Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 15, 1993 TAG: 9301150264
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN KING LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
HISTORIC CIVIL RIGHTS CASE COMES TO TV
Ernest Green didn't plan to be a hero. He just wanted the best education possible. But Green and eight other black teens ended up changing the course of U.S. history in 1957, when they integrated all-white Central High in Little Rock, Ark.This civil rights watershed is depicted in "The Ernest Green Story," Sunday at 7 p.m. on the Disney Channel. It repeats Monday, Saturday and Jan. 29.
Little Rock became the testing ground of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1954 case of Brown vs. the Board of Education, which held that segregation in America's public schools was unconstitutional and ordered the schools integrated.
The case split the town when black students applied to the school board to attend Central High, which they believed was superior to the schools they were attending. Board members chose nine students they believed were academically qualified and unlikely to cause trouble. One of them was Ernest Green.
The day before school started, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard, ostensibly to maintain order at the school; in reality the guard prevented the Little Rock Nine from entering the school. Three weeks later, President Eisenhower forced the governor to remove the National Guard and sent 1,200 federal troops to occupy the grounds of Central High so the students could enter.
The group made it through the school year - Green, the only senior, graduated - in part by following the non-violent teachings of a young Martin Luther King. Not coincidentally, Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The civil rights movement has long been a subject close to the hearts of executive producers Carol Abrams and Adrienne Levin, who were high school students in 1957. "We were the same age as those students," Abrams said. "It was extremely poignant for us. It was on the front page of The New York Times from Sept. 1 until the end of the month, every day while the troops were there."
"I think at that impressional age; it was a horrifying event," Levin said.
"This was before [the terms] `black' and `African-American' were used," Abrams said. "It was still `Negro'; it was `colored.' Historically, it was the first time since the Civil War that there was this head-on confrontation between state and federal rights. It was a very dramatic event."
As dramatic as the event was, Levin and Abrams realize that most of today's young people are not familiar with it. "When Ernie and the others went back for their 30th reunion, they spoke at Central High, and there were students in the audience who never knew that happened there," Abrams said. (Central High is fully integrated today and has a black principal.)
Morris Chestnut ("Boyz N the Hood," "Out All Night"), who plays Green, admitted that he had little knowledge of Green's story. "It was devastating to me that it happened," said Chestnut, 23, who was raised in Cerritos, Calif. "I grew up in a different era. I wouldn't have stood for that [treatment], but back then they had to stand for it. There really was nothing they could do."
Green, now a managing director at the investment firm of Lehman Brothers in Washington, served as a senior adviser to Bill Clinton during his campaign. He said several producers had approached him over the decades about a film, but he had turned down all requests until he met Levin and Abrams. "The chemistry seemed a little bit better," Green said, adding that he thought the time was right to tell his story.
"The idea was to show lots of kids, particularly African-American kids, that there were lots of pieces that went into [the civil rights movement]," Green said. "As I like to describe it - small people who sacrificed a lot, like the parents and others who supported it. That's been a piece that has been missing, I think, in a lot of the television on the civil rights period. It is an important item for young people, in particular African-Americans, to understand."