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

These chapters span LaNier’s senior year. They detail the aftermath of the infamous bombing of her home and her increasing drive to get away from Little Rock. Though most of LaNier’s story is about systemic injustice in the educational system, these chapters demonstrate the wide and interconnected nature of systemic racism—specifically anti-Black racism. When she begins at Central, LaNier has what she later calls “naive” beliefs, including the belief that judicial proceedings and law enforcement will protect her equally and objectively. Her first two years at Central largely dispel this myth in an educational context, and her third year dispels it in a wider context.

Halfway through her senior year, Little Rock is plagued by a series of bombings. The first spree targets businesses and buildings in town, but the second targets LaNier’s home. While white segregationists are arrested and charged for the first bombings, Black men, including LaNier’s father, are accused of the latter. The treatment of these men reveals the ways systemic anti-Black racism affects the justice system.

LaNier is sure that the bombing is an intimidation tactic by segregationists, but a campaign is launched by segregationists suggesting “that Negroes might have been behind the bombing” (184). Shortly, two men are arrested: Herbert, a teen and LaNier’s friend, and Maceo, an acquaintance. Daddy is “taken from his home in the middle of the night by whites” (189) who are from the FBI, who beat and torture him for a false confession for more than two days.

Daddy’s detention stokes LaNier’s realization about the biases and motivations of law enforcement. She overhears Daddy telling Mother what happened to him in jail and thinks, “In the narrow minds of the police, Daddy was just a desperate Negro willing to blow up his own home and possibly even kill his family to get his hands on some money” (191). LaNier believes that law enforcement is bringing their racist biases into their investigation. FBI files released over 50 years after the bombing reveal that, in addition to letting racist biases guide the investigation, law enforcement actively began to “create a fictitious narrative” that Herbert and Maceo were guilty (Ross, Jim and Barclay Key. “In the wake of the Central High crisis, crime and injustice.” Arkansas Times. 27 Oct 2020).

The prosecutor’s first key evidence against the pair is a testimony by Earzie Cunningham that placed Herbert near the bombing. As an adult, Herbert discovers and tells LaNier that Cunningham “was in trouble with the law, and [the police] coerced him into placing me by your house at the time of the explosion” (259). The later-revealed FBI files show that Cunningham initially reported seeing two “white teens” (Ross and Key) by the Walls’ house. The same file reports that a Central High teacher recently showed his class how to make explosives with exact “formulas and percentages,” and “[t]wo young white men had recently checked out chemistry books from a local library about making explosives” (Ross and Key). Only after Cunningham is detained a full day and is shown an all-Black line up of suspects does his witness testimony change. This information reveals not only a law enforcement system guided by racial biases but one that actively diverted attention away from white Little Rock residents and toward falsely accused Black men.

While Daddy withstands the FBI’s physical torture, the two other men give forced, false confessions and are convicted, despite their alibis and the lack of evidence against them. In 1936, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Mississippi that confessions extracted through torture are invalid. That case involved three Black men convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a white farmer. As with Herbert and Maceo, their forced confession was the only “evidence” the prosecution had before finding them guilty.

The only defense Herbert’s prosecutor gives is a witness testimony that Herbert had a swollen face while in jail, implying that he had been beaten to coerce a confession. Despite the ruling in Brown v. Mississippi, the jury convicts Herbert in 38 minutes. In Maceo’s case, his lawyer pushes harder for his defense and “was on ongoing burr in the side of the white establishment” (209). Even though detectives admit on the stand that they used “psychology” against the pair, they don’t consider it “coercion” (208). Maceo is also given the maximum sentence.

The Marshall Project calls the court systems “a ‘white’ justice system” (Cohen, Andrew. “Confessing While Black.” The Marshall Project. 12 Dec 2014), biased toward whiteness in sentencing and jury selection. Theoretically, every American citizen has a right to be impartially tried by a jury of their peers. Both Maceo and Herbert are tried by all-white juries. In Maceo’s case, the prosecuting lawyer dismisses every Black citizen called to jury duty for the trial. After Maceo is found guilty, his conviction is appealed to the state supreme court. They overturn his conviction and rule “that black defendants were too often tried by all-white juries” (209). This implicitly acknowledges that Hebert and Maceo were not given impartial trials by a jury of peers but by groups of people with ingrained prejudices against them. The law enforcement who constructed a fictionalized case against them, the FBI who coerced false confessions from them, and the all-white juries who found them guilty despite an overwhelming lack of evidence are symptoms of the systemic racism which animates various sectors of society—in this case, the criminal justice system.