Sen. Joyce Elliott: Time To Be ‘Deliberate’ About Race Relations

Fifty-eight years ago this week, nine courageous black teens entered Central High School in Little Rock for the first time despite a throng of white protestors and a Governor resisting integration.

What quickly became known as the Central High Crisis left an indelible imprint of the state on the nation and it still is a stain to this day. Here are the progression of events from this week in 1957:

September 23, 1957 – An angry mob of over 1,000 whites gathered in front of Central High School, while the Little Rock Nine were escorted inside. The Little Rock police removed the nine children for their safety that day.

September 24, 1957 – 1,200 members of the 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles” of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, rolled into Little Rock. The Arkansas National Guard was placed under federal orders.

September 25, 1957 – Under troop escort, the “Little Rock Nine” were escorted back into Central High School for their first full day of classes.

State Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, a champion of equal rights, remembers hearing of the Central High Crisis the day she entered the first grade.

“Somebody said they’ve got soldiers at the school in Little Rock,” recalls Elliott, who grew up in Willisville (Nevada County) and didn’t attend integrated schools until nearly a decade later. “The biggest memory from that was me wondering, ‘Where are my soldiers?’ because in the mind of a first grader I thought everybody gets soldiers on the first day of school.”

Elliott, who appeared on this week’s edition of Talk Business & Politics, is currently working with city of Little Rock leaders to change the name of Confederate Boulevard in east Little Rock to Springer Boulevard, named after an African-American family that originally helped settle part of the area.

Arkansas and the U.S. has made progress since the 1950’s, but there are mixed signals still being sent. The symbolism of the Confederate flag has been removed from South Carolina’s state capitol, but in Arkansas, lawmakers were unable to separate the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert E. Lee holidays.

Elliott says the state and nation might do more to advance race relations nearly 60 years after Central High if it were to emulate South Africa and other countries that have struggled with black-white issues.

“What they did was not just hope things would be better – although they still have a ways to go – but they actively and physically… ‘manned up’ to it and ‘woman-ed up’ to it and said we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with what’s happened to us and reconcile,” said Elliott. “They were deliberate about it.”

Watch her full interview below.