Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom.
Merry Browne
For ten years, I lived in two worlds: the strict, routine-bound realm of school, where dealing with homesickness and surviving dorm life were my primary concerns, and the flexible world of home, where interaction between family members was as distinctive as the individuals themselves. My mother formed the foundation at home, while at different periods of my life my father and each of my brothers influenced my development. Looking back on those early years, I see how I learned about the world at large through my father and brothers while Mother maintained family stability.
That world at large intruded on our family in a dramatic way when I was eight years old. Soon after I began my schooling at Central Institute for the Deaf, my father accepted a position as pastor of a Presbyterian church in the same town where Jonathan attended school: Little Rock, Arkansas. In many ways, the South was a wonderful place in which to grow up. The people were proud of their heritage and traditions. Most we knew were well-mannered and polite and frequently warm and friendly. But in the 1950s, the American South also had an ugly side.
On the morning of September 4, 1957, our family—minus Dunbar, who was attending university in Germany—sat around our breakfast table. I hadn’t yet left home to start my fourth year at CID. As always, we ate oatmeal. As always, my father, wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, pulled out his Bible. He read to us each day, straight through the Bible over the days and weeks and months. On this morning, however, my father altered the sequence. He turned to the Psalms and read aloud, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” His voice cracked. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me.”
The night before, my father had received a momentous phone call from Daisy Bates, co-owner of the local black newspaper and head of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A federal court had ordered that Little Rock’s Central High School be integrated that year. For the first time, black students would legally walk the halls with white students at the school. Nine students who had earned excellent grades in their black-only schools had been selected to take this historic step.
Many citizens and political leaders in Arkansas had other ideas, however. Governor Orval Faubus, citing “evidence of disorder and threats of disorder,” had instructed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black students from entering Central High on September 3. Fearing harm, the “Little Rock Nine,” as they later became known, didn’t even try.
Later that day, a federal judge ordered integration to begin the next day. But the word from angry whites was that if the teenagers attempted to enroll, they would be murdered. The Ku Klux Klan promised “bloodshed if necessary.”1 The school superintendent told the black students’ parents to keep their children at home to prevent a riot because there would be no police protection. Only two years earlier, Emmett Till, a black fourteen-year-old visiting his family in neighboring Mississippi, had been kidnapped, beaten, shot to death, and dumped in a river. The situation in Little Rock felt like a powder keg awaiting a match.
When Daisy Bates called on the evening of September 3, she had a simple yet profound request: Would my father gather a group of white ministers to accompany the black students to Central High in the morning? She knew my father was president of the Greater Little Rock Ministerial Association, an organization dedicated to promoting the public’s interest in all churches and denominations. She also knew that my father was a humanitarian in favor of civil rights and that public support from the white community would draw attention to any injustice.
My father agreed to make calls and meet the students in the morning but said he didn’t know if he would go with them. He phoned a dozen church leaders. Only one local minister said he would join my father.
After our breakfast, my father drove to meet the students. My brother David, twenty-one years old and six foot one, went with him. David wanted to protect my father. My dad didn’t argue.
Seven of the eventual “Nine” students, along with another girl who thought she wanted to join them in the attempt to enroll at Central (she later changed her mind), were gathered at a street corner a few blocks from the school. My father spoke to the teens, praising them for their faith and courage. They planned to begin walking to the school at 8:10 a.m. At 8:09 a.m., a black man asked if my father was going to walk with them.
“I don’t know,” my father said.
“Reverend Ogden, isn’t it about time you made up your mind?”
At that moment, a strange feeling came over my father. He later recalled, “I felt: This is right; this is what I should do. There was not the slightest doubt but that I should do it. I ought to do it. And I felt this was the will of God for me. Every bit of fear just drained out.”
“All right,” my father said. “We will go with you.”
My father began walking toward the mob gathered at the school, followed by the students, David, two visiting white pastors, and two black pastors. The local minister faded into the crowd.
Dunbar wrote the following description of the mob’s reaction in his book My Father Said Yes:
People down the street spotted the little group. They surged forward. They picked up their pace: heavy-necked burly men in short-sleeved shirts and hats; some younger with crew cuts and polo shirts; and hard-jawed, hair-sprayed, thick-armed women in dresses. Some of the guys laughed, smoked a cigarette, on a rowdy late-summer morning’s adventure. Some pointed. “Look, there are the niggers. Get ’em.”2
The mob did not attack, however. It may have been the presence of my father in his light summer suit, leading the tiny band. It may have been the presence of the National Guard soldiers, in uniforms and helmets and carrying rifles.
My father led the students up the steps at the front of the school, where a horizontal line of soldiers blocked their path. The mob closed in around my father and the students. Two soldiers parted a space, and Lt. Col. Marion Johnson, commander of the Guard troops, stepped forward.
My father spoke first, in a loud voice so all could hear, “Are you here to see to it that these children enter this school or to prevent them from entering?”
“The school is off-limits to these people,” Johnson said, pointing with a nightstick at the closest of the teens.
“Does that mean that these children cannot be admitted to school?”
“Yes. That is what it means.”
One of the two black pastors spoke up. “We understood from Governor Faubus that the soldiers are here to keep the peace, for law and order.”
“During the night my orders were changed by the governor,” Johnson said.3
And that was that. Faubus had decided to defy the federal courts a second time. Although tense and worried, my father led the children away from the mob without incident.
