What are the odds I would be lucky enough to see, firsthand, the same ugly sense of entitlement -- the same "get to the back of the bus" disrespect that left the struggle for equal rights an unfinished task even 100 years after the slaves were first set free - and to see all of this, no less, at an event organized to honor one of the icons of civil rights history?
Most of us, at one time or another in our lives, have had a chance to meet "famous people," whether those people are from politics, entertainment or sports. Rare is the chance to meet a genuine hero up close and personal. Rarer still is the opportunity to meet a hero like Ernest Green who is an indelible part of American history.
Ernie Green was the oldest of nine young African-American students who volunteered to break the color-line at Little Rock Central High School three years after the US Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordered the public schools to be desegregated "with all deliberate speed."
President Eisenhower, in one of the bravest and most memorable moments of his presidency, called out paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to escort the so-called "Little Rock Nine" to class, with bayonets fixed, after angry white mobs three weeks earlier had turned out to chase the students away. As Green pointed out in his talk, these were the same 101st "Screaming Eagles" who'd helped to liberate Europe from fascism when they parachuted into Normandy, in the dark, in the early morning of June 6, 1944.
I'd been invited to hear Green talk about his experience as part of the commemoration of Black History Month. But it was the preview to Green's talk that proved the most illuminating.
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Poster Comment:
Quote:
When the U.S. Military used bayonets to push White girls into colored schools, was there rebellion? No!
— David Lane, on "Christian Rightwing American Patriots"