Students Imagine Little Rock, on Film

By DIANA MARSZALEK

SCARSDALE

THE differences in experiences for a group of Scarsdale eighth graders and the famed Little Rock Nine — the African-American teenagers who risked their safety desegregating Little Rock’s Central High School 50 years ago — are so vast that drawing comparisons would be futile.

Not only do the 13-year-olds in Kathleen Connon’s English classes at Scarsdale Middle School live in a largely protected and affluent community, but there is also one glaring difference: There isn’t a single black face among them.

Yet the 86 Scarsdale students have strived to comprehend on both intellectual and gut levels what it took for the Little Rock teenagers to brave hatred and potential violence to attend school, primarily by recreating the experience in films.

The 15-minute movies (Ms. Connon’s four English sections produced one each) were inspired by “Warriors Don’t Cry,” the 1994 memoir by Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the nine Arkansas students, and a school visit last October by Terrence Roberts, another one of the Little Rock Nine.

The movies — which have garnered interest from various school and government groups as well as Manhattanville College graduate students — are an offshoot of English and social studies curriculums that focus on concepts like victimization, courage and morality, as well as historical events from post-Civil War Reconstruction to recent hate crimes in neighboring Westchester communities.

The students wrote, directed and acted in the films, and did all the hands-on production work, like filming, editing and creating a Web site where the films are shown.

The Scarsdale teenagers, who gave up weekends, nights and a snow day to create the films, readily acknowledge that their movie-making endeavor was a far cry from desegregating a school. But they said the intensive weeklong effort of recreating an important event in the civil rights movement helped them delve deeper emotionally into a slice of history than they would have in more traditional studies.

“Anyone can learn about history and have an understanding of what happened,” said Emma Miller, who while playing one of the Little Rock Nine faced enraged segregationists on the set. “But when I was being chased by an angry mob, I felt fear.”

One question that warranted some soul-searching, they said, was just how realistic the students’ portrayal of the events in Little Rock was.

Laura Laumann, one of the actresses, said she grappled with whether she had the right to portray the hardships of an African-American girl. “They actually had to live it,” Laura said. “I’m just acting.”

Then there was the question of whether to use the racial slur often used by segregationists at the time. After discussion among themselves and consultation with teachers and the principal, the group decided to put the language in for reality’s sake.

Ms. Connon has had students make films before, but not on a subject like Little Rock. In the past, Ms. Connon said, she has had students make movies on contemporary and classic literature, teenage health and historical re-enactments, like events from the Depression and the ’60s. Some students made movies based on the themes of earlier discussion: bullying, character building and moral courage.

While technology, including moviemaking, is a standard part of Ms. Connon’s curriculum, the Little Rock films sparked a particular interest and intensity in students that Ms. Connon said she had not seen before. Students put aside chatter to communicate intensely about the films on computer chat lines they created, shared pizza at one another’s houses while working and orchestrated everything from camera shots to costumes, she said.

“I’ve taught ‘Romeo and Juliet’ for 20 years, but there was something about this that had a movement and a momentum that said we should go for it,” Ms. Connon said.

The students attribute that to a range of reasons, from garnering sympathy for others’ causes to the knowledge that there is potential for change.

Asher Stockler, who directed one of the movies, said he felt hopeless reading Ms. Beals’s memoirs because he knew there was nothing he could do to alter history. Asher, however, said he became “less helpless” after creating a film he hopes will deliver a message to others.

“You can’t prevent what happened,” he said, “but you can prevent this from happening again.”

Students Imagine Little Rock, on Film by Diana Marszalek, written on March 9, 2008, is an article I found on the New York Times online that deals with current middle school aged children studying the history of the Little Rock Nine. Ms. Conner who is an English teacher at the all white Scarsdale Middle School requires her students to produce a 15-minute movie every year. This year the movie had to be a recreation of the event that took place in Little Rock, Arkansas with the Little Rock Nine, which were nine black students who tried to desegregate a white school. The students had to write, direct, and act in their films. The students had to decide where or not to include the racial language that was said at that time. They ended up using the vulgar language to be historically accurate. Through this experience the children got a better idea as to what African Americans went though during those times and it definitely made more of an impact them. I choose this article because this made me happy that a teacher was finding a new way to teach this subject.

The movie Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings 1954-1956 talked about the various events that African Americans experienced and had to go through in order to receive equal treatment. It talked about sit-ins at diners that blacks would partake in, Rosa Parks and the public bus system, lynching, and also the Little Rock Nine. Every student at Scarsdale Middle School could have been required to watch this film in order to learn about what happened at Little Rock, Arkansas. Instead, their teacher took it one step further; she made them learn about it and then remake it into a movie.

In Eyes on the Prize: Awakenings 1954-1956, it showed how the state troops were used to keep the black children out of the school. Mobs of angry people were shown standing outside the school doors, which also prevented the kids to get into the school. It wasn’t until the president sent the federal troops in that the black students were allowed to be educated in a white school. Not only did the students as Scarsdale Middle School have to learn all this information, but they had to act it out. One of the actresses in the movie said, ““Anyone can learn about history and have an understanding of what happened, but when I was being chased by an angry mob, I felt fear”.

I was amazed that a teacher at an all white school made the students make a movie about the Little Rock Nine. After learning in class about the Jena Six incident that happened in Louisiana, I lost a lot of respect for small predominately white communities. However, this article gave me hope that not all white communities would react in the same way as the school where the Jena Six are from. It makes me wish that my one of my teachers would have required this type of assignment from my graduating class, which was also predominately white. I believe that the students probably got to learn about the history of racial segregation in a completely different way compared to just learning names, dates, and events like in a normal history class. It is good to know that the injustice that was done to the African Americans in the United States is not being forgotten or overlooked.