As an eight-year-old, I understood very little of this. Hatred based on race was a foreign concept to me. But when I saw my father on TV that evening, I knew something big was happening. I wanted to be on TV too, so I asked my father if he would take me to the school. The next day, a Thursday, he did. White students sat in their classrooms; the Nine stayed home. Soldiers lined the periphery of the grounds. We walked on the school grounds and examined the jeeps, half-tracks, and stacked rifles. My father explained some of what had happened the day before, pointing to this spot and that, repeating what was said.
On September 23, 1957, thanks to a diversion and a police escort, the small group of black students successfully entered Central High through a rear door. By late in the morning, however, police could no longer keep the angry crowd away from the school, and they drove the Nine home. That same morning, a black journalist from Memphis was attacked by the mob. He died three years later from his injuries. It wasn’t until the end of September 1957, when President Eisenhower issued an executive order placing the National Guard under federal command and ordered a thousand US troops to Little Rock, that the Little Rock Nine were allowed to attend classes at Central.
Most people in Little Rock opposed my father’s role in this watershed moment of the civil rights movement. Our phone lines were tapped and we received hate mail, obscene phone calls, and even bomb and acid-throwing threats. Friends advised us not to sleep in the front rooms of our house in case a bomb was thrown through a street window, so we all slept in the back of the house.
My father started Thursday morning prayer meetings for the parents of the students, as the students’ families had been threatened. Attendance by both white and black community members rose. One man who attended and extended his support was an emerging civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many national reporters and civil rights figures ended up in our living room because it was the only safe and friendly place for black people and white people to meet in a city torn by racial mistrust.
At the end of that first year of the crisis, one of the nine black students, Ernest Green, graduated from Central High School. Daisy Bates asked my father to take Dr. King to the graduation exercises at Central. Ernest Green’s family sat in the bleachers. The only other black face in the football stadium belonged to Dr. King, who sat with my father. Both my father and Dr. King were treated roughly by the police at the graduation. They asked my father, “What are you doing with this black man? Where do you think you’re going?” At one point they grabbed my father’s arm and spun him around. But he refused to leave his guest.
My father’s pastorship at Central Presbyterian Church was a casualty of his convictions. From the day he walked with those black students to Central High School, he began to lose control of his church. Gradually, many people left his congregation, though others who supported my father’s beliefs joined. Ministers, rabbis, priests, and people from other churches attended the Thursday morning prayer meetings. But even though my father had the support of many of his parishioners, the opposition was strong and determined.
In the summer of 1958, church deacons came to my father and told him he had six weeks to find another church. That’s about as close as the Presbyterian Church comes to firing a minister. But a historic victory had been won. I knew my father had made a noble and sacrificial effort. I was proud of him.
It wasn’t long before my father was asked to pastor the First Presbyterian Church in Huntington, West Virginia. We moved there in early fall 1958. For my mother, the best part of moving to Huntington was the relief at being able to answer the phone and hear friendly voices again. She no longer had to worry about hostile and obscene calls or about bombs or acid. Much weight had been lifted from my parents’ shoulders.
Most of the danger of that time went over my head. I didn’t recognize the intense feelings people had until my return to classes at CID. While at school one day, I saw an article about my father and the Little Rock crisis in Time magazine. I was so proud that I began showing it to others at the school. But a teacher suddenly snatched it away and told me not to discuss it, saying it was a closed subject. I learned that not everyone regarded my father as a hero.
While he was in Little Rock and after, my father continued to support the civil rights movement. He responded when people asked for favors, such as the night a black family’s car broke down in an area that was unsafe for nonwhites. He drove out and towed them and their car home. He also accepted invitations to speak at other churches, synagogues, universities, and more, where he advocated for the rights of African Americans. He continued to host black families and leaders at our home. And in September 1958, after Martin Luther King, Jr., was stabbed at a book-signing event in New York, my father went to the city to tape an interview with CBS and a talk for the Voice of America and to visit his friend in a Harlem hospital.
As I look back on those events after all these years, I appreciate my father’s actions more than ever. He took a stand that he knew would cost him personally and professionally, one that might even endanger his family. Yet he felt so strongly about doing what was right and supporting the disadvantaged that he did it anyway. Only now do I see the deep impact those times had on me. They exposed me to passionate and opposing opinions of other adults and left me much more sensitive to issues of culture and race. Perhaps most important, they taught me that every human being deserves respect and dignity and that some things are worth fighting for, no matter the cost.
In the spring of 1959, on a sunny and humid afternoon, I was at Busch Stadium watching a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game with the boys from my dormitory. The teenage sister of one of the boys at our school was visiting from Alabama. She was at the game too, sitting in the row behind me. Someone must have pointed me out to her. She’d read about my father and what he’d done to support the Little Rock Nine.
I turned around and noticed her looking at me. Her face was twisted, her brows furrowed, her lips turned down. “You’re a nigger lover. You should be sitting over there with the colored people,” she said to me, pointing to the outfield bleachers. “Those people smell. You belong over there, not with us.”
I was shocked and puzzled. Why was she angry? What did she have against black people? Perhaps I am especially sensitive to the ugliness of discrimination because I have felt it myself as a deaf person. Avoiding, separating, fearing, and hating people because of their skin color—or because of their inability to hear—made no sense to me then. It still makes no sense to me today.
NOTES
1. This quote comes from my brother Dunbar’s book, My Father Said Yes (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 21.
2. Ogden, My Father Said Yes, 28.
3. Ogden, My Father Said Yes, 29.