LYNN — The first thing moderator John Kane did at Thursday’s lecture at KIPP Academy’s middle school was ask three students — all people of color — what their lives were like.
One person, who rode the subway, said she could sit anywhere she wanted. One talked about having the freedom to go to any movie theater he chose, and to sit anywhere he wanted (usually by the aisle so he wouldn’t bother people if he had to get up for any reason).
Then, for the next hour, Kane and the two friends he made early in life shared personal observation and remembrances of life in Little Rock, Ark., in the late 1950s, when the Civil Rights movement was burgeoning.
Johnny Bilheimer, who is white, and Judge Henry Jones, who is black, both grew up in Little Rock. But they didn’t meet until years later.
“I lived in an al-white neighborhood and I didn’t have the opportunity to mingle with black people,” said Bilheimer, who is now 75. “I didn’t know any black people who were in non-subservient roles (such as housekeeper).”
Similarly, “my world was all black,” Jones said. “The city was like that.
“But,” he said, “there were parts of it that were like a checkerboard, and you did have to go into other neighborhoods.”
And when that happened, Jones’ parents would warn him to avoid contact with whites “because if we didn’t, it wouldn’t turn out so well.”
Both Bilheimer and Jones traced the genus of the “Little Rock Nine,” high school kids who were the first to be integrated into the notoriously-segregated Central High School.
“(President Dwight) Eisenhower federalized the local national guard,” said Jones, recalling efforts to get the state to comply with desegregation orders after the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka, Kan.
“Then,” said Bilheimer, “He called in the Army, and for four years, those kids went to school with people with rifles in their hands guarding them.”
“Could any of you,” Kane asked the students, “imagine going to school surrounded by people who had rifles in their hands?”
But that was only on the outside. Once those students got inside, “they were hit, kicked, spat upon, and ignored by teachers,” said Bilheimer, who spent 30 years as a civil rights lawyer.
One of those nine students was Jefferson Thomas, who was a few years older than Jones, “and he was my idol.
“Every night, after school, he would come and talk to my father.”
Jones said that of the nine, Thomas is the only one who has died.
The three met in curious ways. Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus, in an effort to circumvent court orders to desegregate, closed every high school in Little Rock. Bilheimer was about to enter high school, and didn’t want to take the chance of there being no school to attend, so he applied to private schools, among them Phillips Andover Academy. There, he met Kane, and they became friends.
Jones stayed in Little Rock, went to an all-black school, and “ended up with a better education than if I’d gone to Central High,” he said.
When Jones was a freshman at Yale (one of 12 among 1,000 students), he met Kane. Bilheimer and Jones met as lawyers when they both clerked in Little Rock.
Kane, a senior volunteer at KIPP, got the idea of having forums featuring Bilheimer and Jones thanks to a conversation he had with a KIPP student in 2014 about race relations.
“They thought I was crazy,” he said. However, this is the 10th forum the two have done since 2014, and the second at KIPP.
Jones went onto become the first federal magistrate in Arkansas, something he said didn’t bring as much joy to him as one might imagine.
“If you’re the first,” he said, “it means that many, many people who came before you were denied. That doesn’t make you feel happy.”