Even if they were alive in 1957, many of those assembled at Congregation Emmanuel in East Denver on Sunday afternoon did not experience the same civil-rights era as the Little Rock Nine, whom they came to honor.
The nine teenagers integrated Little Rock Central High School that year, facing down the Arkansas National Guard, the governor of their state, racism of classmates and the hatred of half a divided nation three years after Brown v. Board of Education ordered integrated schools. The Little Rock Nine endured slurs, death threats and physical abuse in the name of equal education.
A series of events are planned in Denver this week to celebrate the nine’s courage and legacy.
Tom Walters, 62, had come to the ceremony Sunday by himself. As a white teenager in Louisville, Ky., he taunted blacks, he said, fearing integration.
“I secretly thought even back then how terrible it must be for them,” he said. “I’ve been ashamed of who I was then the rest of my life. I think some people were slower to realize how wrong it was.”
A few pews away, Algetah Brown, 73, said some, like the Little Rock Nine, paid more dearly for our nation’s gains in equality.
Brown, who is African-American, attended an integrated school in Richmond, Ind., and heard her first racist comment when she was in elementary school. She marched home to tell her mother.
“Child, have you forgotten who you are?” Brown recalled her mother saying more than 65 years ago, before ordering the child to go to the library to learn about the struggles of her race.
Just as Brown stopped speaking, the Mile High Chapter Choir, an African-American all-star gospel group, began to sing. Soon, a choir of white people gathered from the audience and joined them on the steps of the pulpit to sing out their hearts to “This Little Light of Mine.”
The events are in Denver because of Carlotta Walls LaNier, who came West after Central High School to attend the University of Northern Colorado and has served as a trustee of Denver’s Iliff School of Theology, one of the sponsors of the events.
The reunion of the Little Rock Nine marks only their fifth time together since graduation — three times in Little Rock, once in Washington to receive the Congressional Gold Medal and “now in my space I call home,” LaNier said Sunday.
For all the division in that violent, angry period, there were glimpses of the good in people, said Jefferson Thomas, who had been student body president at the all-black Dunbar Junior High before enrolling at Central.
Historians note that Thomas was a favorite target of bullies.
On Sunday, Thomas recalled to the audience how a white student slipped him a note at school and whispered for him not to read it before he got home. Thomas expected another slur, another threat.
Instead, the note was from a younger brother of the school’s worst bully. The brother said he was sorry, yet he was afraid to stand with Thomas in public. He asked for friendship, “if you’re not afraid to have a coward for a friend.”
They talked on the phone almost nightly, Thomas’ secret friend tipping him off to abuse the bullies were planning.
“Love is the most powerful force in the universe,” Thomas said on Sunday. “It’s the only force I know of that can overcome some of the intense hatred we had at Central.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
