America Goes Back To Central High President Returns Home To Civil Rights Monument

At the age of 11, he watched, bewildered, as white students a few years his senior hurled insults, saliva and raw eggs at nine defiant black teenagers who wanted nothing more than to go to the best high school in Little Rock, Ark.

Forty years later, Bill Clinton is going back to his home state to point a spotlight on the turmoil that punctuated his Southern upbringing and spurred him to lead an effort to mend the nation’s deep racial divide.

But when Clinton speaks today to the people of Little Rock from the steps of Central High School, he will not only commemorate those days when black students walked to class under the protection of federal troops with bayonets - a milestone in the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The president, himself a product of a segregated high school in nearby Hot Springs, Ark., will also use the anniversary of Little Rock’s most infamous period to confront modern vestiges of discrimination and urge Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to examine their hearts.

And, in a vivid image intended to denote four decades of progress, Clinton will join Arkansas’ governor and Little Rock’s mayor to hold open the front doors of Central High School as the Little Rock Nine walk proudly inside.

“This is going to be very personal,” said White House spokeswoman Ann Lewis. “We probably overuse the word ‘seminal,’ but this was a major event not only in the country’s life, but in the life of a young Bill Clinton.”

Although the speech in Little Rock will be his first on race since kicking off his yearlong race initiative in June, Clinton will not use the forum to unveil new policies, aides said. Rather, they said, the president will hearken to his own youth 50 miles down the road and then fast forward to what he hopes will be a more united America in the next millennium.

“One of the reasons that the president has taken this issue on is because he feels it so personally, particularly because of what happened in Little Rock,” said Maria Echaveste, director of the White House Office of Public Liaison and a key participant in the race initiative. Clinton, she said, will use his own experience of watching integration unfold on a black-and-white television screen to remind the nation just how recently discrimination dominated the nation’s attention, to applaud what progress has occurred, and to push for more.

“A lot has happened in the last 40 years,” Echaveste said. “At the same time, we have unfinished business. And the battles are different now. In a very real way, legal discrimination is no longer possible. But has the country truly accepted the founding principle that all men are created equal in their hearts? The jury’s still out on that.”

Clinton himself put it this way in the latest edition of Newsweek: The “work of building one America will always be at bottom an affair of the heart.” In a personalized column, Clinton wrote in the news weekly that the integration of Central High School “changed the course of history.” Three weeks after Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from enrolling in the all-white school, President Dwight Eisenhower sent in more than 1,000 members of the 101st Airborne Division to escort them through an enraged mob and into class.

The confrontation, Clinton wrote, put to rest the question of whether the federal government would enforce court-ordered desegregation.

But other issues never have been fully addressed, even at Central High. Today, the school has a black majority overall, but a white majority in advanced classes. And while students roam the same hallways between classes, they segregate themselves for lunch and social events.

The nation’s failure to fully integrate is one of Clinton’s greatest concerns and will constitute a major part of what Press Secretary Mike McCurry said will be “one of his most personal and direct conversations yet on the subject of race.

“Integration is about more than just integrating facilities,” McCurry said. “You have to tear down the barriers that exist between human beings. If black kids are sitting on one side of the cafeteria and white kids are on the other side, that’s not quite getting at it.”

In recent weeks Little Rock residents, with the help of the now-famed Little Rock Nine - Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Terrence Roberts, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed Wair and Melba Patillo Beals - have been struggling to come to terms with their past. Finally ready to confront what happened, they turned an old gasoline station near Central High into a visitors’ center and mini-museum that bares the 40-year-old wounds.

Perhaps the starkest example of progress was splashed across the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Tuesday: a photo of Eckford, previously etched in the nation’s memory as the closed-mouth target of taunts flung by a screaming Hazel Bryan, posing - smiling - alongside her former persecutor. Eckford and Bryan, now Hazel Massery, linked their fingers behind their backs as they traversed a moment in time that has frozen each in history.