Blindsided By History

Sure, it would be awkward for everyone at first. It's a subject the old-timers barely talked about for years, and then only among themselves. Some haven't set foot on school grounds since everything splintered. But if they pulled up in front of Central High, they'd shake their heads and feel like 17-year-olds again ... because that grand old fortress looks just the way it did back then, when it was on postcards instead of the front page of The New York Times. Two long city blocks of edifice, seven stories of yellow brick and stone, 370 tons of steel, a 1927 castle gussied up in Art Deco and Collegiate Gothic: America's Most Beautiful High School. That's what the American Institute of Architects crowned her.

The ol' boys would be anxious as they walked from their cars, the way the neighborhood's changed. Randy Rankin, the starting quarterback now, would assure them it's not that dire, but ... well, yeah, three of his buddies have been jumped by local thugs after games, and not all at once.

Guess there's a price to be paid for change, one of the kids would say. To which Bill May and his old teammates would glance at each other, shake their heads and begin to tell their tale.

Bill May blinked as he approached the school. Sawhorses ... soldiers ... cops ... guns? At Little Rock Central, the lord and master of all high schools in Arkansas? One public high school, up till that year, for all the white kids in a town of 100,000, the same school most of their parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents had attended--a city suckled by the same behemoth. A greenhouse for National Merit scholars, future Ivy Leaguers and Hollywood hotshots, for baseball Hall of Famers Bill Dickey and Brooks Robinson, for more state titles in team sports than any other high school in the continental U.S., for track teams that went 15 years without a defeat ... and, oh, my Lord, the gridiron. Bill May and his teammates didn't just dominate Arkansas football in the '50s--their second string could've done that. They took on the beasts of the South on Friday nights, beat the best that Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Kentucky could muster in front of crowds sometimes as big as the ones at the University of Arkansas.

But now the crowds were right in front of Central High, staring at 270 Arkansas National Guardsmen who ringed the building that first week of school in 1957, wondering whether those troops would let nine black kids become the first in the South to integrate a city school. Some soldiers had just graduated from Central High.

None of the Little Rock 9 showed up the first day, advised by school district officials to stay away. On the third day 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford tried to crack the fortress, she alone figuring that those soldiers had to be there to uphold the 1954 Supreme Court ruling mandating an end to segregated schools. Wrong. Under orders from Governor Orval Faubus, the troops crossed their bayonets, closed ranks and turned her away.

Faubus wasn't preventing integration, he insisted. He was preserving the peace, he said, because "blood will run in the street" if blacks attended Central. The crowd surrounded the girl, spitting and yelling, "Lynch her.... Drag her over to this tree!" Lord knows how she got home that day.

Bill? Hell, the all-state tackle was just trying to make it through the moil for the team's 8 a.m. preclass skull session for the season opener, just a few days away, in the Tigers' bid for a sixth straight state championship. Bill was like most of his teammates: white kids who'd grown up so separate from African-Americans--even the wealthier players with black maids in their homes--that they were surprised to learn that any black kid would even want to go to their school. White kids taught by elders that every human being was a child of God to be treated with respect, but don't touch the railing on the escalator at Blass Department Store because colored people had touched it.

Bill, at last, was wide awake. The superintendent of the school district, his dad's friend Virgil Blossom--under death threats for being the architect of the integration of Little Rock's schools--was sleeping in Bill's bedroom to throw his enemies off the trail. Good for Blossom, who had survived an assassination attempt a few months earlier, but not for Bill. Blossom snored.

He realized, too late, that he was approaching a police checkpoint, that students' cars were being searched and he'd never be able to explain that the brass knuckles and blackjacks in his trunk had been purchased by him and classmates on a lark during a school trip to New York City the previous spring, then left in his car and forgotten.