A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School

These chapters follow LaNier’s life from the early 1980s through the writing of her memoir. This is the section of her life in which she finally confronts the trauma of her past and begins to work through it while also educating people about her story.

In the 1980s, more than a decade after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, stories from that era begin to get more popular headway. LaNier’s first instinct is to hide from her involvement. When her former English teacher Mrs. Huckaby contacts LaNier for an interview for a book she’s writing, LaNier does not respond. She says, “Those memories were buried deep in my past. I didn’t want to think about them. I didn’t want to relive them” (239). In LaNier’s opinion, the best way through her trauma is to forget it. The first pop culture encounter LaNier has with her own story is through the television movie based on Mrs. Huckaby’s book. After watching it with her family and “unemotionally” answering her son’s questions, she reflects on how the movie made Mrs. Huckaby “the central character” and how the “Hollywood character was a bit too compassionate” (240). In her experience, Mrs. Huckaby had been fair but never warm. For the first time, LaNier sees her history interpreted through a certain lens, and although she respects Mrs. Huckaby’s right to tell her own story, that lens does not fully accord with her experience. Though this disturbs her, she continues to ignore her past as she has been.

Less than six years later, LaNier is forced to realize that her method of coping with the past is not working. When she is invited back to Central along with her eight comrades as guests of the NAACP for the 30th anniversary of their first year at Central, she finally learns “that burying a painful past doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve moved beyond it” (242). Stepping into Central’s halls for the first time since graduation, she is overcome by “old ghosts,” and her usually collected exterior breaks down. Many psychological studies show that Black Americans experience heightened psychological, emotional, and physical distress due to prevalent anti-Black racism (Lee, D.L. and S. Ahn. “The relation of racial identity, ethnic identity, and racial socialization to discrimination–distress: A meta-analysis of Black Americans.” Journal of Counselling Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1-14). These effects are real, and LaNier must confront the fact that the racial trauma she experienced from The Pressure of Being “The First” is not an experience one can just forget about. Instead, she must develop a system of tangible methods that address the multiple traumas of her past.

Her “[f]irst and most important” (243) move is reconnecting and establishing a support system with the rest of the Little Rock Nine, invoking the Collective Care in Black Communities. Her eight comrades are the “eight other people in this world” who can truly empathize with LaNier, and she comes to rely on their support on “a particularly bad day” (243). Even though reconnecting with her comrades means remembering what happened, they provide a system of support she could not access on her own.

LaNier’s second method is accepting speaking engagements about her time at Central. Her speaking allows her to address things she passionately believes about educational integration, which, to teens in the 1980s, is something they read about in textbooks rather than experience. LaNier wants to use her story so students can “put a face” to those abstracted readings and realize the “human toll” that the struggle for integration had on Black students in the 1950s and 1960s. By doing this, she can also discuss how marginalized people almost always unfairly shouldered the impetus for social change. Rather than simply declaring their support for certain social movements like educational integration, “[w]hite families who believe in the ideals of a multiracial society” (245) need to take concerted actions toward those ideals in the same way marginalized peoples do.

By taking speaking engagements, LaNier is reclaiming her story as a method of working through her past. Likewise, she urges the Little Rock Nine to “stop complaining about people using us” and “take control of [their] own name” (248). They start the Little Rock Nine Foundation to carry on their legacy and register their collective moniker as a trademark.

While LaNier reclaims her power by telling her own story, first in schools and then in her memoir, she also helps others reclaim their own stories, most notably Herbert. As part of her healing, LaNier reconnects with Herbert to discuss his false conviction. When the two meet, she discovers that Herbert “needed to talk about it just as much as I needed to hear it” (257). She devotes almost all of Chapter 16 to Herbert’s story, which recounts the extent of the police and FBI’s plot to convict him and the abuse he suffered at their hands. LaNier tells the story in his voice to do “what [she] can to clear his name” (264) and, in doing so, to find the peace that has so long eluded her.

LaNier’s narrative ends, hopefully, with her recounting of the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. His election provides closure and purpose to her struggles: Despite her trauma, she and her eight comrades “were helping to start a journey sure to outlast any of us” (272). Obama’s election is a point along that journey toward racial equity that she “could not imagine [she] would live to see” (272). LaNier is aware that behind Obama’s election are centuries of pain, racism, and oppression: She recalls the many people who “had to witness this victory from heaven” (272). Like The Pain and Necessity of Educational Integration, pain and progress sit uncomfortably close together.