JOURNAL ASSIGNMENTS Read the assigned pages. As you finish each reading, make a journal entry. Your journal may contain artwork, poetry, short stories, newspaper editorials, letters, speeches, audio or video tapes,

anything you wish. Most of you will use a diary format that is, writing down your personal reactions to what you read. The point is to show me that you have read the assignments and thought about the significance of what you have read. You MUST include: --How the document relates to lectures --The significance of the document --Your reaction to what you read --A quote from the document-include the most significant quote from the document and WHY you think it is significant If your journal is in the standard diary format, it should be about EIGHT double- spaced, typed pages long, in standard (not oversized) typeface and with ONE- inch margins. If you are using some other format, or a mixture, use your judgment concerning length/amount. See me if you have questions. **IMPORTANT***. DO NOT MERELY SUMMARIZE WHAT YOU HAVE READ!!!!! SUMMARIES WILL EARN YOU NO BETTER THAN A "C." Late journals, unless arrangements have been made with me, will cost you points. Other issues to think about as you read: --If you had been alive at this time, what would have been your reaction? Would your opinion be different if these events occurred today? Why? --What surprised/shocked/upset you the most? Why? --Is this source important to historians? Why or why not? --Are there other sources that should have been included in the assignment? Why? --What is the writer's agenda (goal)? Do you think he/she was successful? --Who would have agreed with this writer? Why? --Who would have disagreed with this writer? Why? --What impact, if any, did this event (letter, law, etc...) have? --How might the events have turned out differently? --How have your impressions and views changed?/n we those oved to that the seat. I r me. it and fire- shad hvs- in. as I ou les W d Eyewitness to America 527 Eventually two policemen came. They got on the bus, and one of them asked me why I didn't stand up. I asked him,"Why do all you push us around?" He said to me, and I quote him exactly, "I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest.” "They are in our school. Oh God..." FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL IN LITTLE ROCK September 23, 1957 Arkansas RELMAN MORIN he U.S. Supreme Court had ordered the Little Rock school system desegre- gated, but a riot erupted when nine young students arrived to attend the first day of classes. The President Eisenhower sent one thousand army paratroopers to Little Rock the next day to keep the peace and enforce the Supreme Court decision. But similar incidents occurred elsewhere. A few years later, Governor George Wal- lace personally tried to block the path of the first black students to attend the University of Alabama. Federal troops had to escort the students inside. Morin, an Associated Press reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for this second- by-second account of the first day's riot. It was exactly like an explosion, a human explosion. At 8:35 A.M., the people standing in front of the high school looked like the ones you see every day in a shopping center. A pretty, sweet-faced woman with auburn hair and a jewel-green jacket.. another, holding a white portable radio in her ear. “I'm getting the news of what's going on at the high school,” she said. . . . People laughed. A greyhaired man, tall and spare, leaned over the wooden barricade. "If they're coming," he said, quietly, “they'll be here soon." . . "They better," said another. "I got to get to work." 528 Eyewitness to America Ordinary people-mostly curious, you would have said-watch- ing a high school on a bright, blue-and-gold morning. Five minutes later, at 8:40, they were a mob. The terrifying spectacle of 200-odd individuals, suddenly welded together into a single body, took place in the barest fraction of a sec- ond. It was an explosion, savagery chain-reacting from person to per- son, fusing them into a white-hot mass. There are three glass-windowed telephone booths across the street from the south end of the high school. At 8:35, I was inside one of them, dictating. I saw four Negroes coming down the center of the street, in twos. One was tall and big-shouldered. One was tall and thin. The other two were short. The big man had a card in his hat and was carrying a Speed Graflex, a camera for taking news pictures. A strange, animal growl rose from the crowd. "Here come the Negroes." Instantly, people turned their backs on the high school and ran toward the four men. They hesitated. Then they turned to run. I saw the white men catch them on the sidewalk and the lawn of a home a quarter block away. They were a furious, struggling knot. You could see a man kicking at the big Negro. Then another jumped on his back and rode him to the ground, forearms deep in the Negro's throat. They kicked him and beat him on the ground and they smashed his camera to splinters. The other three ran down the street with one white man chasing them. When the white man saw he was alone, he turned and fled back toward the crowd. Meanwhile, five policemen had rescued the big man. I had just finished saying "Police escorted the big man away" At that instant a man shouted, "Look the Negroes are going in." Directly across from me three Negro boys and five girls were walking toward the side door at the south end of the school. It was an unforgettable tableau. They were carrying books. White bobby-sox, part of the high school uniform, glinted on the girls' ankles. They were all nicely dressed. The boys wore open-throat shirts and the girls, ordinary frocks. var n ed C- Eyewitness to America 529 They weren't hurrying. They simply strolled across perhaps 15 yards from the sidewalk to the school steps. They glanced at the peo- ple and the police as though none of this concerned them. You can never forget a scene like that. Nor the one that followed. Like a wave, the people who had run toward the four Negro men, now swept back toward the police and the barricades. "Oh, God, they're in the school," a man yelled. A woman- -the one with the auburn hair and green jacket- rushed up to him. Her face was working with fury now. Her lips drew back in a snarl and she was screaming, “Did they go in?" "They are in the school," the man said. "Oh God," she said. She covered her face with her hands. Then she tore her hair, still screaming. She looked exactly like the women who cluster around a mine head, when there has been an explosion and men are trapped below. The tall, lean man jumped up on one of the barricades. He was holding on to the shoulders of others nearby. "Who's going through?" he roared. "We all are," the people shrieked. They surged over and around the barricades, breaking for the police. About a dozen policemen, swinging billy clubs, were in front of them. Men and women raced toward them and the policemen raised their clubs, moving this way and that as people tried to dodge around them. A man went down, pole-axed, when a policeman clubbed him. Meanwhile the women the auburn-haired one, the radio, and others were swirling around the police commanding the woman with officers. Tears were streaming down their faces. They acted completely dis- traught. It was pure hysteria. And they kept crying, "They are in our school. Oh God, are you going to stand here and let them stay in school?”/n