Complex Legacy of Little Rock : 2 Who Integrated Central High 30 Years Ago Recall the Hatred

The most poignant moment Terrance Roberts remembers from high school is being a gangly, sensitive, 15-year-old black kid confronted on the athletic field by a beefy white kid named McCauley who was brandishing a baseball bat. A bunch of other white kids formed a circle around them.

“The only thing I could think of was to look McCauley in the eye and not break the gaze,” recalled Roberts, an assistant dean at UCLA’s school of social welfare. “I said, ‘If there’s any spark of humanity in this guy at all, I’ll find it or I won’t find it.’ So that’s what I did. I stood there and looked at him.

“He came up and he half raised the bat and he said, ‘Nigger, if you weren’t so skinny. . . .’ and then his voice trailed off and he dropped the bat and he walked away. I thought to myself then, ‘I’m probably over the worst of it.’ ”

Millions of American blacks who were on the cutting edge of integration carry similar memories, some of them bloody. Roberts’ memories are special, however, almost public property. They began 30 years ago today when he and eight other black children tried to enter classes at all-white Central High in Little Rock, Ark.

Within hours, the three boys and six girls became the stars of what was then the biggest story of America’s civil rights movement, an ugly, dramatic struggle between emerging federal law and ingrained Southern segregation.

Central High was scheduled to integrate in 1957 under a federal court order based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional.

In defiance, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to block integration. On Sept. 4, the first day the black children tried to enter Central High, they were stopped by guardsmen and an angry white mob that cursed and spat at them, forcing them to return to their homes.

The stalemate lasted three weeks. Then President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the guardsmen and sent 1,000 Army troops to Little Rock to control citizen opposition, the first time since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period that federal troops had been used to keep peace in any state. Amid a wave of epithets, the nine children finally entered school.

Years later, one of Roberts’ black classmates, Melba Pattillo Beals, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, wrote in a magazine that the year of hostility and harassment she endured at Central High put “a core of steel” in her spine. “There was nothing you could ever threaten me with that I couldn’t survive,” she said.

The experiences of Roberts and a second member of the Little Rock 9 who settled in the Los Angeles area, Jefferson Thomas, paint a more complex portrait.

Roberts, 45, who lives with his wife in Pasadena and is the father of two grown daughters, left Arkansas after one year at Central High. There was little choice. In a gesture of contempt for integration, Faubus won the Arkansas Legislature’s permission to close Central and Little Rock’s other three high schools for the 1958-59 academic year. Several of Roberts’ aunts and uncles had moved to Los Angeles. He completed high school at Los Angeles High.

Intelligent and personable as a boy, Roberts says the experience neither scarred him nor imbued him with a sense of destiny. It did not change him at all, he contends. Although Little Rock was mildly segregated by Southern standards, growing up had already educated him. “I had been a fairly astute observer of the social scene, and I knew that what was going on between the races was irrational,” he said.

He, like many of the Little Rock 9, went on to professional success. Ernest Green was appointed an assistant secretary of labor by President Jimmy Carter and is vice president of a Washington investment office. Beals became a television newswoman, then a public relations woman. The others live more private lives. Thomas is a Department of Defense contract auditor. Thelma Mothershed Wair and Elizabeth Eckford live in Missouri, Minnijean Brown Trickey in Canada, Carlotta Walls LaNier in Denver and Gloria Ray Kalmark in Belgium.

The first day they tried to enter Central High was as bewildering as it was frightening, Roberts said. They were supposed to go as a group, but Eckford and Roberts went individually. Roberts walked from home--Central was much closer than his former all-black school, a 10-mile bus ride--and found himself immediately surrounded by reporters.

‘It’s Really Strange’

“They were the first phalanx. Outside them was the mob and outside the mob were the national guardsmen who were ringing the school. So there I am talking to reporters and it’s really strange. I’m standing there answering questions and just outside these reporters are people who are spitting and cursing and calling me ‘nigger’ and ‘Go back to Africa.’

“I don’t know if I was so much scared as mystified. . . . Fifteen-year-olds fear nothing. I mean, there is no force on earth that can deter a 15-year-old. It didn’t matter how strong the forces were. We were involved in it, and we were going to see it through. I don’t think we even thought about the fact our lives could be in danger.”

When the blacks were finally admitted to the 3,000-student campus in late September, life became an exercise in resisting taunts and threats. They had agreed to not respond, but they were continually kicked, pinched and knocked down by a persistent group of white students, about 100 of whom were suspended for misbehavior during the year, even though the blacks had to have an adult witness before school officials would act.

Roberts, described by one civil rights worker of the era as “sensitive as an expensive watch and just as delicate,” was the victim of several physical confrontations.

