If confession is good for the soul, and it is, it can be even better for an institution like the press that covers and criticizes others. Familiar names from the past not only filled the old files but appeared in person on a panel at the Darragh Center in Little Rock the other day to evaluate the job the press did during the historic Little Rock Crisis of 1957.
On closer look, with the help of six decades' worth of second-guessing, speculation and perspective in general, racial stereotypes tended to melt away. Not all black folks were persecuted heroes then, nor were all the white folks bullies. Not even all of Arkansas' newspapers were champions of truth, justice and the all-American way--let alone fonts of objective journalism (if there's any such thing outside the journalism textbooks).
Edith Moore was a toddler in '57, but she can remember how scared her folks were at the prospect of their little darling's having to attend a racially integrated school. "My parents were terrified for me to have to go to an integrated school," she recalls, "because of what they read in the newspaper. If you see in the news where somebody is spitting on a black child, you really don't want your child to be spit on." So chalk up another victory for fear during those all too fearful days of what is now yore.
Appearing on this five-member panel looking back on it all were Phyllis Brandon, then of the Arkansas Democrat, Bill Lewis of the old Arkansas Gazette, and Ernie Dumas, who was co-editing his college paper then but would go on to star at the Gazette. Also on the panel were Tafi Mukunyadzi, a former AP reporter who graduated from Central in 2008, and John Kirk, who directs the Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Talk about all deliberate speed, there was a lot more deliberation than speed before the president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States moved to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education handed down in 1954. It wasn't until three years later that federal troops would be called on to enforce that decision and law of the land on Sept. 25, 1957--an historic date for the rule of law in this country and state, one well worth cheering even now.
Tafi Mukunyadzi says the lack of voices other than those of white folks in the local media made it hard for this current generation to understand the full range of what the courageous Little Rock Nine experienced in the halls of Central. She told this panel: "It's forcing students who are studying that history to really relate to those students and what they went through--it's forcing them to look at it in a really different way."
But old Clio, muse of history, has learned to be patient but also hopeful over the aeons. In the end, searching students tend to find the truth for themselves. Which is surely what the diligent and devoted among them will be doing this Sept. 25, all these decades later.
Editorial on 09/19/2017