Seventeen-year-old Jasmine Madley is all nervous energy when I meet her. Her
skinny brown legs are in constant motion. She bounces here and there,
laughing, and throwing her arms around her white friends, who, like herself,
are all cheerleaders. She declares that she just loves to go to school.
Not any school, though.
Her school is Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. A school where,
this month 47 years ago, nine black students her age were verbally
and physically terrorized by a belligerent white mob.
The National Guard was sent out to intimidate them even further.
Only after a three-week standoff did these students enter the school,
this time protected by columns of federal troops with fixed bayonets.
Another river was painfully crossed in America’s struggle for
school integration.
That crisis, which Jasmine can hardly imagine today, is still a vivid
memory for Thelma Mothershed Wair. She is one of the Little Rock Nine.
Now in a wheelchair, she remembers how she was chosen to walk through
a phalanx of angry citizens, who spit at her and called her “nigger”.
“All I wanted was to go to school,” she says matter-of-factly.
It is a comment I hear over and over again on our bus tour from people
who went to an all-black school and suddenly found themselves bused
to an all-white one. With trepidation and fear in their hearts, and
hardly knowing what awaited them, they met the angry mobs and changed
the course of history.
As bad as it was, it got better. Some were lucky. They had kind teachers
who tried hard not to make a difference between a black and a white
child. Others had to fight every day for being who they are, like Carolyn
Hobbs from Little Rock, who would eventually give in, too frightened,
and go back to an all-black school.
Some had mothers who would rather keep and educate their children
at home for a year till they could go to a white school. “White
schools were better,” they explain, and “I wanted the best
for my kids.” Indeed, schools for blacks received the hand-me-down
books and they received less money.
Central High became another symbol for a time of courage and fear.
Or as principal Nancy Rousseau said in a ceremony for the reflecting
pool dedication, “We can’t change the past but in the future
we can make all the difference.”
Looking at these two women on the same school ground, I see their
invisible bond: Thelma and Jasmine, though generations apart, represent
our shared past and our hope for the future.
