Youngest of Little Rock Nine to speak

Carlotta Walls LaNier braces herself: head down, "just take one step and then another."

She is the youngest of the nine black students. She's wearing a new dress and has a stack of books piled in one arm, just like any 14-year-old on the first day of high school.

On that September morning in 1957, their second attempt at getting inside Little Rock Central High School, the students rush to the imposing stone entrance.

The white mobs chant, "Two, four, six, eight, we ain't gonna integrate."

From inside, the nine heard the crowds grow louder, more venomous. They heard the threats of a lynching.

LaNier would never consider dropping out and transferring to another school. Not even after the spitting, the torture in the school hallways, the bombing of her family's home.

"I knew that I was doing the right thing because it was within the law," says LaNier, who wrote those details in her 2009 book, more than 50 years after she and her "comrades" - the Little Rock Nine - integrated the high school following Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down racially segregated public schools.

LaNier will discuss the book and reflect on her experience today at Glenbard East High School in Lombard as part of the Glenbard Parent Series, reminding students "why they are sitting in a classroom with other people that don't look like them."

"It's really about ordinary people doing extraordinary things," says LaNier, a Denver real estate agent. "I just feel somewhere down the line you decide: This is as far as I'm going. This is all I'm going to do, and I'm going to fight for what I believe in."

Glenbard High School District 87 encouraged parents and students to do a "community read" of her book, "A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School," written with Lisa Frazier Page.

"This is living history," said Gilda Ross, the district's student and community projects coordinator and curator of the speaker series. "This is a story for all young people to be aware of."

For decades, LaNier wouldn't speak - not publicly, not to her own family - about Central High School.

"I didn't want to relive any of that," she said.

She started to open up with her two children, a son and daughter.

"I tried to give them the same value system that I had grown up with, to make them understand that the key to success was through education and to get as much as you possibly can and to value that," LaNier said.

When her children's friends had never heard of the Little Rock Nine, LaNier knew she had to speak up. At first, she had traumatic flashbacks and couldn't get through her speeches. Writing the book proved cathartic.

"There are nine stories, none greater or lesser than the other, but different," LaNier said. "Each person's character and strength and courage comes from different sources, different places."

LaNier's story begins with an opportunity. In her all-black junior high school, her homeroom teacher passed around a sheet of paper asking students if they were interested in attending Central High. LaNier signed it without asking her parents, she writes in her book. (Years later, she would learn that the nine had been chosen and "thoroughly vetted" by the superintendent, she writes).

"I surely was going to take advantage of that," she said. "I knew what that school meant, and I was excited about going to that school."

LaNier worried about missing her classes after then-governor Orval Faubus called on the Arkansas National Guard to deny the nine entrance to the school.

"It was mentally exhausting after it took three weeks to get in there. That's what bothered me more than anything," LaNier said. "I felt I could compete with anyone given the same circumstances, but here I am, I'm not in the classroom. I'm not doing homework. I'm not hearing what the teacher is speaking, and I have got to make sure that once I get in there, that I hit the ground running."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower would eventually intervene, ordering a military escort for the nine.

"But I learned early that while the soldiers were there to make sure the nine of us stayed alive, for anything short of that, I was pretty much on my own," LaNier writes in the book.

She describes the "strain of calculating" her every move in the school, as students spit at her, kicked her and walked on her heels, drawing blood.

"It just became a job," LaNier says now. "Let's just look at it as a job. I got up every morning and prepared to go to a job."

She successfully completed that job and earned her diploma. LaNier was the only female student in the Little Rock Nine to participate in graduation ceremonies.

The very next morning, she left Little Rock. She keeps in touch with the surviving students with phone calls a couple times a year. They talk about family and jobs, but not the reasons for their bond. They know each other's strengths, fears and "what a person is really capable of accepting and doing," LaNier said.

"It was a culmination of all I had put into it and what they had put it into it and things that they had lost," she said. "Because of all that we had gone through, and for me to be able to walk across that stage to receive that diploma, ... it just said, 'You did the right thing.'"