Choosing to Walk with Ernest Green

Teachers should review "Teaching Note 1: Offensive and Dehumanizing Language" in the lesson The Choices the Little Rock Students Made before using this material.

Jane Emery was the co-editor of The Tiger, Central High School’s student newspaper. In a 1999 interview, she recalled a choice she made at the end of the 1957 school year.

Towards the end of the year, graduation, Mrs. Huckaby [the vice principal of girls at Central High School] called five of us into her room ... and she said ... [during graduation] one of the five of us would be walking with Ernest Green. And so we could decide what we wanted to do, and Ernest understood if we were uncomfortable. ...

There were five of us brought in. ... And I was the middle person, so of the five people, I would be the one, and so since they didn’t know who was going to be absent, they would call five of us. And I didn’t realize that I was going to be it. And I said, “I have no problem, I’ll walk with him,” and I really thought that was silly. And I didn’t think anything about it.

[Then] we started getting obscene phone calls [at] my home. My mother really got scared. I mean things like ...“Are you a nigger lover, are you going to walk with him? You want your daughter to marry a nigger?” And it went on ’til late at night, and my mother took the phone off the hook, but she was absolutely scared to death, you know like the house was going to be blown up. ... I was angry at the [whites] who did that, who really angered me. So, that just made me more determined that I was going to walk with him. And I walked with him, that was the first I ever talked to him.” ¹  

Teach a Facing History lesson featuring this resource.

• 1Beth Roy, Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 223–24.