Echoes of Little Rock

On Thursday, it was President Clinton who held open the door for the nine blacks who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

Forty years ago, it was David Cooper who helped open it.

Now a Westwood public relations executive, Cooper was a rifle-toting Army private in the 101st Airborne Division when he helped escort the nine frightened black teenagers up the school’s steps and through the front door Sept. 25, 1957.

“The nine kids pulled up in station wagons and we formed a cordon around them and went up the steps,” Cooper, 58, recalled Thursday.

About two dozen paratroopers with fixed bayonets marched to the school’s front door in two columns. The children walked between them. Cooper was near the back of the line of soldiers on the youngsters’ right.

“There was no conversation. But there was a lot of screaming and hollering coming from across the street.”

The story of the dramatic showdown at the Little Rock high school has been told many times from the point of view of politicians who precipitated it, and from the viewpoint of the nine boys and girls who found themselves caught up in one of the most historic episodes of the civil rights movement.

But the story of the 1,100 soldiers, called in by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the face of violent opposition to integration, has rarely been told.

“Most of us were just about the same age as the students,” said Cooper, who was an 18-year-old private first class in the unit’s 327th airborne battle group. “We hadn’t known we were going to Little Rock until we got on the plane.”

*

Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division to Central High after Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had used his own National Guard troops to block integration of the school three weeks earlier.

Central High had been scheduled to integrate in 1957 under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional.

Still, plenty of questions were flying through the minds of the young paratroopers as they traveled in more than 50 C-119 Flying Boxcar aircraft from Ft. Campbell, Ky., to Little Rock Air Force Base.

“We wondered why the local police weren’t there. Were we going to have to round up people? Were we going to have to shoot our weapons? What was going to happen?” said Cooper. “I’d only been out of high school a year myself.”

Bottles and rocks were tossed at army trucks carrying the soldiers from the air base to the high school campus, Cooper said. The paratroopers pitched tents on the football practice field behind Central High’s main building.

To the relief of some of the young soldiers--and to the despair of others--ammunition was not handed out for the M-14 rifles they carried the next morning as they marched to the front of the school.

“We never told anyone that,” Cooper said.

Cooper’s attention was more focused on the crowd across the street from school than on the nine students he and the others had come to protect.

The crowd was mostly composed of young white men. They screamed insults and racial epithets at the nine children. “The Central High kids were not a problem,” Cooper recalled.

Tensions outside the school eased after that first day.

“What was surprising is how quickly it settled down. It went from a few thousand to a few hundred protesters in about a week,” he said.

The paratroopers were quickly phased out of the picture, initially replaced by federalized Arkansas National Guard troops and then removed from the campus completely.

Cooper and other soldiers bivouacked on the school grounds for about two weeks, taking turns standing guard. Cooper never had another turn at escorting the nine black students in or out of the main classroom building. The soldiers spent about another month in barracks at a nearby National Guard base before returning to Kentucky.

Although school buildings were off-limits to all soldiers except those escorting the black students between classrooms, Central High students seemed friendly to the troops.

Older people proved to be less tolerant, Cooper observed.

“I was amazed when parents came and dragged their kids out of school. It awoke me to the reality of the world. It wasn’t that way where I grew up.”

Cooper was raised in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where his own high school was integrated. His first experience with racism had come outside Ft. Campbell, where he noticed drinking fountains labeled “white” and “colored.”

Although Cooper had been eyeing a military career when he got his parents’ permission to join at age 17, he left the Army in 1959 and returned to Nevada to go to college.

He found that his Little Rock experience had changed him.

In Reno in the 1960s, he said, he helped lead a sit-in at a local bar after its operators refused to serve a black man. Later, he said, he worked on a college magazine and wrote editorials in favor of civil rights.

He turned to public relations in the 1970s after working in broadcasting and as an educator and--briefly--as a U.S. Senate committee staff member.

Cooper has saved yellowed copies of the Tiger, Central High’s student newspaper, that he picked up on campus. The Oct. 3, 1957, edition included an interview with a 101st Airborne captain who stressed that the soldiers’ intent was to leave campus as soon as possible.

“We don’t want to be obnoxious to the people. These boys [the younger soldiers] want to be--are even eager--to be friendly with the students. We don’t want to be foreboding. That’s why we’re trying to slip into the background as much as possible,” Capt. Edmund Barker told student interviewers.

*

Cooper said he has not talked with any of his former fellow soldiers in more than 25 years. But he returned to visit the Central High campus in 1983. And he stopped off at Ft. Campbell this year on a vacation trip his wife.

He was surprised, Campbell said, that the paratroopers’ Central High assignment is not mentioned in the 101st Airborne museum at the Army base.

“I told the curator there I had some old newspapers and magazines about the 101st in Little Rock I would send him,” Cooper said.

“I’m proud of what we did.”