67 pages • 2 hours read
Carlotta Walls LaNier, Lisa Frazier PageA Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Pain and Necessity of Educational Integration
Educational integration is portrayed as both painful and necessary: Traditionally white schools like Central have more academic and extracurricular resources and opportunities afforded to their students than Black schools like Dunbar. For LaNier, who excels in academics and sports, this is a major draw of her transfer. However, schools like Dunbar are run by highly qualified teachers who are deeply invested in their students’ well-being and education because of the dedication to Collective Care in Black Communities.
The 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that segregation was constitutional if institutions were “separate but equal,” but this was never the case in practice. Dunbar has a fraction of the space, classrooms, money, teacher pay, resources, and amenities that Central has. Among Black schools, even this makes Dunbar an excellent school: It “attracted black students from all over Arkansas who stayed with relatives to attend” (37), rather than attending the “one-room shacks” that constituted schools for Black children in much of the South. Despite this, when the opportunity to attend Central arrives, LaNier thinks that “Central clearly seemed the better choice” (45). Even though Dunbar is an excellent school, separate is not equal, and even the best Black schools receive less funding, resources, and opportunities than white schools.
When she hears about Brown v. Board in sixth grade, LaNier thinks that “Black children would finally have access to the same opportunities as white children” (32). Integration seems like the only way forward to educational equity. However, it becomes a drawn-out and traumatic process for the Black students who are subject to violence and abuse for pursuing their constitutional right to an education. Besides the physical and emotional violence they face from white people, the nine do not have the community aspect of school that is so important. LaNier “rarely saw any of the other black students” except at lunch (104). Being “the lone black student […] made for some long and lonely days” (164). LaNier misses having friends and teachers who understand her and the humor and community at Dunbar.
The teachers also create obstacles for the Black students. In every class, LaNier anticipates how racist her teacher is and how that will affect her experience: One teacher openly retaliates against Jefferson by docking his grades (164). bell hooks, a Black feminist and educator, writes about the trauma of “that shift between beloved, all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers” (hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Taylor & Francis, 2014, p. 4). In all-Black schools, hooks says education was “about the practice of freedom,” while in integrated white schools, the “lessons reinforced racist stereotypes” (3), and they “were always and only responding and reacting to white folks” (4). Though a young LaNier doesn’t understand this dynamic, her adult family members do, especially those working at Dunbar. LaNier learns much later that her Aunt Eva asked LaNier’s parents to withdraw her from “that school,” meaning Central, and keep her enrolled at all-Black schools where the teachers spent their summers getting advanced degrees and certifications and “invested their skills and hearts in preparing black children for a world that would require than to be twice as good and work twice as hard” (53). Aunt Eva wants LaNier to attend a school in a community that understands her and prepares her for the world in nuanced and racially sensitive ways.
As an adult, LaNier is still affected by the knowledge that integration is necessary and the trauma of integration. LaNier’s “instinct to protect [her] child” (245) resulted in her and Ike’s moving away from Lakewood and into Denver because their son Whitney’s school was majority white. However, rather than moving to a majority-Black neighborhood, they choose a “relatively diverse” neighborhood so Whitney can “kno[w] and interac[t] freely with people of all races” (245). Though they remove Whitney from a situation in which he could be ostracized, LaNier and Ike still believe in the necessity of integration.
When people tell LaNier how important it is for white students to go to a school with Black students, she questions their framing of integration. She says, “Diversity is at least a two-way street” (245). The Pressure of Being “The First” should not always be on the shoulders of non-white children. LaNier believes that if white people truly believe in “the ideals of a multiracial society” (245), they should also make concerted efforts toward integration rather than displacing the responsibility onto the shoulders of marginalized people.
The Pressure of Being “The First”
Though LaNier’s stated claim is that everyone can make a difference, her narration also reveals that no one person should have to carry the weight of the scrutiny and pressure that comes with being “the first” person in a racial group to do or achieve something that formerly only white people have done. She experiences profound trauma in the first group of Black students to integrate Little Rock’s schools and subsequently spends her adult life either trying to elude or reconcile herself with this trauma.
In the ongoing fight for equity, Black Americans are consistently judged more harshly than white Americans. Often, they must “be twice as good and work twice as hard” (53) as their white counterparts. Further, the logic of systemic racism results in systemically privileged groups—like white people—forming universal opinions of an entire race based on the actions of individual people. LaNier knows that to white Little Rock citizens, “we represented […] colored people everywhere” (36). Former United States First Lady Michelle Obama has similarly stated, “Making mistakes was not an option for [our family]. […] When you’re the first, you’re the one that’s laying the red carpet down for others to follow” (Ducharme, Jamie. “'Making Mistakes Was Not an Option.' Michelle Obama on the Pressure of Being 'The First.'” TIME. 23 June 2018). This is a paradigm established under the logic of white supremacy. Within this paradigm, “Black exceptionalism is often used to justify Black humanity” (Asare, Janice Gassam. “Our Obsession With Black Excellence Is Harming Black People.” Forbes. 1 August 2021). Black Americans must “prove” that they possess extraordinary traits and abilities to receive the basic rights and respect that white Americans receive by default. Undue pressure is put on individual people to represent others who share their identity: Though LaNier’s narrative is specifically about Black Americans in the latter 20th century, this is true for people belonging to many marginalized races, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities.
