Little Rock Nine

Floor Speech

LITTLE ROCK NINE -- (Senate - September 25, 2007)

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, today marks an important anniversary in America's continuing efforts to create a truly just and more perfect Union. It was 50 years ago today--50 years--that nine courageous high school students in Little Rock, AR, stood up to a jeering, threatening crowd, the Arkansas National Guard, and their own Governor to claim their fundamental right for equal educational opportunity.

I can still recall as a child, seeing that scene on black-and-white television, a scene that has been replayed so many times, watching those students as they walked through that gauntlet of hate into a high school. High school, for most of us, was a joyous experience, a happy experience. For many of these students, their high school career began with fear.

These young people, not chosen by any scientific method but almost by chance, came to be known as the Little Rock Nine. Thankfully, it is hard for many Americans to understand what courage it took for them to walk into Little Rock Central High School in 1957. You know what it took? For those kids to walk into that high school, it took an order from President Dwight David Eisenhower, the protection of the U.S. Army, the extraordinary legal talents of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and daily guidance from caring adults such as Daisy and L.C. Bates. Above all, it took the daily faith and courage of those nine young kids and their families.

The crowds who surrounded Little Rock Central that day may have disappeared after a few tense days, but the taunts and threats to those nine students continued for the entire school year. In the end, those nine young students became America's teachers. They showed us and they showed America how we could live closer to our ideals.

Although their names will always be linked first and foremost with Arkansas, the people of my State are proud that four of the Little Rock Nine went on to college in Illinois. Gloria Ray Karlmark earned a mathematics degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Three of the Little Rock Nine earned degrees at Southern Illinois University, a great university in my State, which prides itself on having opened its doors and cast away any racial prejudice very early. It became well known throughout the African-American community as a place where higher education was available for those African-American students who were striving to better themselves.

Minnijean Brown Trickey graduated from Southern Illinois University and went on to a distinguished career in education, social work, and public service that included serving in the Clinton administration as a Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Dr. Terrance Roberts earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in psychology from SIU. Today, he is a professor and practicing psychologist in California.

Thelma Mothershed Wair earned a B.S. and a master's degree in guidance counseling from SIU, married a fellow SIU student from my hometown of East St. Louis, and served as an educator and an inspiration in the East St. Louis school system for 28 years before she retired.

A lot has changed in America over the last 50 years. Little Rock Central High School remains one of the best, most challenging high schools in Arkansas. Today, it has an African-American student body president. Other communities that were once deeply divided by race--and not all of them in the South, I might add--have changed as well.

In my home State, my Land of Lincoln, a few weeks ago I visited a town I have come to know over many decades--Cairo, IL. Forty-five years ago, Cairo was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activism. In the land of Lincoln, in 1960, there was a white citizens council that was doing its best to keep Cairo a segregated town, many years after Brown v. Board of Education. The head of the white citizens council was the white states attorney for Alexander County. Similar to many southern towns, Cairo closed its municipal swimming pool rather than allow black and white children to swim together. Today, I am proud to tell you that the mayor, the city treasurer, and the police chief of Cairo are all African-American.

But the struggle for equal justice is not over. Last week, thousands of people from communities across America traveled by plane, car, and bus to Jena, LA, with a population of less than 3,000, to protest what appears to be separate and unequal justice. The facts in what has come to be known as the Jena 6 case sound disturbingly similar to so

many cases from an era so many of us thought was long gone.

One year ago, some African-American students at Jena's public high school asked the school administrators if they could sit under a shade tree outside the school, and they were told they could. For years, that tree outside their school had been known as the ``white tree.'' By custom, its shade was for white students only. Days after African-American students dared to sit under that tree, nooses were hung from its branches--nooses. Local authorities dismissed that unmistakable reference to the terrorism of lynching as another youthful prank.

Over the next 2 months, tensions rose at the high school. A series of fights between black and white students escalated. Each time, black students were punished more severely than the white students who took part in the same fights. Finally, last December, six young men, all African-American, were arrested and charged with attempted murder and other serious felonies that could send them to prison for a collective 100 years.

The problem of unequal justice is not confined to the South, and it is not limited to race. It is easy to condemn yesterday's wrongdoing, but the Little Rock Nine had the courage to oppose injustice in their own time. In our time, few people still condemn the overt racism of Jim Crow and ``whites only'' drinking fountains, but many still excuse and justify discrimination and unequal justice based on such distinctions as national origin and sexual orientation.

I believe one day in the not-too-distant future, we will look back on these attitudes and wonder how we could have tolerated such discrimination and division.

It is good to reflect on times past, the heroes and heroines of those eras,

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but also to reflect on what America was like, how people reacted to that scene in Little Rock, AR, and how they reacted to Dr. Martin Luther King. It is easy now, some 50 years later, to suggest everybody knew it was the right thing to do in Little Rock and that everyone understood Dr. Martin Luther King's message was consistent with our values as Americans. But we know better. We know America was divided--some cheering those students and some cheering the crowds.

We learn from experience. I believe in redemption, personal and political. I think as each of us makes mistakes in our lives, we are oftentimes given a chance to correct those mistakes. I think when our Nation has made a mistake, whether it is slavery or racism, we are given a chance to correct that mistake. Today, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine, let us reflect on how far we have come.

Melba Patillo Beals, a member of the Little Rock Nine, went on to a distinguished career as a journalist and author. In a book about her role in history, she wrote:

If my Central High experience taught me one lesson, it is that we are not separate. The effort to separate ourselves--whether by race, creed, color, religion or status--is as costly to the separator as to those who would be separated. The task that remains is to see ourselves reflected in every other human being and to respect and honor our differences.

The best way we can honor the courage of the Little Rock Nine is to follow their example--to have the vision and the courage to confront the injustices of our time.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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