CHAPTER 14

She Came to Us (1958)

She stood on the steps of New Lincoln School in New York City, waving happily at the crowd.1 It was one day last February. All of us knew where she came from, and we knew that there, at this moment, her disgrace was being used against the rest. Right now, they were handing out cards that spoke for their fury—that said ONE DOWN, EIGHT TO GO. This girl was the “one down.” Her name was Minnijean Brown, a sixteen-year-old student, expelled from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

She was one of the nine Negro students who had been going to Central High since September. Their first day there was a storm of feeling at riot pitch, with the National Guard trying to make a wall behind which these students could go to school. There was one photograph which gave the scene: the dark girl going past the terrible open-mouth faces of women full of destruction. If you saw that picture, you remember it.2

Her coming here, five months later, was still not at all like the way a high school junior comes to school. She had been offered a scholarship for $525, tuition for that half-year, “providing that a proper home could be provided for her in New York City.” Dr. John J. Brooks, director of New Lincoln, said that “as a pilot school for American education, we are concerned with principles of education as well as curriculum and teaching procedures.” There was a principle of education involved as Minnijean Brown stood on the school steps that Monday morning, a strong, poised, handsome girl, dressed in a coat of a fresh blue with a corsage of orchids, beside her mother. She waved for the battery of photographers filling the sidewalk, crowding around the red Jaguar from the television network.

The school was excited, too. But through the city, there were several kinds of response. A boy in the school said: “A good thing. Our school invited that girl from Little Rock.” A shopkeeper asked: “Will she be able to keep up with her studies?” And a woman listening: “Did they check on her grades when they gave her that scholarship?” A taxi-driver said: “Tell me this—why did they want the troublemaker?” And a soda-jerk: “That’s a good school that does a good thing like that.”

In Little Rock, when the nine Negro students were admitted, the school authorities pledged them never to “retaliate to verbal or physical harassment regardless of circumstance or degree.” That meant, according to the local secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that Minnijean “could not raise a voice or a hand in defense of her very life without jeopardizing her future at Central. Yet those who contrived this agreement did nothing to deter her tormentors, who increased day by day.”3 She was “roughed up,” kicked, threatened with violence, hit with a bowl of hot soup—twice—, hit in the back with a rock, and called endless names including “nigger bitch”—and expelled for spilling her lunch tray on two students who attacked her. No white student has been expelled from Central.4 After Minnijean’s expulsion, the signs came out in Little Rock. They were battle signals: ONE DOWN, EIGHT TO GO.

Minnijean had a chance to talk to her teacher that first morning at New Lincoln. They met privately, before the reporters arrived, and went on with the talk over coffee, before the last pictures were to be taken. Mrs. Carpenter liked the girl at once. Pauline Carpenter is a graceful, slender woman, with an accurate way of talking and moving that is very attractive. Her eyes are a changeable brown, flickering as she speaks, and her brown hair is folded smoothly up and over her head. “The thing that startled Minnijean most,” she told me, “was my saying that she was expected to argue with her teachers. I told her she could ask questions about anything.” What Minnijean said was: “I hope I can be just another student.” The school promised her that she really could—after that first morning, no reporters, no photographers. They hoped they were not being naïve. For the acceptance of this girl after she had been thrown out of the entire Arkansas school system was stirring up many things, not likely to die down soon.

Governor Faubus had said publicly that the School Board in Little Rock “may have made a bad mistake.”5 He meant that Minnijean should have gone back to Horace Mann, the all-Negro school. “He doesn’t mean that he thinks she shouldn’t have been expelled—but just a little bit expelled,” says Minnijean’s mother, and her smile has a corner strong enough to carry her meaning.6

In Little Rock, the first day the girl could not go back to school, Mrs. Brown took her shopping for shoes. At forty, she has the same poise as her daughter, a lively assurance. “I hoped all the staring was over,” she says, “but everything in that shoe store just stopped.” They had had all the degrees of daytime unpleasantness whenever they went out. It was now evident in some of Mr. Brown’s business life, too—he is a building contractor in Little Rock. But the horrors came at night. “They’d call us up, and say, ‘We’ll lynch her’—‘We’ll bomb the house.’ Mostly at night. After a while, we told Minnijean not to answer the phone when it rang at night.”

