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.
Prologue-Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Remember Central High — Fifty Years Later”
LaNier recounts listening to former President Bill Clinton speak at the 50th anniversary of her first year at Central. After LaNier graduated, she left Little Rock, got married, had kids, and rarely spoke of her experience until 30 years later when the Little Rock Nine were invited back to the school as guests of the NAACP. On that day, she has dinner with Bill and Hillary Clinton and speaks openly about her experience at Central for the first time. This launches LaNier's “quest for healing” and “greater understanding” (xv), of which her memoir is a result.
She has since stayed in touch with her “comrades” and began a nonprofit foundation for education with them. Though they are often framed as one unit, they are also nine individual people, and this book is LaNier’s individual story.
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Different World”
LaNier recalls her family history. Her formerly enslaved maternal great-great-grandfather Hiram claims his Cherokee and Spanish ancestry but distances himself from other enslaved people by virtue of his education. Hiram’s son, Papa Holloway, was the first non-white building contractor in Arkansas. After Papa’s longtime girlfriend died, she left the house to Papa. He sold it to LaNier’s father after he returned from WWII, when LaNier was three.
Her maternal grandfather, Grandpa Cullins, is a big, crudely spoken man. Her paternal grandfather, Big Daddy, has a third-grade education and owns a pool hall and restaurant. LaNier’s father is Big Daddy’s third child. His mother died when he was a teenager. Daddy eloped with LaNier’s mother, Juanita, as a teen before being shipped to WWII. Mother worked as a store clerk to support herself and the infant LaNier.
As a child, LaNier is close to Big Daddy, who lets her tag along at work. She notices how Big Daddy orders supplies from a white supplier “just like the white customers” (14). Her maternal and paternal grandfathers are united in their love of the Brooklyn Dodgers after they sign Jackie Robinson in 1947. When the Dodgers play in St. Louis, the entire family road trips to the game. Daddy organizes pit stops with relatives along the way so they can go to the bathroom and rest since hotels do not serve Black customers. LaNier doesn’t question this at the time. When the “ugliness of that other world” (16) shows its face to LaNier in childhood, her parents and grandparents take pains to teach her not to replicate the “ignorance” they face.
In 1951, at eight years old, LaNier’s Aunt Juanita and Uncle Freddie invite her to spend her summer in New York. She is stunned by the city's glamor and notices the lack of “Whites Only” signs at the fountains and restrooms and how she can sit anywhere on the bus. She also meets a “white boy who became [her] best friend” (25). As a result of these experiences, she has a new perspective on Jim Crow-era segregation.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Playing Field”
Inspired by Jackie Robinson, LaNier and her friends recruit white children for their summer softball games. While LaNier knows little of the white families in the neighborhood, the Black families are like family. She is in sixth grade when Brown v. Board makes the news. The next year she graduates from Paul Laurence Dunbar Jr. and Sr. High School and is disappointed not to see immediate changes to her school.
On the walk to Dunbar in the morning, she passes the then all-white Central. Though the two schools look similar, Dunbar is underfunded in every respect. Despite this, it is far better quality than most Black schools in the South. Their teachers have advanced degrees and work to make the curriculum creative and rigorous.
In 1955, the school board approves plans for two new high schools: Horace Mann for Black students and Hall High for white students. Central High will undergo a slow integration process: A handful of Black students will be admitted annually starting in 1957. This is meant to stall integration as much as possible.
In summer 1955, Emmett Till is lynched by white men in Mississippi. On September 15, LaNier sees pictures of Till’s open casket. In Till, LaNier recognizes her friends and family. LaNier imagines Little Rock on the opposite side of the spectrum of “racist evil” from Mississippi.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Birth of a Tiger”
In spring 1957, LaNier’s teacher asks for volunteers to attend Central in the fall. LaNier signs up. She sees the choice as innocuous and doesn’t tell her parents. In retrospect, she calls herself “naive.”
In August, Papa Holloway dies. At his funeral, word gets out that LaNier will attend Central. Some family members are disappointed, including Aunt Eva, who works at Dunbar’s library and is not convinced the Central teachers will invest in LaNier’s education the way Dunbar teachers did.
On registration day, LaNier goes to Central with her friend Gloria Ray. The registrar sends them away and tells them to return with their parents for a meeting with the superintendent. When they return to Gloria’s car, Mrs. Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP, is waiting for them. She wants to know what happened inside the school.
At the meeting, Superintendent Blossom tells the students they cannot participate in extracurriculars and must leave school immediately after classes ends “for [their] own safety” (58). LaNier is in disbelief and thinks that once she starts attending, things will be different. Blossoms tells the boys in the room not to date “or even look at [...] our girls” (60).
Prologue-Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These chapters cover LaNier’s life leading up to her first day at Central. They provide background on LaNier’s slow recognition of systemic racism in the South and the strategies for, resistance to, and anxieties about school integration.
