Connections Questions for the Classroom | Choosing To Participage Online Module

The following are some questions for classroom discussion to help students connect the history presented in this website to their own lives and the choices they make everyday.

Use the menu below to jump to each Connection Question:

What is integration?
How do you define the word bystander?
How does one cooperate through silence?
What is the hurt that comes from words?
What if others had supported the "Little Rock Nine"?
Define the word hero.
To what extent does TV expand your "universe of obligation"?
How do we as individuals expand our "universe of obligation"?
How else can individuals and groups bridge differences that separate them?
How do you think the "Little Rock Nine" may be connected to people who registered black voters in the South or sat-in at lunch counters in the 1960s?
How are you learning to be a citizen in a democracy?"

The Rev. Colbert Cartwright was one of the few white ministers to speak out against the mob. He and other religious leaders organized a day of prayer for peace in the city on October 12, 1957. Although over 6,000 people participated, the next day the mob gathered once again outside Central High. And once again, other white citizens chose to look the other way. In reflecting on the crisis, Cartwright observed:

In the end, the law could not [integrate the schools]. A group of very dedicated people, women marshaled grassroots support to take back the schools and work on the desegregation problem. The lesson is that people themselves had to take responsibility for what they wanted their community to be. They had to rally the good forces in the community to take back the schools, do more than a lackluster desegregation effort by some edict. This was work that should have been done prior to desegregation.

What is integration? What does he suggest is needed to integrate the schools?

In 1957, Jesus Colon wrote an article about the "Little Rock Nine." In it he describes what a friend did a few days after Faubus called out the National Guard.

Joe took a rough piece of paper from the factory and wrote a request to the President of the United States to use his federal and military powers to keep open the doors of the high school to the Negro children. Joe then asked the 60 workers in his shop to sign their names to the request. About 40 of them signed. Then Joe put the whole thing in an envelope and sent it to President Eisenhower. Joe is a white worker. Can you imagine the effect in the White House if other Joes in thousands of other factories and offices all over thenation would have done the same? Enough said.

How would you answer Colon’s question? How do you define the word bystander? Research suggests that the responses of bystanders give an event meaning. Television dramatically increased the number of people who were bystanders to the riots in Little Rock. What is Colon suggesting about the ways they could give meaning to the event?

The nine African American students all lived in the Central High school district. As a result, they knew a number of white students in the school. Yet Elizabeth Eckford recalls, "Some of the students I’d known since I was ten years old, who were white, were afraid to speak to me in school. It’s true there were only about 50 students who were actively harassing us. But some of those other students, it was my feeling, were cooperating in that violence through their silence." How does one cooperate through silence? What is she suggesting about the role of the bystander?

There is an old saying that "sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me." Is it true? What is the hurt that comes from words? From silence? From "just being ignored"? How might the situation at Central High School have been different if Webb and other white students had regarded black students as "kids" much like them?

As the mob harassed Elizabeth Eckford, Grace Lorch decided that she could not remain a bystander. (Click here for more about Grace Lorch's story.) She braved the crowd to help Eckford reach safety. The white ministers who accompanied the African American students to school that day also took a stand. How important were the choices they made to the black students? To the community as a whole? To themselves? What if others had supported the "Little Rock Nine"? For example, what if the principal or a group of teachers had opened the doors of the school and escorted the nine into the building? How might that decision have altered the outcome of that day?

Harry Ashmore, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, said of the crisis in Little Rock, "Orval Faubus was the hero to the mob; the nine courageous black children he failed to keep out of Central High were heroes to the world." To whom was Eisenhower a hero? How does Ashmore seem to define the word hero? How do you define it? Who do you think the heroes were in this story?

Journalist David Halberstam described the crisis in Little Rock as it unfolded as “the first all-out confrontation between the force of the law and the force of the mob, played out with television camera whirring away in black and white for a nation that was by now largely wired. After watching the confrontation on television, Doris Kearns Goodwin, then a high school student in New York, wrote a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower urging him to intervene. Goodwin recalls:

Aside from the death of [actor] James Dean and the struggle to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, no public event had so fully engaged my private emotions. To challenge the president of the country, to berate angrily a governor I had never heard of from a place I did not know, was for me an immense expansion or political consciousness. It was a turning point or, at least, the start of a turning point.