But it was the younger children she was worried about, too. They are three years old, nine, and ten. At first, the Browns thought they would not expose them to this, not tell them at all. But soon, says Mrs. Brown, they knew they couldn’t keep it from them; so they told them, as gently as they could.

All during the school year, there was a lot of sadness for the nine Negro students. And growth, too. Minnijean’s mother said that the girl found more strength than she had thought possible. Strength was necessary, every day, every morning. The nine families had not really known each other before this; but the solidarity among the children was there. When the scholarship was offered to Minnijean, she said, “I’ll go to New York if the others want me to.” The whole group decided together that she should go.

During the days before the flight east, there were two more telephone calls. One was to Mrs. Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP, from a woman who asked what sizes Minnijean wore. The caller drove up to the Brown house on the last evening with a lot of new clothes—coats, hats, dresses, bags. She was a white woman, the owner of “the most exclusive shop in Pulaski Heights.” Another call was made, and this Minnijean and Mrs. Brown did not know until after their flight. It was anonymous, a call made to the manager of the airport to say that there was a bomb on their plane. There was no bomb.

Mrs. Brown made only a quick visit to New Lincoln before she went home to Little Rock. She and her husband have respect for education, she says, and she knows that it is not a tour through the building that will let her know what is happening. “There are new school buildings in Little Rock,” she says. “A new building isn’t a school. We’ve heard a lot of that kind of talk. People think that a school’s a building but it’s not.”7

Minnijean Brown hung up her coat with the orchids. In a violet dress she sat among her classmates with the books she would be using—Eugene O’Neill’s plays, a life of Benjamin Franklin, Immortal Poems, a book on El Camino Real.8 She wondered what would happen when they studied the Civil War. She knew she had heard about it from a Southern point of view; here it would all be Northern, she guessed, but Mrs. Carpenter had said they would use several books—Beard, Faulkner—and all discuss and ask questions.9 She had never once asked questions about the Civil War. She would have more science than she had ever had; and maths, they said; and French this year, and biology.10

The class was talking about O’Neill.11 There were objections from these sixteen-year-olds. Wasn’t this too tragic? Minnijean volunteered. “Well,” she said, “in life things don’t always have a happy ending, do they? That’s the way it is.” And she volunteered to read. She loves to read, and can be seen as she really is when she reads poetry.12 She likes to sing, too, and is glad the school will be doing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida this year.13 But now she is reading the old song that begins:

Love not me for comely grace,

For my pleasing eye or face,

Nor for any outward part . . .14

“She’s an awfully nice girl,” said Mrs. Carpenter to me.

And the school—what had it done to prepare for this? In the few days before Minnijean’s arrival, Dr. Brooks had spoken to all the classes from the seventh grade up, telling them the facts and why the school was glad to welcome this girl.

For it was not a sudden or an empty gesture. The school’s tenth anniversary comes later this spring, but this was not even seen as a sign of celebration. It goes deep into the reasons for the being of this kind of education, back into statements that Abraham Flexner, head of the Institute for Advanced Studies, made in 1920. It goes back to something that Dr. William H. Kilpatrick, the founder of New Lincoln, wrote for the Teachers College Record in March 1921:

What is then demanded of the school? That it build in its pupils breadth of view in social and economic matters, the unselfish outlook, a sense of responsibility for improving affairs, and such an ability to think as will keep our pupils, grown to maturity, from being the prey of demagogues. [. . .] Practice in these is necessary to build them firmly. [. . .]

