A Mighty Long Way: Chapters 13–17

The intoxicating scent of food saturated the halls.

He played professional baseball in the Negro Leagues as part of the famed Kansas City Monarchs from 1937 to 1940. That included a stint barnstorming the country alongside Satchel Paige as a member of the team’s All-Star players in 1939 and 1940.

Now President Kennedy was gone, his life extinguished by the same kind of hatred that had been so rampant in Little Rock.

I even kept my distance from the two local NAACP chapters, which I suspect may have miffed some of the officers who knew my story.

I couldn’t understand why two chapters of the NAACP were necessary with so few black residents in Denver. But I was too preoccupied trying to figure out my own life to ask questions. I wasn’t ready to become an envoy.

This was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, but I didn’t realize then just what that meant. It was clear, though, that the agency had kept a file on me. I surmised it was likely because of my role in integrating Central High School.

But the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on June 6, less than a month after my college graduation, deepened my angst.

The tone of the question unnerved me. I felt as though my blackness was being challenged.

She kept up with us, tracked down the troublemakers who could be identified, and punished them, which drew the ire of the segregationists to her.

When a serious bout with pneumonia had threatened his life at age ninety-seven, it seemed to me the hospital was considering his age and holding back treatment.

We had been complaining for years about people putting money into their pockets by using our name and images to publicize events that we knew nothing about and to sell all kinds of T-shirts and trinkets.

Several of us volunteered to kick off fund-raising for the foundation by donating a percentage of any speaking fees and honorariums.

A committee had planned more than a week of receptions, lectures, honors, and appearances, which drew a host of dignitaries, including one from the nation’s highest elected office—Arkansas’s native son Bill Clinton, who was nearing the end of his first presidency.

We were raising families, giving back to the community in myriad ways, and enjoying success in our various careers.

I wondered whether the contrition making headlines was sincere and worried that Elizabeth might get hurt. I shared my concerns with her, but initially Elizabeth—who even during our worst times at Central tried to find the good in our tormentors—was excited and believed Hazel to be sincere.

The reconciliation photo, which was made into a poster while the two were on the speaking circuit, is still sold with other Little Rock Nine memorabilia, but Elizabeth insisted that a sticker bearing a quote from her be attached to each one. The sticker says: “True reconciliation can occur when we honestly acknowledge our painful but shared past.”

Ernie came up with a solution: He would fly to Little Rock the morning of the funeral and represent the nine of us by laying a wreath on the bier of Mrs. Bates’s coffin as she lay in state.

First, I called Herbert’s younger brother, Dr. Lester Monts, then senior vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Michigan, to get Herbert’s telephone number.

Southfield was widely known throughout Michigan as home to many of the area’s prominent African American politicians and automobile industry executives. It had evolved since my time in Michigan as a jurisdiction with one of the highest per capita incomes for black men and women in the country.

The three of us sat in the family room and chatted amiably about Little Rock and family for a couple of hours, and then she headed upstairs to bed.

He turned to the bailiff and said aloud:
“Get that convicting jury back in here! We don't have any more time to waste."

I found a job at a General Motors subsidiary in Lavonia, Michigan.

I was elected as an alternate on the committee that handled grievances, health and safety issues for the union.

For Herbert, that has been vindication enough.

Life-size bronze statues capture each of us as the children we were then in a memorial simply called Testament. Editorial cartoonist John Deering and his wife, Kathy, spent seven years bringing his idea to fruition after getting permission from the Little Rock Nine Foundation.

It marked the first time that an African American had headed the ticket of a major party for the nation’s highest political office. The crowd of eighty-four thousand supporters—an amalgam of people, representing the country’s diversity—was absolutely ecstatic.

It marked the first time that an African American had headed the ticket of a major party for the nation’s highest political office. The crowd of eighty-four thousand supporters—an amalgam of people, representing the country’s diversity—was absolutely ecstatic.

I watched him on the campaign trail and in the debates and scoured the news coverage of his proposals for change.

He was sounding all the right notes on the issues that mattered a great deal to me, particularly health care, the war in Iraq, and the tanking economy. He came across as supersmart and unflappable.

Even he seemed somewhat subdued and awed by the magnitude of it all.