Arkansas natives talk about school desegregation

LYNN – John Bilheimer held up the historic photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine black students who walked into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., alone while being jeered at by white students and parents.”That was the first day of school in 1957,” Bilheimer told a rapt group of KIPP Academy students on Thursday. “A mob formed outside the high school.”Bilheimer said it became so bad it was decided that the nine black students should stay home.”But Elizabeth Eckford’s family did not have a phone, and no one thought to drive by and tell her to stay home,” he said.Bilheimer should know. He was in that school that very day.Bilheimer and Henry Jones brought the civil rights movement to life as the KIPP students got to hear a first-hand account of what life was like for a black teen and a white teen in the Deep South in the late 1950s.KIPP Academy volunteer and Swampscott resident John Kane set the stage for Kathleen Shaughnessy’s eighth grade social studies class when he introduced two of his old friends.”They will tell you what it was like to grow up in Little Rock, Ark., where there was virtually no contact or dialog between the races,” Kane said.The talk, led by Kane, wrapped up a month of events at KIPP aimed at raising black history awareness.Little Rock became the first battlefield in 1957 over school desegregation when the National Guard was called out to block nine black students from attending Central High School.Jones, who is black, was in the seventh grade and knew the nine students chosen to be integrated into the new high school. John Bilheimer, who is white, was in the eighth grade and grew up near Jones, though the two never met until adulthood.Jones said the photograph shows an angry mob, but he had in fact been in the same white neighborhood only hours earlier delivering newspapers, “and no one bothered me.” Jones said the photo also belies what else was going on in Little Rock that day, which was essentially life as usual.”I was in school and it was a normal day,” Bilheimer said.Bilheimer called the event embarrassing. For Jones, however, it had a slightly deeper impact. Jones said he heard stories from Jefferson Thomas, another of the black students who eventually did go to Central that year.”Three years later, when some more students were given the chance to go to Central High School, I decided to go to the black high school because of what Jeff said,” Jones said. “Plus, I was going to be a Major League Baseball player and Central didn’t have a baseball team.”In 1959, then-Gov. Orval Faubus closed all the high schools in the city rather than integrate. For Bilheimer, that meant a change in plans and he headed north and spent his high school years at Phillips Academy Andover, where he met Kane. He later returned home to attend the University of Arkansas before heading back north to Harvard Law School.Jones said deciding to stay at Horace Mann School was the best decision he could have made. The school had fewer resources than the white schools but it had better teachers, he said.”Our teachers had been educated all around the country because they couldn’t get an education in Arkansas,” he said. “We got the best education and they made sure we were prepared for life. They told us how to survive in the world.”While Bilheimer came home to the University of Arkansas, Jones headed north to Yale where he was one of 12 African-American students in a class of over 1,000 males, including Kane. Later Jones attended law school at the University of Michigan, became the first African-American law clerk to a federal judge and joined the first integrated law firm in Arkansas where he met Bilheimer for the first time. Jones also served as a judge in the Eastern District of Arkansas from 1978 to 2010.Students peppered the pair with questions, including what life was like before integration.”We will answer that very differently,” Bilheimer said.Bilheimer said white kids and adults didn’t really think about segrega