Fifties (113 page)

More than thirty years later, John Chancellor could still talk about the day the 101st Airborne came to Little Rock as if it had happened yesterday: The soldiers marched into the area and set up their perimeter. Their faces were immobile and, unlike the Guardsmen’s, betrayed no politics, just duty. As they marched in, the clear, sharp sound of their boots clacking on the street was a reminder of their professionalism. Chancellor had never thought much about the Constitution before; if anything, he had somehow taken it for granted. But he realized that day that he was watching the Constitution in action. There was something majestic about the scene: it was a moment at once thrilling and somehow frightening as well.

With the arrival of the 101st, the nation yet again witnessed a stunning spectacle on television: armed soldiers of one of the most honored divisions in the United States Army escorting young black children where once there had been a mob. When the segregationists in the street protested, the paratroopers turned out to be very different from the National Guard soldiers who had so recently been their pals. The men of the 101st fixed their bayonets and placed them right at the throats of the protestors, quickly moving them out of the school area. That first morning, an Army officer came to Daisy
Bates’s house, where the children had gathered, and saluted her. “Mrs. Bates,” he said. “We’re ready for the children. We will return them to your home at three-thirty.” It was, said Minniejean Brown, one of the nine, an exhilarating moment. “For the first time in my life I felt like an American citizen,” she later told Mrs. Bates.

For the moment, the law of the nation had been upheld against the will of the mob and the whims of a segregationist politician. The black children were escorted to and from school every day by the soldiers. Little Rock seemed to calm down. Faubus screamed about the encroachment of states’ rights by the federal government and bemoaned the fact that Arkansas was occupied territory. Why, he himself, he said, had helped rescue the 101st when it was pinned down at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (which was untrue—by the time his outfit had arrived, the 101st had already stopped the last German drive).

After a few weeks, with the situation seemingly under control, the government pulled out the 101st and put the federalized Arkansas National Guard in charge. With that, the situation began to deteriorate. The mob was no longer a problem, but inside the school there was a systematic and extremely well organized assault upon the nine children by high-school-age segregationists. They not only harassed the black children but, more effectively, any white child who was courteous or friendly to them.

It was a calculated campaign (organized, school officials suspected, right out of the governor’s mansion). The school bullies, behaving like youthful Klansmen, knew they had behind them the full power of the state government and the increasingly defiant Arkansas population. That meant the job of protecting the nine fell on a handful of teachers and administrators in the school. The nine students were in for a very hard and ugly year. There was a relentless assault upon them—kicking, tripping, hitting them from behind, harassing them with verbal epithets as they walked down the hall, pouring hot soup on them in the cafeteria. Their lockers were broken into regularly, their books stolen. The school administrators knew exactly who the ringleaders were but found them boastfully proud. One girl told Elizabeth Huckaby, the vice-principal, that she was entirely within her rights. All she had done, the girl said, was to use the word
nigger.
It was as if her rights included harassing others for racial reasons.

How, in retrospect, the nine children stood all of this is amazing, but they did, showing remarkable inner strength and character, again and again turning the other cheek. On many occasions they
seemed ready to break, and one or two would show up in Ms. Huckaby’s office in tears, exhausted by the cruelty and on the verge of quitting. It was the job of Ms. Huckaby and others to plead with them to keep going and to remind them that if they faltered, it would merely be harder on the next group, because the segregationists would be bolder with success. Only one of the nine did not finish the first year: Minniejean Brown. Perhaps the most enthusiastic and emotional of the nine, she seemed to be the one least able to turn away from the harassment. Soon, the segregationists realized that she was the weak link and turned their full force on her. Minniejean on occasion fought back. Tormented in the cafeteria one day by her enemies, she dumped a soup bowl on the head of a student and was suspended. She tried desperately to control herself but in time responded once too often and was expelled. Immediately, cards were printed up that said,
ONE DOWN, EIGHT TO GO
.

Some of the black children’s parents wanted them to pull out at various times during the year, fearing the price was simply too high. But Daisy Bates was strong: She reminded the children again and again that they were doing this not for themselves but for others, some as yet unborn. They were now, like it or not, leaders in a moral struggle. That year Ernest Green graduated, and twenty years later, he was perhaps the most successful member of the graduating class: As an assistant secretary of labor in the cabinet of Jimmy Carter, he was the featured speaker at the twentieth reunion of his classmates.

In a way, everyone seemed to have gotten something out of Little Rock. The civil rights leaders learned how to challenge the forces of segregation in front of the modern media, most notably television cameras. The networks, new and unsure of their role, had found a running story composed of almost nothing but images, which would not only prove compelling to viewers but which would legitimize its early reporters for their courage and decency (just as the broadcasts of Ed Murrow and his CBS colleagues had been legitimized radio during World War Two). In the months after the quiz-show scandals rocked the networks, there was a calculated attempt to address the resulting loss of prestige by giving the news shows ever greater freedom to cover such important events as Little Rock. Not just the news shows but the networks themselves were suddenly in the business of building respectability. John Chancellor in time would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in American journalism and public life, as anchor of the
Today
show, as head of the Voice of America and, finally, as anchorman of the NBC news.