When she enrolls at Central, LaNier does not realize she is taking on this pressure. She says, “I had made a simple decision to go to a different school. I had no idea how much my life and the lives of those closest to me were about to change” (45). She also does not know at the time that she had been specifically vetted and selected by the Little Rock school board to represent the Black student body at Central. She and the others had been “put through a kind of Jackie Robinson test” (60). Similar to how Jackie Robinson was selected by the Dodgers because he had “the character and temperament that would enable him to withstand the racist attacks sure to come” (60), the Little Rock Nine are the students “whose backgrounds had been deemed acceptable by the school system’s white leaders” (60). The all-white school board pre-selected Black students to attend Central based on their subjective analysis of how they would conduct themselves as “the first.”
During her first year at Central, LaNier is too busy trying to survive to recognize the national pressure on her. She realizes this the following summer when the nine go on a national tour organized by Mrs. Bates. She says:
[I]t really hit me—the magnitude, the scope, of what the nine of us had done. It wasn’t just about each of us having access to the best education possible in Little Rock. It was about parting once closed doors for colored children everywhere (130).
They spend the summer meeting famous entertainers and politicians who treat them as if they were the celebrities. LaNier says that “it felt unreal and at times, for me, a bit uncomfortable” (135). The Little Rock Nine are, at their core, a group of teenagers with a massive weight of the entire movement for educational integration on their shoulders.
LaNier doesn’t dwell on this pressure while it is happening; she is more focused on graduating and leaving Little Rock. However, the pressure haunts her in her future endeavors. The first job she applies to after leaving Michigan State is with Mountain Bell Telephone Company. They hire and train her as a service representative before she hears from other Black workers that she is the first Black employee in that job. She is immediately worried: “I wouldn’t go through that again. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, a racial symbol, of the standard-bearer of anyone’s expectations” (221). At Central, LaNier already experienced being used to judge Black students and the educational integration movement writ large. At Mountain Bell, she turns down the position in favor of a lower-paying position as a teller to avoid the trauma and pressure that she knows would come with being “the first” yet again.
While LaNier wants her book to show that “the ability to move the world [isn’t] reserved for the ‘special’ people” (xvi), there is also acute pressure and lasting trauma that comes with being the first to do something and carrying the futures of all who follow on your shoulders.
Collective Care in Black Communities
LaNier often details the family members she stays with and speaks to in various parts of the country. This attention to family and community calls to mind the historic role collective care has played in Black American history, wherein Black communities form collective care networks for safety and empowerment.
Queer Black feminist Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Dover Publications, p. 130). This quote about “self-care” is often misappropriated by the beauty industry and other capitalist structures as a call to individually unwind from stressful days. However, Black feminist and political activist Angela Davis has highlighted an important aspect of Lorde’s work: “The importance of emphasizing the collective character of that work on the self […]. If we don’t start practicing collective self-care now, there is no way to imagine much less reach a time of freedom” (Davis, Angela. “Radical Self Care: Angela Davis.” AFROPUNK, YouTube, 17 Dec 2018). Collective care—wherein community members look after one another in expansive and interlocked ways—has been especially important for Black communities in the United States, where Black people have been subjected to enslavement, violence, injustice, and systemic racism. In this perspective, collective care is an avenue toward liberation not granted through traditional means.
Though LaNier’s narrative does not use this terminology, it is brimming with examples of collective care. This care is necessary for the survival of Black people in the Jim Crow South. For instance, when LaNier’s family travels to see baseball games, “Daddy meticulously mapped out the eight-hour trip so that we could stop along the way at relatives’ homes for bathroom breaks and rest” (15). Similarly, their home had “relatives stopping through on their cross-country trips” (15). In the Jim Crow-era South, Black people were not welcome at hotels or gas stations. They might be subject to racial violence from either the owners or patrons of an institution. Though LaNier’s book does not name it, Daddy likely used a resource like “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” which listed the addresses of hotels, buildings, and private homes where Black people could find safety. Black communities provide safe havens for each other to aid in their collective freedom.
Within this “black world full of protective family, neighbors, and [LaNier’s] church community” (16), she feels safe. At Dunbar, she is constantly “under the watchful eye of an aunt, uncle, or family friend who was on staff” (34). The anxieties about LaNier attending Central from her family and friends who work at Dunbar are partly based on knowing that there, among almost all white people, she will be away from the supportive networks within Black communities, instead judged by her skin color by teachers who don’t know her.
Over the years, LaNier’s travels across the Midwest are enabled by the supportive distant family members who offer their homes for her. Though she stays connected to these systems through adulthood, her trauma at Central causes her to leave behind everyone from that era. It isn’t until almost 30 years later—when she reunites with the Little Rock Nine—that she realizes they may provide each other with collective care and healing that they cannot find on their own. When she returns to Central on the 30th anniversary of integration, LaNier realizes that dealing with her trauma alone is not working. Though she was usually “cool, calm, and collected,” she found herself “gasping for air, unable to stop the tears from flowing” (243). This convinces LaNier that something must change with how she is dealing with her past. Her “[f]irst and most important” change is re-connecting permanently with the Little Rock Nine (243). Collective care aids healing via empathy and community. Re-connected with the “only eight other people in the world who know exactly what happened to us at Central and how it felt” (243), LaNier now has the option of leaning on one of them “on a particularly bad day” (243). Together, they care for each other in a larger system of support.
Further, this collective care allows them to exercise their own freedom—to enact “political warfare,” as Lorde says. LaNier always calls the other eight her “comrades” rather than “friends” or “peers”—though she does not explain this word choice, her rhetoric invokes images of people involved in a political fight together. It is LaNier who calls her “eight comrades” in 1996 and plans a strategy meeting so that they can “take as much control as possible of [their] own legacy” (247). Together, they begin the Little Rock Nine Foundation to reclaim their story, “give back to the community as a group” (247), and “advance the principles” they believe in (248).
With communities based on collective care, Black Americans can secure the safety denied them by systems of racist violence, collectively address trauma, and enact freedom and political change.
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