“I got hit pretty hard in gym class one day with a combination lock,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Somebody threw it from short range, caught me in the side of the head. I didn’t pass out, but I was close to it, and my thought was, ‘I have to get out of this locker room or I’m gone.’

‘Shooting an Animal’

“The way they would do things would be to attack from a hidden point. It’s like shooting an animal. You wound the animal enough to get close, then you pounce for the kill. So I held myself up on the lockers and walked out of there into the coach’s office.”

Roberts, who speaks with a soft, high voice and the composed demeanor befitting his training as a psychologist, is one of the Little Rock 9 most frequently sought out by the news media for interviews at each major anniversary--20, 25, 30. He is cooperative and coolly frank in his beliefs that when America congratulates itself about civil rights victories like Little Rock, it celebrates nothing more than the illusion of progress.

“A lot of people think I should change my ideas because I’m always talking about the need to combat racism. A lot of people, who I think are uncomfortable with the whole idea, say, ‘But that’s over, that’s gone.’ There are people right here at UCLA, students and colleagues.

“It’s amazing, but I think part of it is just the lack of understanding reality. You know it’s possible to live in this country with a total lack of awareness about what some people go through, because you can effectively isolate yourself and live in what I call White America, and you don’t know anything else. You don’t want to know anything else.

“The one thing that causes me to have the most despair on a continuing basis is what happens to all the talents and abilities possessed by young black children who’ll never have a chance to do anything with that because much of that energy will have to go into fighting racism on some level.

“Or, if they are not hopeful enough to fight, then they’ll give up and go the way of drugs or living as an outlaw.”

More Guarded Perspective

Across town in Central Los Angeles, classmate Jefferson Thomas holds Central High in a much different, more guarded perspective.

A year behind Roberts in school and less sophisticated, Thomas was shocked by the hatred that erupted in Little Rock. “I never thought it would be a problem,” he said earnestly. “I had no reason to think that the quiet, peaceful place where I grew up could change so drastically.” Before integration began, “I used to go to Central on weekends and play ball with the kids there.”

Unlike Roberts, Thomas stayed in Little Rock after Faubus closed the schools. He took correspondence courses instead of attending 11th grade. The next year the schools reopened, and he graduated from Central. His father, under pressure at work because of his son’s role in integration, decided to move West to seek employment. Thomas went to college in Detroit for a year, then followed his family. It was not a choice he made willingly.

“If not for this,” he said of his Central High experience, “I’d probably still be in Arkansas. It wasn’t something I wanted to leave.

Nor would he be so nervous in large crowds.

It is a reaction from that time of “not knowing from one hour to the next what was going to happen,” he said. “I don’t like going to the Coliseum for sports events. I haven’t been in a crowd situation since the Army, and there someone was always in control. I worry about what would happen if somebody shouted out one or two little phrases and everybody went wild.”

‘Couldn’t Hit Back’

In terms of overt violence, Thomas said he was not often victimized at Central.

“I would get out of the way. I was a skinny little guy. I’d been on the track team in junior high. I could run fast. I looked at it this way: If I’d been in an all-black school and a 6-foot-1, 200-pound guy pushed me around, I wouldn’t go flying into his chest. Mentally what would hurt was when little puny guys came up and slapped you in the face. You couldn’t hit back.

“We got better experienced at getting out of the way as the year went on. You’d laugh at the fact that they ran into the wall while they were going after you.”

Thomas, the divorced father of a 21-year-old son, said few of the people he works with at the Defense Department office in El Segundo, where he has been employed 10 years, know that he was a civil rights pioneer. A good friend said that when the topic of Little Rock came up, she had to yank from him the fact that he was one of the children.

“I prefer it that way,” he said. Telling the stories hurts. “In my life there have been two periods of time that were very trying, Central High and Vietnam,” where he served for a year after being drafted in 1968.

Not that he isn’t proud of what he did. It felt good a few years back when his son came home and told about encountering a history textbook that described the incidents his father had told him about.

‘A Friendly Soul’

Not that there weren’t some glimmers of humanity along the way. Roberts remembers the white man who ran after him as he headed home on that first violent day. “I turned around, expecting to do combat with him. It turned out he was a friendly soul. He just wanted to let me know that not everybody felt that way about letting me into school.”

There was Robin, the white classmate who let Roberts share her algebra book after his was stolen and paid for her kindness by having to endure abuse from other whites. “Her family was forced to move away from town,” he said.

And there is the yellowed telegram inside the scrapbook of clippings Roberts kept. It is dated Oct. 18, 1957. “We can never forget what you did here,” it says. It was signed merely, “A White Lady.”

Roberts looked at the telegram and added a caveat.

“I’ve never been quite sure which way to take that,” he said.