No one, of course, gained more than Orval Faubus. He portrayed
himself as the victim of massive federal intervention, the lonely man who believed in states’ rights and the will of his own people. No longer could any good (white) citizen of Arkansas be for segregation and against Faubus. A third term, which had seemed unlikely before Little Rock, was guaranteed. With two moderate candidates running against him in 1958, he beat their combined total of votes by more than two to one. A fourth term followed. And a fifth term. And finally a sixth. On occasion there was talk of retirement, but he had, wrote the
Arkansas Gazette,
ridden off into more sunsets than Tom Mix. His decision to block integration set the stage for a generation of Southern politicians, most notably George Wallace, who had learned from Little Rock how to manipulate the anger within the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media. The moderate position had been badly undermined at Little Rock, and an era of confrontation was to follow, Harry Ashmore wrote prophetically in
Life
in 1958.

A year after Little Rock, Daisy Bates suggested that she come to the White House with the nine children. It would be a wonderful thing, she suggested, for the children, who had endured so much hatred and violence, to be received by the President of the United States. The idea terrified Eisenhower’s White House staff. In truth, it was a hard thing to say no to. Sherman Adams, the White House chief of staff and the boss of Frederick Morrow, the one black man on Ike’s staff, shrewdly put the ball in Morrow’s court. Adams asked Morrow: Was Mrs. Bates’s request a wise one? No, said Morrow, because it was not a question of whether the President sympathized with the nine children. Rather, if he met with them, it would so enrage Southern leaders that it would diminish his role as a leader on such issues in the future. In addition, he added, the meeting would only subject the students “to more abuse than ever before, and certainly the President does not want to be a party to this kind of affair.” “You are absolutely correct,” Adams told Morrow. “That was my thinking on the meeting.” Adams had one more move left. Would Morrow please call Mrs. Bates to tell her? It was, Morrow noted, a call he dreaded making, but he knew the rules and he knew what he was there to do. He was a team player, so he did it. He suggested that if she and the children came to Washington, he would set up a specially conducted tour of the White House.

No aspect of the crisis, particularly the role played by Orval Faubus, escaped the notice of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was nothing if not political, and he understood the emerging politics of protest brilliantly. King knew from his experience in Montgomery,
where television news was making its earliest inroads, that what he was doing was no longer merely local, that because of television, for the first time the nation was convening each evening around 6 or 7
P.M.

King and his people were conducting the most perilous undertaking imaginable, for they knew that the more skillfully they provoked their enemies, the more dramatic the footage they would reap, and also the more likely they were to capture the moral high ground. King was appealing to the national electorate at the expense of the regional power structure, which he considered hostile anyway. He needed some measure of white backlash, and he needed, among other things, proper villains. He wanted ordinary white people to sit in their homes and watch blacks acting with great dignity while Southern officials, moved by the need to preserve a system he hated, assaulted them. As such he was the dramatist of a national morality play: The blacks were in white hats; the whites, much to their surprise, would find themselves in the black hats. A play required good casting and Martin King soon learned to pick not just his venues carefully, but also his villains.

Montgomery, for all its successes, had lacked villains. Certainly, the local officials in Montgomery had mistreated the black protesters, but there was no one brutal figure who had come to symbolize the evils of segregation and who could be counted on, when provoked, to play into the hands of the Movement. But Orval Faubus was a different matter, a man who made ordinary Americans recoil. As the Movement grew, King was offered various cities as platforms for his protests, but he was always careful to select those with the ugliest and crudest segregationists—such men as Bull Connor, in Birmingham, and Sheriff Jim Clark, in Selma. In the past, segregation had been enforced more subtly, often through economic threats. Blacks would lose their jobs if they signed petitions asking schools to desegregate, for example. Racial prejudice had been like a giant beast that never came out in the daytime; now King and others like him were exposing it to bright light, fresh air, and the eye of the television camera and the beast was dying.

The timing of King’s protest was critical: 1955 and 1956 marked the years when the networks were just becoming networks in the true sense, thanks in large part to the network news shows. Along with John Kennedy, King was one of the first people who understood how to provide action for film, how, in effect, to script the story for the executive producers (so that the executive producers thought they were scripting it themselves). It was an ongoing tour de force for
King: a great story, great action, constant confrontation, great film, plenty of moral and spiritual tension. There was a hypnotic effect in watching it all unfold; King treated the television reporters assigned to him well. He never wanted a confrontation that the network newsmen could not capture on film and feed to New York, nor did he, if at all possible, want the action too late in the day that it missed the deadlines of the network news shows. So it was that the Movement began and so it was that television amplified and speeded up the process of political and social change in America.

One of the most powerful currents taking place and changing in American life in this decade—taking place even as few recognized it—was the increasing impact and importance of black culture on daily American life. This was particularly true in the fifties in two areas critically important to young Americans: music and sports. In popular music the influence of black culture was profound, much to the irritation of a generation of parents of white teenagers. While Elvis was the first white country artist to use the beat, he was merely part of a larger revolution in which not only were many of the features of black music being used by white musicians, but black musicians were increasingly accepted by white audiences as well. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, and Fats Domino were now integrated into the white hit-charts. The other evolution, equally important, was taking place in sports, and it had a significant impact on the society. With the coming of television, professional sports, particularly football and basketball, had a far greater national impact than they had ever had before. What had once happened before relatively small crowds now happened simultaneously in millions of American homes; in effect, it was going from the periphery to the very center of the culture.

In terms of the coming of technology and the coming of the gifted black athletes, a dual revolution was sweeping across the country: in the quality of athletic ability of those able to play, and in the number of people now able to watch. Professional football, which, in comparison with professional baseball, had been virtually a minor sport before the arrival of television, now flowered under the sympathetic eye of the camera, its importance growing even as the nation was being wired city by city and house by house for television. Suddenly, professional football had become a new super sport, the first true rival to Major League baseball for the nation’s affection.