A School Year Like No Other, Eyes on the Prize: “Fighting Back: 1957-1962”
Lesson by Bill Bigelow
A group of white people protesting the admission of the "Little Rock Nine" to Central High School. Photo by John T. Bledsoe, courtesy of Library of Congress
Grade Level: High School
Time Required: One to Two Class Periods
Materials
[Optional] Copies of the Student Handouts “Inside Elizabeth Ann Eckford” and “In Their Own Words: Eyes on the Prize: Little Rock and Mississippi”
[Optional] A transcript of this episode of Eyes on the Prize.
“A school year like no other.” That’s the narrator’s understated description of the 1957–58 school year at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the dramatic episode “Eyes on the Prize, Fighting Back (1957–1962).
More than 50 years after heavily armed federal troops escorted nine African American students into Central High School, it’s easy to scoff at the results of desegregation. So Black children can go to public schools formerly reserved for whites. So what? Is life within integrated schools equitably structured? Has desegregation significantly reduced the achievement gap between Black and white children? Have income disparities withered away? Can we even say that schools are less segregated than they were 50 years ago?
This is not a lesson that attempts to analyze the ambiguous legacy of desegregation. Instead it celebrates the determination and sacrifice of those individuals who were the shock troops in this struggle. As Melba Patillio Beals recounts,
By the time school had ended I had sort of settled into myself. And I could have gone on for the next five years — it didn’t matter anymore. I was past feeling. I was into just that kind of numb pain where you say, ‘Hey, I can make it. Do whatever you’d like, and it just doesn’t matter anymore.’ But I came home and by myself I walked to the back yard and I burned my books, and I burned everything that I could burn. And I just stood there crying looking into the fire. And wondering whether I would go back, but not wanting to go back.
To a lesser extent, the lesson attempts to examine some of the resistance to school integration. Students watch the video, but through writing they are also invited to step into the shoes of the individuals whose lives shaped and were shaped by these key civil rights battles.
Some students focus on the hardships of the African American teenagers attempting to integrate Central High School, as does Lila Johnson in her poem:
I remember the mob
how faces became blurred shades of light and dark
how fingers reached greedily for a sleeve an arm a neck
how bodies formed an intricate weave and squeezed
in hopes of crushing a young black girl
Frequently, students write from Melba Pattillo Beals’ standpoint as she burns her books after that 1957-58 school year. Sarah Sherwood penned a bitter piece she called “The Fire in My Soul”:
I swore to myself I would never go back there again, that I would never put myself through that kind of humiliation again. I hated them; I hated them for making me hate. I told myself I would never become like them, but here I am wishing they were all dead.
And then she lights her books on fire:
I sat there and watched as my dreams, my hopes, burned away. I coldly stared at the flame. There were no more tears to cry.
Despite the anguish in students’ writing, perhaps the most common motif in their pieces is defiance. Alice Ramos imagines the thoughts of Ernest Green, the first African American to graduate from Central High School:
But I graduated from
your all-white, all-prejudice school
They didn’t clap
When I went to pick up my diploma
But I didn’t care
I don’t need their clapping
I beat the monster
that day I stepped inside the school.
In fact, more than 50 years after Brown, we can see that the “monster” is more multifaceted, more complicated than it may have appeared to the NAACP activists who led the move to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. So we need to help our students reflect on alternatives that civil rights activists might have pursued 50 years ago, and let’s help students probe the contemporary nature of the monster of racial inequality. But we can also offer students the opportunity to celebrate the courage and tenacity of the young people who risked their lives for a better education — for themselves and for those who would come after.
This article first appeared in a special edition of Rethinking Schools magazine, “The Promise,” on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision (Spring 2004; Vol. 18, #3)