The Central High Memory Project began in 2005, when civics teachers at Central assigned students to interview a relative who lived through the Civil Rights Movement. The ongoing experiment produced different ways to share its findings with the general public: books, presentations at conferences, poetry readings, and a walking tour of Elizabeth Eckford's first attempt to enter Central. From time to time, the Memory Project interviewed former students who attended Central during the desegregation crisis in 1957. Penny Fox, a junior at the time, was lab partners with Little Rock Nine member Gloria Ray Karlmark in biology class. Members of the Memory Project, always thinking and seeking more information about the crisis, interviewed Fox with the hope to gain the perspective of a white student.
Current Central High School students Zoie Moore, Zia Tollette, and Jessie Bates reflected on their time as members of the Memory Project.
Zoie Moore
Tell me about the work you've been doing with the Memory Project.
We all divided out the [walking tour] script into several parts. My primary job in the beginning was to pick out—we had the primary documents and these documents were Elizabeth’s first day—I had to read the entire newspaper and cut and paste quotes from specific people. And Governor Faubus was really in this article, so I had to do a lot of research on Governor Faubus.
Anything about Faubus that stuck out to you?
The accounts from everyday students on him have been, 'Oh, we didn't expect him to shut down the school.’ Or ‘We didn’t expect him to do such a thing at Central. He was just another man we voted for.’ Especially from blacks who voted for him. I thought that was really interesting. They were shocked in a way.
The Memory Project gets people to talk about the legacy of discrimination in many forms. Tell me why that is important?
I think they get an understanding. I think it’s something different from TV and media. We can read the words and see something that touches something else inside of you. I think it says that we’re not alone in this world. There are other people who are going through the same thing and that’s a problem that we need to address.
Upon reflecting about the legacy of discrimination, tell me about forms of discrimination at Central High School.
Not directly to me, but to my co-black friends who fit the media description. I get named a bunch of stuff such as ‘Oreo.’ How can you be white in the inside out? I’m just talking how I talk. And that’s on both sides, black community, in my community, so I guess that’s a form of discrimination, but not really something that’s drastic.
It's interesting.
Yeah, I grew up in a white neighborhood but I go to an all-black church. So I hear different things. But nothing that hurt me physically or emotionally because I grew up with this. I’m used to it now.
The Memory Project is reacting to American History like a student activist. What do you gain from that?
The fact that everyone has a story. I don’t know how to word it but the Memory Project has taught me that the person who sits in the back of the class, they could have so much going on that you don’t know about. Their uncle could have walked with Martin Luther King or they're, you know, part of the KKK or something. So it’s interesting that we all need to talk about. I’ll be heading off to college this fall and I definitely want to start a school’s own chapter of the Memory Project, which I think it will be very interesting.
What school?
I'm going to Agnes Scott in Atlanta, Georgia.
You talk to people of older generations about civil rights. What have you learned about that dialogue?
Especially when I talk to different races, I love to hear their point of view of it. I guess it’s a sign of relief. Not everyone is bad or evil, [like] how our textbooks go over how you grow up. Ms. Penny said, ‘I was just trying to be her friend.’ But she was attacked. That’s something that you wouldn’t hear in a textbook. You probably turn to the KKK mob or something like that.
Zia Tollette
Tell me about the work you've been doing with the Memory Project.
What we’ve been doing for the past year, or more than that, is to try and make a walking tour following Elizabeth Eckford’s walk on the first day of Central High. And we made a script to go with the walking tour and tells about the first day of the integration of Central High…What I have been doing is that I have been the editor of the script so we read through a bunch of primary sources and we found ones that stick out for us. We meet together and confirm the things that have stuck out to us and we decide, ‘Do we want to add this to the story?’ We add and we take out. It’s been a long process.
What were some of the things that stuck out to you?
The main thing that we got to experience was that it is a lot worse than what you learned in school. It was ridicule every day. Horrible things were said. In school, they sugarcoat it and they say, ‘there were a few antagonists, but it wasn’t that bad. It was just a few people.’ But truly not the truth. The truth is that so many people were so horrible to the Nine on a daily basis. That’s the main thing.
I think that the Memory Project that have gone through these sources have definitely knows more about how horrible it was. But I think the majority of students at Central would agree that the way that it is presented in middle school or even in high school is not the full truth.
The Memory Project gets people to talk about the legacy of discrimination in many forms. Tell me why that is important?
I think it's important to talk about discrimination that doesn’t necessarily affect you because it helps you relate to people that are different than you. It teaches tolerance and it promotes diversity. We’re a very diverse group. It’s truly beneficial to hear experiences you can relate to personally but somebody that you’re really close and know has to deal with this every day and it’s very personal. Diversity teaches that.
Upon reflecting about the legacy of the desegregation crisis, tell me about forms of discrimination at Central High School.
