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30 August 2007

Ernest Green

Little Rock Nine member Ernest Green (© AP Images)

Fifty years ago, black youngsters’ struggles to attend Little Rock’s Central High School during the 1957-1958 school year propelled the civil rights movement forward in the United States. (See “After Facing Mobs 50 Years Ago, Nine Go Home to Honors.”) The Little Rock Nine’s story is really nine stories.

Ernest Green was the first black to graduate from Little Rock’s Central High School.

“I was the only black student in the 12th grade,” he said. “Graduation felt like a tremendous accomplishment, as anyone’s high school graduation does.” But as the date of the ceremony approached, Central’s principal spoke to him. There had been rumors that Green would be harmed at the graduation ceremony, and the principal didn’t want him to participate. The principal said he would mail Green’s diploma to his home.

“I said, ‘Not in this lifetime,’” Green laughed.

 

Ernest Green waits for graduation ceremonies to begin at Central High's football stadium in May 1958. Green was the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, making him the first black student to graduate from the school. (Will Counts/Permission of Vivian Counts)

Ernest Green waits for graduation ceremonies to begin at Central High's football stadium in May 1958. (Will Counts/Vivian Counts)

After graduating from Central, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Michigan State University. Today, he is an executive with Lehman Brothers, working in the financial firm’s Washington office.

Green spoke to USINFO about the motivation to go to Central in the first place. “For all nine of us, the common thread was the importance of school and education; we all had adults in our families who thought that we had the right to be there.” Green’s father had died before he went to Central. But his mother and aunt, both school teachers, and his grandfather, a retired letter carrier, encouraged him. Even as things got more difficult, “none of them ever said, ‘we regard this as a mistake,’” he said.

Aware that he was living in a period of change in the United States, Green was ready to become part of it. He had heard about the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, about the brutal murder of a young black named Emmett Till, and about black athlete Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League baseball. “And I was cognizant of the Supreme Court decision” making school segregation illegal, he said.

Green found practicing nonviolence easy because it was practical. “We were significantly outnumbered; there were several thousand of them and nine of us.” The resistance to his being at Central even motivated him. “If there was so much protest about my going there, there had to be something worth pursuing,” he said.

See Black History Month.

Listen to Green talk about his graduation from Central.