Many of our African-American young people are starting to embrace the image that it’s not cool to go to school,” said Carolyn Ash, of Denver, until recently the program director for the Minority Student Achievement Network, a coalition of school districts nationwide working to close the achievement gap.
“African-American youth are bombarded on a daily basis with negative images of themselves and who they can become.”
Even LaNier’s little sister, Tina, and daughter, Brooke, barely got the lesson of the Little Rock Nine in school and sought out the details in their own reading.
“When a People magazine reporter and photographer came to the house for a 25th anniversary story when I was 7, I understood that mom did something special, but I wasn’t sure what it was,” Brooke LaNier said.
“I got the details by reading books on my own,” said Tina Walls, who was 5 when LaNier graduated from Central High in 1960.
And my son? He’ll hear the story of the Little Rock Nine from me.
And if he’s lucky, one day he’ll meet Carlotta Walls LaNier.
