HBO doc looks at legacy of Little Rock H.S. integration

Dan Devine

As the nation’s attention turns this week to the 50th anniversary of the landmark integration of Little Rock Central High School, the documentary “Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later,” which premiered Tuesday night on HBO, offers an in-depth look at a community still wrestling with its dark past.

Award-winning filmmakers and brothers Brent and Craig Renaud spent about 18 months over the past two years working on the film in their native Little Rock as the city prepared to celebrate five decades since nine teenagers, flanked by paratroopers from the 101st Airborne, faced down racist threats and made history, becoming the first black students to attend Central on Sept. 25, 1957.

The brothers wrote in their director’s statement that they “did not set out to make any particular kind of film,” but they did acknowledge that they wanted “to go into the school and examine the legacy of desegregation” and the civil rights movement’s struggle for equal education — still controversial and relevant issues in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision rejecting voluntary desegregation plans in school districts in Seattle and Louisville, Ky.

In the process, the Renauds found a school that has taken major leaps forward as an academic institution, but still struggles with what one Central teacher calls “the elephant in the room” — a deep division in educational achievement between black and white students.

Central is routinely named among Little Rock’s best high schools by local newspapers, according to Principal Nancy Rousseau, and draws a lot of students from affluent backgrounds looking to take advantage of the school’s challenging Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum and sterling academic reputation. At the time the documentary was being filmed, Newsweek magazine had placed Central 20th among American high schools, a distinction based largely on the number of AP courses taken by Central students.

But despite Central’s majority-black population, relatively few black students take the AP courses, a flipside of the educational coin emphasized by the film’s juxtaposition of the smooth efficiency of a nearly all-white AP history class with the scattered nature of a remedial reading class populated almost entirely by African American males.

Students, teachers and administrators offer a variety of possible explanations for the achievement gap, such as a lack of emphasis on education in the black community and vestiges of institutional racism.

“Central is still pretty segregated,” says Brandon Love, 17, frequently the only black student in his AP classes. “It’s just that we don’t have to have the National Guard here to get into school.”

Back when armed escorts were needed to shepherd black students into and out of Central, the climate was characterized by hateful speech and violent actions. The film includes footage, shot the day the Nine came to Central, of an older white man giving his opinion on the students’ chances: “I think they’ll get in there, but I’m not sure how long they’ll live once they do.” Soon after, a black man is pushed to the ground and punched in the head by a swarm of angry whites as he tries to walk away.

Relations at today’s Central appear less volatile. The 70-minute documentary includes no confrontation more heated than a verbal disagreement between a black girl and a white boy over whether whites are responsible for racial disparities in educational achievement.

But on top of the differences in education, social divisions still exist. Black kids eat lunch in the cafeteria; white kids eat outside. Black kids line up to ride the bus; white kids hop into luxury cars filling the student parking lot.

The remaining separations caught on camera are perhaps more unsettling than those of 50 years ago because of how normal they’ve become. Stripped of the venom of the past, segregation is no longer forced; rather, it appears to be largely accepted as a fact of life, a matter of merely “staying with the people you feel comfortable with,” both at Central and the city of Little Rock.

But despite the film’s depiction of the community’s stalled progress, Craig Renaud — himself a proud Central graduate — told the Banner in an interview that amid the frustration and disappointment, there’s reason for optimism.

“I think the hope is in the discussions that are being had about race,” he said. “One of the things we found refreshing in making this film is that people are discussing the issues. A lot of people who have seen the film have said that they are surprised at how candid these people are.”

Hope may also be found in Love, an African American sworn in as Central’s student body president, an achievement unthinkable in 1957. Or in 15-year-old Angelica Luster, a young AP student who sees classroom excellence as her ticket out of an underprivileged life in Little Rock.

In the end, Craig Renaud hopes that “50 Years Later” presents multiple perspectives on America’s pursuit of equal education and his hometown’s continued struggles. More importantly, he hopes it continues to spark debate.

“There is no correct answer in any of this. But there is something that needs to be discussed past the anniversary,” he said. “It’s not enough for us to just arrive every 10 years and say, ‘We have a long way to go,’ and then everybody goes back to where they were and what they were doing, and nobody works on moving forward.”