LaNier is optimistic and “naive,” as she calls herself in retrospect. Her biggest reckonings with the depths of southern racism come as shocks to her. Knowing nothing else, she accepted many of the things her family had to do to survive—like map out their road trips to avoid gas stations and hotels, use specific bathrooms and fountains, or sit in the back of the bus—as “the rules” and never thought to question them. When she visits her Aunt Juanita and Uncle Freddie in New York, the bathrooms are only divided by “men” and “women,” and they sit wherever they want on the bus. LaNier thinks “being colored seemed to mean something else up here” (20). She calls New York a “brand-new world” (25), free from the boundaries that restricted her actions and friendships in Little Rock. Unlike the South, the North is not legally segregated: LaNier comes to understand that segregation is not simply a way of life but purposeful, state-sponsored, anti-Black racism.
In addition to depicting the contrast between racial access and equality in the North and the South, the descriptions of LaNier’s family life also foreground the theme of Collective Care in the Black Community. LaNier grows up under the influence and care of loving parents and grandparents and an extended family stretching across several states. That her New York relatives invite her to spend the summer in the city with them—a vastly different and much freer world than Little Rock—shows an investment on their part in broadening her perspective and providing her with a safe and fun summer season.
Even though the juxtaposition between Little Rock and New York City sparks LaNier’s realization, embedded systems of anti-Black racism animate the entire United States. In a 1960 speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that the “racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem” (King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness.” Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. 6 September 1960). Some white liberals from the North used their advocating for legal desegregation in the South to draw attention away from the systems of racism and educational segregation that also undergirded the Northern states (Theoharris, Jeanne. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Beacon Press, p. 32).
As a pre-teen, LaNier struggles with realizing the insidious extent of systemic racism in the United States. She sections off horrific racist crimes as things that happen over there but not here. When Emmett Till is lynched in Mississippi, her reaction is that “Little Rock was somewhere on the other end of the spectrum [of racist evil]—or so I thought” (40). At moments like these, LaNier’s older, authorial persona intervenes to draw attention to the mistaken optimism of her youthful self. She brings this same energy to her enrollment at Central. She doesn’t understand why some of her family is resistant to her transfer, believing them hypocritical for preaching the importance of education and then resisting when she pursues what she sees as educational advancement. Even though they are genuine concerns, her family’s worries about LaNier’s attending Central are one manifestation of The Pressure of Being “The First.” Even though this pressure is motivated by love, it still creates emotional conflict in LaNier, who expected widespread familial support for her decision.
This misunderstanding anticipates The Pain and Necessity of Educational Integration. LaNier believes attending Central is necessary for her future, a notion solidified in the reader’s mind by comparisons of the Black and white schools that bear out the fallacy of “separate but equal.” Her adult relatives, especially the ones who work at Dunbar, “invested their skills and hearts” in teaching for a school system that underpaid them in comparison to their white counterparts so they could “prepare black children for a world that would require them to be twice as good and work twice as hard” (53). These adults understand their anti-Black society in a way that the young LaNier doesn’t. They utilize Collective Care in Black Communities to help students, understand the lived experience of being a Black person in the United States, and don’t believe that their “white colleagues at Central” (53) can look past the students’ skin color to see the “doctors, lawyers, scientists, and entrepreneurs of the next generation” (53). By contrast, LaNier expects rationality from people and equal treatment by governments and authorities: After Brown v. Board, she thinks “that what the US Supreme Court said should happen would indeed happen because it was now the law of the land and because the law was just” (57). The adults in her life know—and LaNier quickly comes to know—that the legal and governmental systems in the United States are just as anti-Black as individual white citizens are.
LaNier moves closer to this realization in Chapters 2 and 3, which address how the fear of romantic and sexual relationships between white and Black people animates anti-Black violence and fear of integration. The combined circumstances of Emmett Till’s lynching, newspaper ads promoting fear of integration, and the Little Rock Nine’s meeting with Blossom reveal to her “the underlying source of all that fear” (57): that white womanhood is at risk from Black masculinity. This racist caricature imagines that Black men will enact revenge for enslavement against the white daughters of former enslavers: This stereotype originated during the era of chattel slavery and was re-popularized with the 1915 release of the racist, pro-KKK movie Birth of a Nation. This dehumanization served as justification for the extrajudicial lynching and murder of Black men and boys, such as the 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was hunted down and lynched by a white mob after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. When Blossom warns LaNier’s male peers “not to date—or even look at—our girls” (60), she thinks about the possessive nature with which white men see their white daughters. She “also thought for a moment about Emmett Till” (60) and wonders if her male peers are thinking about the violent or fatal repercussions for innocuous or accidental behaviors.
Even after this, LaNier views the coming year with hope. She reflects, “Youth can give you an unfailing faith that the world will give you back what you give to it, what you expect” (62). Despite this faith, LaNier’s confrontation with the systemic racism surrounding her will intensify in the next chapters.
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