I always say that Central is integrated but still segregated. We definitely have black kids hanging out with black kids, white kids hanging out with white kids, and all races hanging out with each other...a big problem at Central is getting out of your comfort zone and talking to new people. I think that problem lies in our cities. Segregation, especially neighborhoods, and [Interstate] 630 basically divides where black people live and where white people live. I think that’s one of the biggest problems…It’s not necessarily discrimination, it’s just not understanding other people and not trying to understand them.
The Memory Project is reacting to American History as like a student activist. What do you gain from that?
I think just getting involved with whatever committee and in whatever situation I’m in and I’ve learned that if even if you’re in a small community, you can still make a difference. That may not be big but that’s still something. We were just interviewing a student who was at Central with the Little Rock Nine. She just talked about how her church which is predominately white meets with the predominately black church and they…talked about issues of race and how they see things versus how other people see things and it’s good to bring those different ideas together and confer with other people because they really do see a whole other side of things that you wouldn’t have seen by yourself.
You talk to people of older generations about civil rights. What have you learned about that dialogue?
I learned about a lot of things. I think that a lot of people of my generation really don’t grasp how bad racism used to be because right now, there’s definitely a lot of racism but it’s nothing like segregation that was happening not too long ago. We talked to other people in the Memory Project and that’s been very helpful. I think that a lot of what I have learned has also come from to talking to my family members because my dad grew up in Arkansas around the same time as the Nine. He’s younger than them, but the things that he heard on a daily basis are just astounding because this generation does not go through things like that. Not that abrupt, hateful racism every single day. Not that there’s still not there, but it’s just not as prevalent.
One thing that my dad told me was that the first day he came to Little Rock...he was walking through the neighborhood as kids do. It was a different time, you could walk around when you’re ten years old. But he was just walking by and then some white teenage boys pulled up next to him in a car and spat on him and call him the n-word. Things like that don’t happen today. I think that’s what I learned is that sometimes you just need to take a step back and you need to listen. When you find out that stuff, you can prevent it from happening in the future, stop history from repeating itself.
Jessie Bates
Tell me about the work you've been doing with the Memory Project.
I started the Memory Project even though it’s a high school club. But I’ve known Mr. West for a while. He thought I might be interested because I enjoy writing and reading and history. By the time I had started, they had already put the basic [walking tour] script together so they had gotten all the quotes that they wanted. And so at the very beginning my part was to mainly just to edit, to make it really concise, and make it flow. I think the hardest part that I had to do was setting the momentum for each stop. It’s truly difficult to keep the tension high while still telling the full story and not lose their attention. It was difficult to find the right quote to start with and then find the right quote to end with for each stop because a lot can change.
The memory project gets people to talk about the legacy of discrimination in many forms. Tell me why that is important?
The Memory Project is mainly educating about our past…and how we got through that. It took a while for the students at Central to accept the black students. I think full integration and to get past just years of teachings might take a while and you just got to wait and actively work towards it because nobody had really said that we need to integrate, then Central would probably still be segregated.
Upon reflecting about the legacy of the desegregation crisis, tell me about forms of discrimination at Central High School.
I don’t think any of it is purposeful or conscious discrimination but it’s definitely segregated. I feel some teachers, some not all, because a lot of the teachers are very into equality, but some teachers might be more likely to get onto an African-American student than a white student for doing the same thing or to be more suspicious of an African-American student that they find in the bathroom during class even if they have a pass. It’s subtle. It’s not just straight-out hatred or anything but I also find that Central is segregated. Even the students just segregate themselves.
Because the classes, I haven’t personally taken AP classes because I just got in 9th grade. You take AP in 9th grade. But my sister described…her classes and she was just the majority white. There might be one black student in my AP classes. That changes who you hang out with as a student. Your friends are majority, their mostly white because that’s whose in your classes that you take and get to know. So when you get to the lunchroom or outside of the school, you mainly hang out with white students because that who you spend all your time with.
When students experience that, how do they try to change it?
It's difficult to change because it’s such a big school. It’s hard to change that but there was recently…a death among a white student and Ms. Rousseau held a moment of silence that was one minute over the intercom. Then there was a death of a black student and the moment was a tenth of that time and so a lot of students got really angry about that. They organized a little protest. It was kind of a march. They went to the auditorium and Ms. Rousseau talked with them about it. There’s small things that they kind of protested but it’s hard to completely change all of that with the snap of your fingers.
The Memory Project is reacting to American History as like a student activist. What do you gain from that?
I'd like to be more open minded about races and also it’s just been a good experience not with the racism, not the actual thing we’ve been working on, but deciding what matters. Whenever you read something and figuring out how to put stuff together and [edit] all that, it’s been a good experience learning.
You talk to people of older generations about civil rights. What have you learned about that dialogue?
It gives you a new opinion and a new view on things because especially for Penny, who was just a white student at Central. Whenever you think about white students at Central at that time, you think, ‘Oh, my God, they were the crazy, hateful people.’ But then she was just one of the ones who just kind of was pushed to the back and didn’t get involved in that, but wasn’t really able to do anything to change because it was such a big thing. One person can’t do it.
The Memory Project is sponsored by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System. For more information on their civil rights oral histories, contact: gwest@cals.org.