The Faces of Racism

Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; Sept. 4, 1997
By Linda R. Monk

New clothes on the first day of school. A sense of hope and fresh beginnings. This is the schoolchild’s timeless ritual, accompanied by the blessings of anxious parents.

For 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, these feelings were even more intense when she began school on Sept. 4, 1957. She wore a freshly ironed dress that she made with her mother especially for the occasion. Elizabeth tried to comfort her nervous mother, as her father paced the room. The family prayed together before Elizabeth stepped onto the public bus.

Elizabeth Eckford was one of the first nine students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Known as the “Little Rock Nine,” they had planned to arrive at school together, but Elizabeth never got the message.

So that morning she stepped off the bus alone into a crowd of angry segregationists, her new school surrounded by the Arkansas National Guard. She attempted to enter the school three times, and was rebuffed by the guardsmen. Hecklers followed her as she tried to make her way back to the bus stop — and home.

“I couldn’t turn around because they were right on my heels. I had to keep on walking,” she says in a new radio documentary, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Filled with the voices and songs of America’s civil rights era, the 13-hour series aired in April on public radio stations. Her voice still raw with the pain of decades earlier, Elizabeth sobs as she recalls of the National Guard, “I thought they were there for my protection.”

Craig Rains was a white senior at Central High, who opposed integration on states’ rights grounds. Rains was taking pictures as Elizabeth tried to enter the school. That event was a sea change for him, as he relates in the documentary. “I think at that point is when I really began to change my mind and realize that this was not a states’ rights issue, that it was a people issue.”

A photograph of Elizabeth’s first day at Central High has become an icon of America’s battle over race. In it, a stoic Elizabeth is hectored by a young white girl named Hazel Bryan, her face frozen forever in a paroxysm of hatred.

For years, Hazel Bryan’s face has haunted me, because when my Mississippi school was finally integrated in 1970, that photo could easily have been taken of me. My Elizabeth Eckford was Sandra Gross. She had the misfortune to be in my 7th grade English class and the object of my considerable racist passions.

When our class performed a play about Rip Van Winkle, I argued vehemently that it was historically inaccurate for my black classmates to portray upstate New Yorkers of Dutch descent. Never mind that it was also historically inaccurate for white Southerners to play such roles — race was all that mattered.

Hazel Bryan became a poster child for racism. Her picture appeared across the nation, in schoolbooks, and on every anniversary celebrating Central High’s integration. But hardly anyone reported her apology to Elizabeth Eckford five years later in 1962.

In “Breaking the Silence,” a new book about the Central High crisis by Sara Alderman Murphy, Bryan describes her change of heart:

“I don’t know what triggered it, but one day I just started squalling about how she must have felt. I felt so bad that I had done this that I called her . . . and apologized to her. I told her I was sorry that I had done that, that I was not thinking for myself… I think both of us were crying.”

Today, Bryan is a 55-year-old grandmother and active volunteer who has taught parenting skills to at-risk teenagers. She remains close to a young African-American mother who took her class. I spoke to Bryan recently, as she got home from taking a tae kwan do class with her twin grandsons.

“There is more to me than that one moment,” she said.

I spoke to Sandra Gross recently, for the first time in 26 years. I fully expected her to hang up on me, before I could apologize. “You were forgiven a long time ago,” she said. “I don’t waste time and energy in hating.”

Today, Craig Rains states with pride that he lives in an integrated neighborhood, attends an integrated church, and belongs to organizations that are all integrated — including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He feels strongly that “the press has blown the violence all out of proportion — not that I condone ANY of it.”

Wesley Pruden agrees. Today, he is editor in chief of the Washington Times. In 1957, he covered the Little Rock crisis for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. His father, a Little Rock minister, was a leader of the Capital Citizens Council, which spearheaded the opposition to integrating Central.

According to Pruden, the conflict was more over class than race. “The anger of segregationists was directed at the white establishment,” he said, “because they were experimenting on working-class kids.” His father argued that the brand-new Hall High School in Little Rock’s affluent suburbs should be the first to integrate, not Central.

Both Rains and Pruden oppose a national apology for slavery and racism. “I did nothing to apologize for,” says Rains flatly. To him, the troublemakers at Central High were “a small group of students who smoked cigarettes at recess.”

The temptation for Americans 40 years later is to look at Hazel Bryan’s face and say, “Not I.” I never owned slaves, I never mistreated black people, I have nothing to apologize for.

But our redemption as a nation will come only when we can say, “Yes, I.” I have caused black people pain, I have benefited from a country built on the fruits of slavery, I could have reacted as Hazel Bryan did. We must look at her face and see a mirror of ourselves.

“I’m not saying that I would have done differently,” says Lottie Shackelford, the first black female mayor of Little Rock., adding that “true reconciliation comes when nobody is trying to make excuses.”

Hazel Bryan apologized. So did George Wallace. So did the Southern Baptist Convention. So did Linda Monk. Why can’t the nation?