A “For Better or Worse” Exerpt

Dawn of American integration

September 3, 1957

Little Rock, Arkansas  

“As you know by now, yesterday— the day before the ‘Little Rock Nine’ were to enter Central High School— in a televised speech, Governor Orval Faubus explained that he had called out the Arkansas National Guard because he’d heard that white supremacists from all over the country were descending on Little Rock. The governor declared Central High off limits and ordered the Guard to surround the school in order to keep the nine students from entering.”

Standing within a group of jostling, unruly people, the well-known newscaster, motioning to the brick structure behind him, continued: “Amidst threats and taunts, earlier today nine Negro children, braving the anger of the white citizenry of Little Rock, Arkansas, attended class at Little Rock’s all white ‘Central High School’.”

The picture cut to earlier that day outside of Central High School, to the scene of a mob of screaming, fist-shaking people.

“As you know by now,” a different well known newscaster said, “Governor Faubus said he activated the Arkansas National Guard in order to keep the nine Negro children from attending school here.

“President Eisenhower, in a move to protect the ‘Little Rock Nine’, sent the ‘101st Airborne Division’ into Little Rock to evoke the Constitution, and for a tense time the bayoneted rifles of the Arkansas National Guard faced the bayoneted rifles of a thousand federal paratroopers. But within minutes the Arkansas contingent was ordered to stand-down and boarded the trucks that would return them to their armories, leaving the Army of the United States of America to safeguard the constitutional right of everyAmerican citizen to an equal, ‘desegregated education’.”

Watching for Ruby, switching from channel to channel, Marsha...

and Mitchell Lipensky anxiously watched the early evening and late night news. With the exception of the fleeting sight of what appeared to be a white man being attacked by a snarling guard dog held loosely at leash by a Little Rock police officer, nobody else on the black-and white television looked as though it might have been their friend.