Attending a white junior high school in the early 1960s was a lesson in isolation and perseverance, black former Little Rock students told a crowd Saturday at Bullock Temple CME Church near Central High School.
But most said they learned a lot and chose careers based on their junior high experiences.
"I wanted to make the world a better place than it was," said LaVerne Bell-Tolliver, who became a social worker years after integrating Forest Heights Middle School.
Seven of the 25 former students who helped desegregate Little Rock junior high schools discussed their experience publicly for the first time as a group Saturday. They hugged, laughed and talked about their childhoods, some as old friends.
Little Rock high schools began desegregating in 1957, and black students began attending junior high schools in the city in 1961, part of a gradual desegregation of the school district that trickled into lower grades in later years.
Little Rock schools were desegregated so slowly that the pro-integration Committee on Education of the Council on Community Affairs sent a letter to the Little Rock School District in 1963 telling the district it would take 450 years at the current rate to completely desegregate the school system.
It was 50 years after the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High School before a judge ruled that the school district was "unitary," or desegregated in a case dating from the 1980s.
In 1961, several black students were pioneers at five Little Rock junior high schools: East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest and West Side.
They had to apply to be accepted into the white schools, answering questions such as whether "the average Negro" is an introvert and whether they believed a student should gain entry to a school based on his merit or race.
Most didn't get in.
"We were children as we went through that process," Bell-Tolliver told the crowd Saturday.
Some of the integrating students reported Molotov cocktails were thrown at their homes after the Arkansas Democrat published their addresses in a newspaper article, Bell-Tolliver said. One didn't attend school at all after rocks were thrown at his home.
In video clips shown at Saturday's event, the students recalled a "hostile environment" at school, with daily heckling. Some said they felt like they got through their days with the help of God.
At a panel discussion, seven former students -- Bell-Tolliver, her sister Kathleen Bell, Glenda Wilson, Henry Rodgers, Wilburnette Walls Randolph, Kenneth Jones and Joyce Williams Warren -- discussed where they grew up, their parents' careers and influence, their religious upbringings and the effect the experience of integration had on their lives.
They recalled minimal to no support from teachers and administrators and being ignored or teased by other students.
"Academically, we were OK," Wilson said. "It was the social part ... where we weren't."
Wilson attended East Side Junior High School. She said she learned to change her personality to feel comfortable.
"I learned to be a chameleon, because I had to," she said.
Bell said she remembered being picked on at Pulaski Heights. She said she thought it might be payback for something she must have done when she was younger.
"It was not a good [time]," she said. "I don't like that I was there."
Randolph said she wondered whether the desegregation process would have gone better if it had started in elementary schools. But she said integrating Southwest Middle School taught her to see people beyond their race.
"Some things are still the same, but we learned how to live with each other," she said. "I just see the heart of the person, and that's what I deal with."
Rodgers, who also integrated Southwest, said he became more intolerant of teasing, leading to a confrontation later in life when he was a member of the U.S. Air Force stationed in Portugal.
He and other black Air Force members had tried to hold a party with soul music shipped in from the United States instead of attending the usual country music parties and rodeos, which they felt were more geared toward white airmen. But some of the Portuguese protested and would not allow them to hold the party in the building they rented.
Rodgers and his fellow airmen beat up the Portuguese men, sending them all to the hospital and leading the Air Force to institute a soul night for black airmen to prevent future clashes, he said.
"I helped change the Air Force," he said.
Jones, who integrated West Side Junior High, said he learned he could "deal with anybody."
"I think my experience taught me more about me than it did about other people," he said. Jones is now an organizational psychologist and consultant.
Bell said she learned to be alone and that she could succeed by herself.
"I learned I could be isolated and be OK," she said.
If they could go back in time and give themselves advice, the former students said they would be encouraging and remind themselves the tough times at school soon would be over.
"You're doing the right thing," Jones said.
Metro on 02/22/2015