LANIER GIVES
back through foundation.
At age 8, Carlotta Walls LaNier was fortunate enough to spend a summer in New York, staying with an aunt in what was called “the projects.” It’s now a high-rent district in the vicinity of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
“I knew then that things were different in other places,” says LaNier, who was growing up in racially segregated Little Rock. “I recognized that … I could go to a baseball game and sit anywhere,” whereas at Arkansas Travelers games “we had to sit over in a certain section.”
But her parents, Juanita and Cartel you Walls, told her things wouldn’t always be that way. “When my mother and father would say, ‘Yes, you’ve got to sit up in the balcony of the theater, but that’s going to change,’ I believed them,” says LaNier, 74.
“I did realize that things were different for me and other Negroes — ‘coloreds’ as we were called at the time — like getting on a bus, having to sit at the back of the bus. But my mother and father were people who … knew change was coming.”
LaNier and eight other black students — Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest G. Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed Wair, Terrence J. Roberts and the late Jefferson Thomas — would become key figures in that change. The group, widely known as the Little Rock Nine, became the world’s poster children in the effort to level the racial playing field after years of prejudice and violence toward black people, mainly in the South.
Monday marks the 60th anniversary of the students’ successful entry to what was then all-white Little Rock Central High School. LaNier, at 14, was the youngest of the Nine and the first black woman to graduate from Central.
The group’s first attempt to enter Central on Sept. 4, 1957, was thwarted by Arkansas National Guardsmen sent to the school by then-Gov. Orval Faubus. During the second try on Sept. 23, the Nine entered the school past an angry mob but were taken out for safety reasons. On Sept. 25, the group entered under protection of the 101st Airborne Division sent by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, though their school year was marked by verbal and physical harassment and the unjust expulsion of Trickey.
After LaNier’s 1960 graduation, she returned to Little Rock for visits, but stayed only a few days at a time.
“I never felt comfortable, to be honest with you, until the 40th anniversary [observance],” she says. “What the city did and what the committee did to commemorate our integrating Little Rock Central High School, I thought was very heartwarming.”
It was during the 40th anniversary that LaNier, alarmed at evidence that civil-rights history was getting lost, met with fellow members of the Nine to establish the Little Rock Nine Foundation. She set up the foundation and served as its first president. Over nearly two decades, the foundation has awarded more than $800,000 in scholarships to more than 100 students.
At first, only Central High students were eligible. That eligibility was then extended to all Arkansas students, and after the 50th anniversary, to students all over the country. Now, the scholarships are given to students at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
“Through this organization, she found a way to give back by awarding scholarships to deserving students in underserved schools,” says Margaret Whitt, a retired University of Denver English professor now living in Gerton, N.C. Whitt helped several years with the application and selection process. “Among the winners, there have been many successful stories.”
LaNier, a real estate broker in Englewood, Colo., for 46 years, holds numerous Nine-related awards and accolades — from induction into the Arkansas Black
Hall of Fame to a Congressional Gold Medal. Some of her possessions from her time at Central High are now part of the collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
But her desire to attend the prestigious Central was simply rooted in her love of education and a desire to have the same educational opportunities as the white girls with whom she played softball in the summer.
WEST END GIRL
LaNier grew up with extended family in the city’s West End (now Midtown) in a neighborhood that included people of both races living on segregated blocks. Her parents’ prediction regarding change manifested in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka, Kan.). That landmark decision declared that state laws establishing separate public schools for black students and white students were unconstitutional.
Young Carlotta was a ninth-grader at all-black Dunbar Junior and Senior High School when the effects of that court case hit Little Rock. Her homeroom teacher broke the news rather casually while reading the school’s daily bulletin.
“Halfway through he said, ‘If any of you who lives’ — and he gave street assignments within those borders — ‘have any intentions of going to Little Rock Central High School in the fall, please sign this sheet of paper,’” LaNier recalls. The teacher put the paper on the first desk and finished reading the bulletin.
“When it got to me, I immediately signed it and gave it to the person behind me. The reason is that my folks had always told me that when opportunities come, whether it’s a crack in the door or the door flung wide open, be prepared to go in it.”
She had seen that “separate but equal” hadn’t worked out for black schoolchildren. While playing softball with the white girls, she says, “I was always happy when I’d hear them say they’re getting new books in the fall, because that meant their [old] books were coming over to my school.”
The Little Rock Nine became synonymous with Daisy Bates, the state NAACP leader who with her husband, L.C. Bates, owned the state’s largest black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. LaNier delivered copies of the paper; Bates is known as the Nine’s guide and adviser.
