Find the Good

“This is not supposed to be like this,” gasps Minnijean Brown Trickey as she faces Central High School in Little Rock. “It can’t be 50 years. I can’t feel this so strong, it doesn’t make sense. I was supposed to be over it.” The camera circles her, in a slow, slightly swooping movement, helping you to feel her disorientation. A half century ago, Brown Trickey entered the school flanked by National Guardsmen. Dispatched by President Eisenhower, the men with guns ensured that she and eight other black students could get inside the building. In that moment, U.S. public education changed. At least, it was supposed to.

Following Trickey’s introduction, the film cuts to a brief newsreely summary of the experience she calls “run[ning] headlong into American white supremacist, blockading people”: protestors wave the Confederate flag (reminding you of its symbolic potency) and assert their own righteousness : “It has been the pattern of life from time immemorial,” says one man, “I am for segregation because it is Biblical.” Similar images from 1957 are seared in our collective memory: the 101 Airborne Guard’s jeeps parked outside the high school, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus excoriating integration from behind his wooden desk, and the remarkably resolute Elizabeth Eckford walking in crisp white dress and sunglasses, framed by the contorted faces of jeering white students. Today, as the Little Rock Nine—Trickey and Eckford,, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Melba Patillo Beals, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Jefferson Thomas, and Thelma Mothershed Wair—gather for reminiscing and accounting, HBO premieres Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, a look at Central High School now.

The context of the celebration is illuminating, but Brent and Craig Renaud’s film is not so much interested in comparing then and now as it is in telling the stories of students and teachers still struggling to make sense of segregation, ongoing if shapeshifted. Quite like their remarkable documentary series Off to War, about an Arkansas National Guard unit in Iraq, the new movie frames its subjects in relation to one another rather than abstract notions of “progress” or “failure.”

Still, it’s hard not to feel disappointment when looking at what goes on in Central’s classrooms and the surrounding neighborhoods. Walking up the front steps, student body president Brandon Love, 17 years old, notes that the past is with him every day. “It’s a big deal,” he says, that such an historic event took place on these very steps. And inside the school, “It’s still pretty segregated.” And yet the white students tend not to notice: planning for college, attending Advanced Placement classes, they keep a focus on their futures, not the past.

In the hallways, students open and close their lockers, laugh and chat. Then a security guard hustles them off to class with a whistle, and Principal Nancy Rousseau makes rounds, announcing to her charges that today will be “mix-up day,” encouraging them all to “find other people who are different from you to sit with.” Cut to the next scene, in the cafeteria, where no one is sitting with new friends, but only sticking with their patterns: the tables are self-segregated. The point of patterns is underscored when Rousseau meets with a group of parents and urges them to do the same: “When was the last time that you had dinner or spent an evening with someone outside of your social group?” On cue during the final phrase, the camera shows the one black mother in a room full of white ones. While driving home in her SUV, a white mom in a pretty pink blouse with her pretty pink sweater tied over her shoulders explains, “I think that for a very long time that the desegregation in 1957 was a black eye on Little Rock, and people thought of Little Rock as being somewhat racist and that’s not at all true.” While she concedes that she spends her time with “people like us,” she takes Rousseau’s point: “There’s just always areas of improvement that need to be made.” 

Language—passive, vague, “positive”—allows racism to persist, unnamed and unacknowledged. While everyone—parents, teachers, staff members, and students—agree that inequity exists in Little Rock and at Central, Caucasians see a problem of class differences rather than racism. Security guard Floyd Smith, who is black, observes the breakdown of students as they leave school for the afternoon: “Most of the poorest kids ride the busses here, majority black,” he says. “Most of the kids have seen murder, get their car jacked, they saw their friends get beat up. I mean, some of their parents are on dope or whatnot.” As he’s talking, a set of white girls goes to the parking lot (“Your car is so freaking nice,” says one). “But a big majority of the white students are from the rich part of Little Rock,” Smith observes.

While it’s clear that 16-year-old Maya, mother of two, shows every interest in her family and her education (“I went to school every day pregnant”), the film emphasizes that such stereotypical class distinctions are pervasive, too. White kids on the golf team appear to embody the promise offered by Central, a school that has money “thrown at” it for Advanced Placement programs and “opportunities.” One boy specifies, “I think we live like in a different like world than the black students. They see their friends make a lot of money selling drugs or whatever. But where we are we see, like, older parents making money and having a family. I think our parents put that in our heads a little bit more.” This concept of the “different worlds” is complicated by someone like 15-year-old AP student Angelica, who says that it’s precisely because she comes “from an underprivileged background” that she aspires to “leave here,” meaning the cramped, un-repaired home where she shares a bedroom with her younger brother.

The black-white divide is also challenged by Brandon, who lives in a large house in a “white neighborhood” and drives an ‘06 Ultima Special Edition. He has plans for Duke or UCLA, and thinks the AP system “serves as not only a divide in educational promises but also a wedge between races. In many cases,” he asserts, “It has also become a racial boundary accepted by many and challenged by few.” It’s a subtle point, and surely well-taken. Sandra Brooks’ “struggling readers” class is comprised primarily of black males. As she sees it, “These kids are very often behavioral problems, partly because they know they should be doing better, they feel badly about themselves, and so rather than admit that I don’t know how to do this, they want attention, they cause problems.” This sort of thinking, however well-intentioned, demonstrates Brandon’s point. Kids expected to do poorly (“who have never had a book read to them,” laments Rousseau, tearfully) know where they stand in the pecking order. They reasonably resent the system that tells them to feel badly about themselves.

Asked “Where are we as a school?”, teacher Angela Jackson frames her answer by noting the culture that shapes kids’ experiences. “I bet you if you ask a white teacher that they’re gonna say oh the kids are just learning and they have no reality. If you’re living in the AP world, you are living out of reality when it comes to students in this school.” As Trickey tells a group of students at Central, history informs the present. “Women in gloves and hats, white women,” she says, “were screaming obscenities and death threats at me and I was 15 years old. That stuff is powerful.” As Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later reveals—quietly, insistently, and effectively—the fallout of that moment remains “powerful.” And everyone, privileged and not, is responsible to one another.