19 Aug 2014 Opera set to commemorate anniversary of desegregation of Little Rock Central

by Donna Lampkin Stephens

The biggest story in Arkansas history will come to life in a new way with the University of Central Arkansas College of Fine Arts and Communication’s commission of the opera The Little Rock Nine.

Bolstered by the school’s first-ever grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Virginia Bernthal Toulmin Foundation and the Fred Darragh Foundation, UCA is in contract negotiations with Tania León, Cuban-born composer and conductor, and Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., American literary critic and scholar, who will write the libretto.

The brainchild of Dr. Rollin Potter, former dean of UCA’s College of Fine Arts and Communication, The Little Rock Nine will tell the story of the nine African-American students who, under the protection of the United States Army’s 101st Airborne Division, entered Little Rock’s Central High School, risking their lives to ensure future generations’ equal access to education.

Plans are for the opera to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the desegregation in September 2017.

“The Little Rock Nine story embodies all of the ingredients to be one of the world’s great operas,” Potter said. “Nine innocent young people take the stage front and center as they confront years of bigotry and America’s failure to stand by a promise of equality for all citizens. With few options remaining, the Nine found support from a president and American hero determined to validate the laws of the land and America’s leadership in a world still grappling with the truest meanings of freedom and opportunity.

“This is a story so compelling that it is best told through an art form where its dramas can unfold and remain with us forever.”

The story of the Little Rock Nine transfixed the nation in September 1957 as nine ordinary yet courageous African-American students entered the previously all-white Central High School under federal troop escort to obtain an equal education. With the help of television news, then in its infancy, and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and photographers, the events commanded worldwide attention as Little Rock and the Nine came to symbolize the federal government’s commitment to eliminating separate systems of education for blacks and whites.

Dr. Gayle Seymour, associate dean of CFAC, and the author, assistant professor of journalism at UCA, have worked with Potter for nearly two years on the project, which they hope will invite younger generations into the world of opera through the drama and innovation that León and Gates will bring to the work.

As Gates has expressed, “It would be one of the honors of our lives to tell this story as it has never been told: as a modern opera as searing and inspiring as any of the dramas of the ancient world, but with more immediacy.”

Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and one of the world’s most prominent scholars on African-American history.

As he tells the story, “At the center of the crisis were nine black children seeking the promise of equal education. Behind them was a federal court order. In their way, literally, was their state’s white governor, determined to hold onto the old ways, even at the point of arms. As the country watched the standoff unfold, the children walked up the schoolhouse steps with bricks and bats bearing down. Their only hope: the President and a military, which, at his command, had helped liberate Europe after D-Day.

“In an America torn between its capacity for cruelty and dreams, what would win out: betrayal or courage, rage or principle, hate or the dignity of rising by learning? The answer would revolutionize a nation.”

Terry Wright, dean of CFAC, said the project was well suited to the mission of the college.

“One of art’s most vital imperatives is its ability to serve as a collective witness to history and thus serve as both a safeguard as well as an expressive reminder to be ever vigilant against social injustice,” he said. “By creatively dramatizing the story of the Little Rock Nine, a seminal incident in the struggle for civil rights, the opera project fulfills that critical objective.”

León is known for her contemporary music, including ballets, string quartets and the opera Scourge of Hyacinths, based on a play by Wole Soyinka.

Director of the composition program and Claire and Leonard Tow Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College, León was in Little Rock in June for meetings about the project. She joined representatives of UCA, the Little Rock Central High National Historic Site, journalists of the era and several members of the Little Rock Nine.

The angle she and Gates are considering, she told the group, would be the impact on people when they are rejected.

“It’s not about pigmentation,” she said. “It’s about what we do to each other as human beings.”

She said she foresaw the opera ending with hope.

Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Nine who joined the meetings by conference call, said, “I like this. It sounds great.”

A few highlights from the ensuing conversation:

Trickey said while she had been too young to consider the full ramifications of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, she was affected by the Emmett Till lynching in Mississippi in 1955.

“That’s what I remember the most — ‘I’m in that same danger, and if I don’t do something, if this doesn’t change somehow, we’re all in that same danger,’” she said. “I considered in going to Central that the white kids were just like me — curious, thoughtful — and that they would see black kids coming as an opportunity to learn something. I didn’t have the understanding of institutional racism. To this point I find all of those things profound intent
ional ignorance. I’ve never gotten over how my idea was so different from their ideas.”

Her younger sister, Phyllis Brown, remembered Trickey saying at the time, “When they get to know me, they’ll like me.”

Trickey answered: “They couldn’t see me as a person, which is what it’s still about. That was really disappointing. It was an absence of thought. And it’s about their training as to who I was. Now I’m old enough to know they didn’t have a choice. That’s how they were trained, what they believed. We see it now. You have to be someone who is willing to not pay attention to the training.

“I thought, ‘This is going to be fun.’ I was thoughtful, and I would say that all the Nine were thoughtful and felt that way then. It was shocking what happened.”

She said that finally, the Nine came to consider themselves more fortunate than the white students at Central.

“Our upbringing was such that we didn’t hate anybody,” she said. “We were fortunate as individuals that we hadn’t been trained to hate and that we had been trained in our families the opposite of accepting stupidity for stupidity’s sake. We were better equipped. At a certain point I started feeling sorry for them because they couldn’t think.”

That theme of absence of thought was reiterated by Elizabeth Eckford, another of the Nine immortalized in Will Counts’ photo of a young white student shouting angrily at an impassive 15-year-old Eckford as she tried to enter the school.

“I remember in the first 10 days of school there were some friendly overtures (from the white students),” Eckford said. “Then they gave up. Why did they give up so quickly? To be considered nigger-lovers was something they couldn’t abide. I can’t figure why they gave up so quickly.”

Indeed, it is one of history’s saddest questions.

For more information about The Little Rock Nine, contact Seymour at 501.450.3295 or [email protected].