LaNier lauds Bates for her work with the Nine but says Bates did not hand-pick them as some thought, nor was she the mother figure some believed her to be. “Because she was president of the NAACP and because of what she stood for … she was the person [everybody] went to.”
She believes “the real heroes and she-roes” of that era were the parents of the Nine. “I saw my mother’s hair turn gray that year. And the gray hair she has on her head today was started Sept. 23, 1957.”
THE LOST YEAR
Because the Nine missed three weeks of school before their successful walk into Central, LaNier’s biggest concern that day was being behind in her lessons. But that was the least of what she and her family had to endure that year. Not only was she harassed in school, her father, a brick mason, lost jobs because of all the tumult and had to leave the city to find work. However, LaNier remained committed to her goal of graduating.
“I really can’t imagine having … that kind of fortitude at that young age. To this day it astounds me,” says Toronto filmmaker Fern Levitt, who did a documentary about the Nine and credits them for her activism.
Green became Central’s first black graduate in the spring of ’58, and the rest undertook a celebrity tour of sorts. “We were then sent all over the country,” LaNier says. In Chicago they received an
award from the Chicago Defender. In the Big Apple, they met the mayor and the governor and visited the United Nations. In Cleveland, they received the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. They appeared in a parade, took photos with LaNier’s hero — civil rights lawyer and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — and were honored with $1,000 scholarships at the Elks Convention.
LaNier and her classmates expected to return to Central in the fall of ’58. But Faubus, invoking newly passed state laws intended to stall desegregation, closed the city’s four public high schools, leaving some 3,600 students and their parents scrambling for education alternatives.
Shut out of Central once again, LaNier took correspondence courses through the University of Arkansas and received tutoring from retired teachers at the Dunbar Community Center. In April 1959, LaNier went to Cleveland to attend a high school for two months while living with an NAACP board member and his wife. She then moved in with a great-aunt in Chicago to earn her remaining 11th-grade credits over the summer.
“Then I came back for my senior year — without the troops,” LaNier says. “And there was an element that was still here” and opposed her presence.
“However, I will say this … white kids too had lost their [year]. And I think the leadership of our class didn’t want to see that happen again. They were trying to curtail some things and trying to be more [civil].”
LaNier’s home was bombed one night in early Feburary 1960. No one was hurt, though the incident further fueled LaNier’s resolve.
“I was determined to go back to school that next day because I didn’t want them to think that they had won,” she says. “Unfortunately, other people got the brunt of [the] injustice.”
A neighbor, Herbert Monts, and another man, Maceo Binns Jr., were accused of the crime. Cartelyou Walls was accused of conspiring with the men to bomb the home for the insurance money. Monts was convicted and served part of a five-year prison sentence.
“They did not do that,” LaNier states with emphasis. “I knew it had to be someone like the Ku Klux Klan.”
Whitt, who invited LaNier to speak to her class at the University of Denver, admires LaNier for the fact that she didn’t quit. “She just stuck it out … she never showed her anger … She had so much dignity.”
For LaNier, it was better than the alternative.
“I tried not to be negative about this, because you know what? All that does is grow a cancer in you,” she says.
By the time graduation day came, LaNier had had enough. “When I marched across that stage and received my diploma on May 30, 1960, I caught the first thing smoking out of here the very next morning, vowing never, ever to return. But you know … a lot of things changed.”
The “first thing smoking” took LaNier to St. Louis, where she attended summer school at Beaumont High to earn a credit she needed to qualify for enrollment at Michigan State University, which she attended for two years. She then followed an uncle and her parents to Colorado, where in 1968 she graduated from Colorado State College (now Colorado State University). The same year she married Ira C. “Ike” LaNier. The couple have two grown children: a son, Whitney, and a daughter, Brooke.
After years of silence about her experience, LaNier shared her story in a 2009 book, A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School (One World, $15), which she co-wrote with former Washington Post writer and editor Lisa Frazier Page.
“When I learned Carlotta’s full story, I was so impressed and amazed by the poise and grace she had demonstrated as a teenager under such pressure and stressful conditions,” Page says. She’s particularly impressed that LaNier got up and went to school the morning after her house was bombed. “She wanted the bigots to know that they had not won.”
What does LaNier see as her biggest legacy?
“I don’t think in those terms,” she says. She stepped into the pages of history simply because she didn’t want to be a “second-class citizen.”
“All I wanted to be was a citizen. And I felt that I was going to be able to do that. I saw that in New York City, that I could go anywhere. I was around people of all different colors … and it was wonderful.”
“All I wanted to be was a citizen. And I felt that I was going to be able to do that. I saw that in New York City, that I could go anywhere. I was around people of all different colors … and it was wonderful.”