The school we have inherited has come down to us from a remote past when education was mainly designed on the one hand to inculcate docility and on the other to impart bare knowledge or skill. These things no longer satisfy. The duty of the school is now as large as is the life of the child who is to live in the democratic society of the future.15

It has meant something to the other students in this school to have Minnijean come, and to know that they are part of what is happening. To the younger children, it comes through in the simplest terms. A boy in the fifth grade overheard Dr. Brooks speaking about it to the high school, and told it this way: “He said there wasn’t to be any yakking in the cafeteria.” In the Live Wire, the paper of the lower school—mimeographed—a short statement on page three, under the heading “A New Student,” is, again, Dr. Brooks speaking:

This is a dramatic incident in the life of the New Lincoln School. Our brief history has been full of adventuring of one kind or another. Our school always responds with enthusiasm to promising plans and fortunate circumstances. In this case we need more than enthusiasm; we need to be helpful, to be reasonable, restrained, and to act in good taste. I’m asking each member of our school’s community to help make Minnijean’s entrance to our school and her life here as normal, as unexcited, and as satisfying to her as possible.

To the other students it means many things. It means partly that they know that they are in a school that can act generously and with speed; they have seen a chance given to someone who was going to be cut off from all further education, for acting in a way many of them feel they would have acted. Most of all, it means to them this: they know they have a part in making the world. This is something that for a long time was a principle basic to our people, the principle on which the strength and responsibility of the individual in the life of this country was built. However, in our lifetime, this principle has come to be almost totally obscured. Here, in one stroke, among children and young people, it is made clear and active.

This girl is not a troublemaker. She has answered the troublemakers. She was set in disgrace for that. It is not her shame. The disgrace branches out past Little Rock to every one of us who is white and lets it exist, there and in our community; to everyone who thinks “Why did they take the troublemaker?” The disgrace belongs to all of us, for we all have that element in us. Attack can be met with passive resistance—and it looks as if the Negro people had made themselves the next “chosen people” in taking on themselves the great work of passive resistance in this country. But there will be times when somebody young and fiery will be the kind of champion who answers back, some young girl shouting back at those who say “Goddam,” as it was said long ago in France, or “nigger bitch,” as it is now said in Little Rock.16

Minnijean Brown fought back in Little Rock; there will be things for her to fight in New York, maybe as difficult, whatever they are. A letter about her came today—when the news arrived that a white girl had been expelled from Central High for making the cards saying ONE DOWN, EIGHT TO GO. The letter, from the son of two Vermont preachers, says, “Tell her I am proud of her, that all of us who stand for self, knowing thus we must stand for every other self, see in her our champion . . . Tell her how Jesus said: ‘And every tree that beareth not good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire.’ She is the good fruit when she fights back to make a better world for your son, for my daughter, for these warped and twisted of the earth, men who have made shame of man, the tool-user, man, the dreamer, man, the maker and mover.”17

In her first week here, Minnijean asked the sixteen-year-old questions. What is the social life around here? Do they really want me to come to the party? Do they wear socks? She was told about socks—the three lengths, and what they are called locally. Yes, they want her at the party on Friday evening. But some of the students have invited her to go see Long Day’s Journey into Night, and that is what she is going to do.18

She has noticed right away that the handshakes are different. In Little Rock, when people shook hands, they took her hand like this, with just their fingertips; their whole hands never touched hers. But perhaps that’s the way they shake hands there. “I hope that they will see me as a person,” she says. “I hope that I will have friends here. Last year, I had friends; but all during this time, with everything that’s happened, I don’t really make any friends.”

Now she in her classroom is deep in talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets. A class of about twenty students, eighteen of them white. Several of them volunteer to read. They say, one after another, the marvelous lines of the change of state—the poem which takes you, after the long despising, up in a great sweep at break of day.19 Her classmates talk about this form, this sonnet—What does the tight structure do? Does it confine the poet? How can it mean freedom to him? They talk about the tightness of rhyme, the music within the lines, and the movement of the meaning.

Minnijean volunteers: she speaks about the poem as a whole, she comes through with an offering quality that is in her thought and in her experience. This is a girl who had been doing pretty badly in English at Little Rock—bad marks. She talks about the music and the rhyme. You cannot separate out any of these elements, she says, and hope to keep the beauty. The beauty is the entire thing, she says; and she volunteers to read the sonnet, too, sharing these meanings that the others have read, offering it to us for our meaning, the full and piercing lines:

When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state . . .20

(New Statesman, 1958)