What do Doris Goodwin’s remarks suggest about the way TV expanded her “universe of obligation”—the circle of individuals and groups “toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends”? To what extent does TV expand your “universe of obligation”? The video Eyes on the Prize, available from the Facing History Online Campus, shows some of the images she saw on TV in 1957. How do those images help you understand why Goodwin views the crisis in Little Rock as a turning point in her political consciousness?

That summer after the “Little Rock Nine” first integrated Central High, with the support of Governor Faubus and the state legislature, the Little Rock School Board closed all of the city’s high schools—the three “white high schools” and the one “black school.” Earlier that year, most white students and their parents saw themselves as bystanders. Now they discovered that they were deeply involved in the crisis. A number of parents began to speak out. A few organized to help reopen the city’s high schools to both black and white students. Among them was Sara Alderman Murphy. Her experience convinced her that “Little Rock was split into two communities that did not communicate or know enough about each other to solve problems together.” She decided that “work needed to be done in changing attitudes—my own as well as others’.”

In 1962, she organized an interfaith, interracial group of women to speak about “race” to civic clubs, religious groups, and women’s organizations in Little Rock and beyond. One evening, Mildred Terry, an elementary school teacher and a member of Murphy’s group, told a white audience about her son Alvin. He was one of the first black students at a local junior high school. She described how he was punched in the back, knocked down stairs, and repeatedly called names by white students at the school. After the program, a white boy asked to speak with her. She later shared that conversation with Murphy.

When he and Terry were alone, he said: “You don’t know me but you would if I told you my name. I was one of those boys who harassed Alvin. I hadn’t thought about how it made him feel until I heard you talking today. Please tell him I’m sorry I did it.” “I certainly did remember his name when he gave it,” Terry said later, laughing. “He made Alvin’s life miserable but I can’t get over what he said today. I was really moved to know he finally understood what he had done.”

In 1997, when Elizabeth Eckford was asked why she returned to Central High after her experience with the mob, she replied, “Somewhere along the line, very soon [staying at Central] became an obligation. I realized that what we were doing was not for ourselves.” What was that obligation? For whom do you think she and the others were enduring the harassment, if not for themselves? What does Sara Murphy’s story suggest about the way communities can break isolation? About the way we as individuals expand our “universe of obligation”?

The roundtable discussion organized by NBC (Click here for full story) was one of the few opportunities Central High students had to talk about their concerns. In that conversation, students raised all of the issues that there were parts of the debate on integration—questions of equality vs. state’s rights, fear of “race mixing,” and the conflict between free speech and free association and individual rights. None of these issues were discussed at school. How do you think the students learned about them? What did the roundtable discussion add to their understanding of these issues? To the understanding who heard their discussion?

Suppose a community group, the school, or the students themselves had organized informational conversations like NBC’s roundtable discussion. Who might have benefited? What might the students have learned from one another? How important is that learning? How else can individuals and groups bridge the differences that separate them?

In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to move to the back of the bus as required by law. Her arrest prompted other African Americans to boycott the city buses. For twelve and a half months, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., they walked, carpooled, and rode in taxis rather than sit at the back of the bus. Their commitment inspired the "Little Rock Nine." Melba Pattillo later wrote that she experienced a "surge of pride when I thought about how my people had banded together to force a change. It gave me hope that maybe things in Little Rock could change." What connected African Americans in the two cities? How do you think the "Little Rock Nine" may be connected to students like Marian Wright Edelman who registered black voters in the South or sat-in at lunch counters in the 1960s? To those who took to the streets to demand laws that guaranteed equal rights for all Americans?

In 1957, Doris Kearns Goodwin attended high school in Rockville Centre, New York. She had two teachers who “thought much more could be learned from the drama in Arkansas than from the prescribed textbooks.” In both her social studies and English classes, those teachers chllaneged her biases and encouraged her to think independently. They were teaching how to be a citizen in a democracy. How is democracy taught in your school today? How are you learning to be a citizen in a democracy?

(Check out Expanding Citizenship from the Choosing to Participate Study Guide to learn about how some young Americans answered this question.)