The Battle of Little Rock
THE BATTLE OF LITTLE ROCK; As America recalls the day when troops were sent to escort nine Arkansas teenagers to school, Leonard Doyle talks to the cub reporter who forced a president to confront segregation; Civil rights struggle remembered
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Exactly 50 years ago today in the midst of toxic racial ferment, nine black teenagers were escorted to their school in Little Rock, Arkansas, by armed paratroopers as an angry white mob hurled abuse at them.
For three weeks in September 1957, Little Rock was the focus of a showdown over segregation as the state governor, Orval Faubus, defied a Supreme Court ruling from 1954 which declared segregated classrooms unconstitutional.
He ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop the nine black students enrolling at the Central High School with about 2,000 white students. The showdown became a test for President Dwight D Eisenhower, who ordered members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students to the school.
The transfer of the students, to Central High School from the poorly equipped local negro school was so bitterly opposed that they were obliged to travel to class in an army Jeep, with troops from the 101st Airborne division, the "Screaming Eagles", in front and behind.
Snipers kept watch from the school roof and helicopters circled overhead as 20 soldiers in combat gear shielded the black students as they crossed thelawn and climbed the stairs of the school. It was the first time in 80 years that federal troops had been sent to a former state of the Confederacy.
The episode became a landmark in the American civil rights struggle alongside the stand taken by the black civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to sit at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That moment will be remembered in a ceremony today featuring, among others, Arkansas's most famous son, former president Bill Clinton.
The events in Little Rock would not have happened when they did but for the efforts of a young man named Larry Lubenow, a pushy student journalist who had elbowed his way into Louis Armstrong's hotel suite in North Dakota a week before the momentous school run.
The interview he landed was to cost him his job and caused ructions across America for its denunciation of institutionalised racism. It was all the more incendiary because Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong had long been written off in civil rights circles as an "Uncle Tom" figure. "I don't get involved in politics," he had once said, "I just blow my horn."
In the words of a Chicago newspaper, the story had the "explosive effect of an H-bomb".
The Little Rock Nine were barred from attending Central High School by Governor Faubus and a hostile white community bent on maintaining racial segregation at the start of term in September 1957. Two weeks later, on 17 September, Armstrong and his All Stars band checked into the Dakota Hotel, a few hundred miles away in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Larry Lubenow was a 21-year-old college student moonlighting for The Grand Forks Herald when the editor sent him to get an interview with the legendary jazz trumpeter.
He was instructed to stay away from politics and stick to music. But Lubenow had no intention of following his editor's orders. "I was from a small North Dakota farming community but I knew all about the trouble in Little Rock," he recalled yesterday, "and I was outraged".
"Thanks to a misspent youth I knew the hotel bell captain from late-night drinking sessions," Lubenow said.
"He tipped me off that Mr Armstrong was the first black man ever to have stayed in the Dakota [hotel]. I also knew that Grand Forks was the home town of Judge Ronald Davies who had just challenged Orval Faubus the segregationist governor of Arkansas." Judge Davies had struck down an injunction to keep the black students away from the school.
Helped by the bell captain, Lubenow made his way into Armstrong's suite as room service was delivering his lobster dinner before that evening's concert. Lubenow recalled that he immediately "told a lie" to avoid being ejected. "I said I would be fired from the paper if I did not come back with an interview, so [Armstrong] asked me to sit down and have a glass of wine. I declined the wine but we started talking about jazz and he told me that Bing Crosby was one of his favourite artists.
"I then asked him if he knew he was the first black man to have stayed in the hotel and soon we were talking about Little Rock and the fact that he was in the home town of Judge Davis.
"That just sent him off," Lubenow said. With his lobster dinner going cold, Armstrong, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, "cancelled a goodwill trip to Russia where he was being sent by the State Department as a musical ambassador".
"'It's getting almost so bad that a coloured man hasn't got any country,' Armstrong fumed. "The way the government are treating my people in the south, they can go to hell."
Armstrong denounced President Eisenhower as "two-faced", saying he had "no guts" and was being pushed around by local racists. "A no-good motherfucker," is how he described Governor Faubus, which the young Lubenow persuaded him to tone down to the euphemism "uneducated ploughboy."
Mr Armstrong was equally scathing about the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, before launching into an obscene and ribald version of the American national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner:
At that point, Lubenow recalled, Velma Middleton, the vocalist with whom Armstrong was touring, tried to shush him.
Speaking of his previous trips to Europe Armstrong said: "The people over there ask me what's wrong with my country; what am I supposed to say?" If he went back to the Soviet Union, he would do it on his own he said. "They know Louis Armstrong, and they'll come to hear me. In Berlin people risked their lives to hear me."
Armed with his scoop, Lubenow missed the concert and raced back to the newspaper to find that neither his own paper nor the Associated Press wire service would touch it. They needed proof that Mr Armstrong had said such incendiary words.
The next morning Lubenow returned to the musician's suite with a photographer and showed him the story. "That's just fine," Armstrong said. "Don't take nothing out of that story. That's just what I said and still say." He then wrote the word "solid" and signed his name at the bottom of the reporter's typed story.
The article triggered a media meltdown and its contents were broadcast nationwide on that evening's television news.
The writer David Margolick, who recently revealed Lubenow's tale, discovered that a Mississippi radio station had destroyed all of its records by Louis Armstrong. The next day Armstrong's road manager said the musician had been tricked into giving the interview, but at his next concert stop Armstrong said: "I said what somebody should have said a long time ago."
He went on to close his concert with a repeat of his offensive version of The Star-Spangled Banner.
A galaxy of black sportsmen and artists, including the baseball player Jackie Robinson, the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and the singers Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt, immediately spoke out in his defence. The black magazine Jet reflected the astonishment of many black Americans when it said that Armstrong's message to the world had long been that "the negro's lot in America is a happy one".
Armstrong paid a price for his outspokenness. His concerts were boycotted and television shows on which he was booked to appear were shunned by advertisers. Lubenow also suffered. Far from being feted for delivering a world-class scoop, he was banned from appearing on television to talk about his interview because it was sponsored by the Farmers' Union. "The owners considered the Farmers' Union to be Communist," he recalled. "It was laughable."
"I walked out on them [the newspaper]," he recalled, "and I couldn't get a job anywhere."
But his interview with Armstrong had the desired effect. Lubenow certainly believes so as does the writer David Margolick. On 24 September 1957 "no guts" Eisenhower, as Armstrong had branded the US president, ordered the 101st Airborne into Little Rock.
"If you decide to walk into the schools with the little coloured kids, take me along, Daddy," Armstrong telegraphed the White House.
Mr Lubenow, whose scoop helped to change US civil rights history was paid $3.50 for his story before he quit.
