Jim Eison: “There I Was in History”

In 1997, reporters Ron Wolfe and Mary Hargrove interviewed Jim Eison for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Eison was one of about 150 white students who marched out of Little Rock Central High School on October 3, 1957, and crossed the street toward an effigy hanging from an oak tree. An effigy is a crude figure that stands for a hated individual or group. In this case, the effigy stood for the nine African American students. The reporters describe what happened next:

Some of the boys kicked and punched the straw-filled dummy that was dressed in blue jeans and an orange sweater. Rebel yells split the air amid shouts of, “Kill ’em, kill ’em!”

One boy stabbed the dangling figure in the back with a penknife. Cameras snapped and whirred, and a photographer asked Eison what he was thinking. “Oh, if that were only a real one!” Eison cried.

Someone set the effigy on fire, and it burned until the police pulled it down and stamped out the flames while the crowd booed.

Seventeen-year-old Eison—the crew-cut son of a university professor—made national news that day. Maybe it was just Eison’s luck that the cameras caught him. Maybe it was the shirt he was wearing, white with bluebirds, that grabbed their attention. Maybe he just said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

“There I was in history,” Eison remembers.

Although others have apologized for their behavior in 1957, Eison refuses to do so. 

“I was a product of my day and time, and I was acting from my early upbringing,” he says. Does it embarrass him now to be reminded what he said about the effigy? The question hangs for only a moment.

“Of course, that’s something I wouldn’t say today, I assure you,” Eison says. “Even if I felt that way, I wouldn’t lower myself now to say something that crude. … The sentiment was true. I’d rather I hadn’t said it, but at the same time I’m stubborn enough that I don’t like people to make statements and then apologize. I think that’s weak.” 

So he holds his ground. No polishing the scars off history.
No apology. …
Oct. 3, 1957: Eison’s memory is vivid as flame. … He remembers how his “liberal” grandmother had angered him that year, telling him, “It’s not going to hurt you to sit by them.” Colonel Eison [his father] had warned even before, “Desegregation is coming whether you like it or not. It’s coming.”

But when it came, it hurt and scared the Eison boy in ways he couldn’t name, and still can’t.

“It challenged a way of life,” he says. “Just how it was challenging, I don’t know.” But it threatened something so deep, so dear to him, that nothing good about desegregation could make up for the loss. …

He didn’t count how many other boys and girls joined the walkout … But it felt like a lot …

He walked out of school that day … in a show of “intense dislike” for blacks, and with practically no idea why. “I didn’t know anything about blacks,” Eison says. “I didn’t know anything about their history, what they had achieved or not achieved. Very few people did, either, very few.

“But the reason I maybe felt like I did—remember, I saw and observed these people on the streets, probably a lot of it came through my eyes. And then, another part of it probably came from peer pressure. A kid that age, you follow the crowd.” ¹

Teach a Facing History lesson featuring this resource. 

• 1Ron Wolfe and Mary Hargrove, “ A Product of the Old South,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 5, 1997.