36 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
was another bogus promise. On 23 September, Central High reopened with
a thousand angry whites, including Faubus’s friend Karam, waiting for the
black students. Car licenses showed that a quarter of them came from nine
other states, mainly Texas. ‘Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t going to integrate,’
the menacing crowd chanted. With the police looking the other way, the mob
broke school windows and assaulted black passers-by and ‘Yankee’ reporters.
The black students circumvented the mob by using a delivery entrance.
When the mob realized it was outsmarted, six white girls wearing ponytails
and poodle skirts shrieked, ‘The niggers are in our school. Oh, my God,
they’re in the school!’ A ringleader shouted, ‘They tricked us, the yellow
bastards. Come on, let’s go in the school and drag them out.’ Other white
teenagers jumped into their cars and threw bricks into black homes and
businesses.
Meanwhile, the beleaguered black students barely survived. ‘You want
integration?’ school officials taunted them, ‘We’ll give you integration,’ send-
ing them to nine different classrooms. To get to her homeroom on the third
floor, a terrified Melba Pattillo kept her eyes straight ahead and recited the
Lord’s Prayer repeatedly. Before long, the school was overrun by the mob.
When it seemed as if the black students might be lynched, they were rushed
from their classes to the principal’s office. Melba overheard panicked officials
plotting how to escape: ‘We may have to let the mob have one of those kids,
so’s we can distract them long enough to get the others out.’ ‘They’re chil-
dren,’ another replied. ‘What’ll we do, have them draw straws to see which
one gets a rope around their neck?’ When firemen refused the mayor’s orders
to douse the mob, assistant police chief Gene Smith dispatched squad cars to
extricate the black students. Smith told the embattled students to keep their
heads down and advised the drivers to ‘move fast and don’t stop no matter
what.’ To make sure the black students had left, a Mothers’ League repres-
entative searched the school and reported, with great satisfaction, ‘we went
through every room in the school and there were no Negroes there.’
That night, the police intercepted a 100-car caravan loaded with guns and
dynamite headed for the Bates home. As the situation worsened, prominent
citizens persuaded the mayor, whose son went to Central, to cable Washington
for federal troops.
The stand-off between state and national officials lured television crews
to Little Rock, where on-site television reporting was pioneered. John
Chancellor, a young reporter for NBC News, transmitted searing images of
white mobs assaulting black teenagers going to school. Much of Chancellor’s
inside information came from Ira Lipman, a courageous 16-year-old senior,
whose parents knew Ernest Greenas an attendant at their country club.
Furious at having their dirty secret exposed, segregationists threatened
Chancellor and called his television network the ‘Nigger Broadcasting Company.’Green, Ernest(1941– ):
First black graduate of
Central High School, Little
Rock, Arkansas.