Carmen Jungbluth drove from Boone to eastern Iowa on Thursday to hear two pioneers of school desegregation from the American South speak to a crowd of 120 rapt audience members in the lead-off event to a three-day tour of Iowa dedicated to barrier-breaking events that civil rights icons Dr. Leona Tate and Carlotta Walls LaNier described in both historic and urgent terms.
LaNier, a member of the Little Rock Nine, and Tate, one of the New Orleans Four, integrated schools in their respective cities in the late 1950s and early 1960s in high-profile flashpoints in American history. They spoke on Thursday night in Muscatine at the Stanley Center For Peace and Security.
“It just really meant a lot to me to come and hear these women,” Jungbluth, 67, said after the event. “We [white people] just went to school automatically without having to think about was it our right to be there. We didn’t have adults yelling at us as we were going into school.”
LaNier and Tate will speak again Friday night at 6 p.m. at Plymouth Church on Ingersoll Avenue in Des Moines as part of “Trailblazers of School Desegregation,” a series organized and moderated by Rachelle Chase of Ottumwa, an author and historian, and Joshua Manske of Algona, podcaster and Iowa agriculture leader. Tate also will speak about desegregation in Algona at First Congregational United Church of Christ on Saturday at 5 p.m.
“Understanding our history is so important, especially in these times,” LaNier said in Muscatine.
Added Tate, “It’s not that far away, it’s during your time.”
In Little Rock, Arkansas, LaNier was the first Black woman to graduate from the prestigious Central High School after integrating it in 1957 with eight other students. LaNier’s home was bombed in 1960 before she graduated, an experience she recounted in the conversation moderated by Chase tonight.
“A lot of terror took place,” LaNier said.
Leona Tate, 6 years old in 1960, joined three other girls in integrating an elementary school in New Orleans, the all-white McDonogh 19 Elementary School.
The two women described being yelled at, spat on and surrounded by armed troops in the schools in Little Rock and New Orleans.
“My childhood was wiped out,” Tate said, adding, “I could not exit a door without a marshal.”
Both Tate and LaNier, with the perspective of decades, have absorbed the historic importance of their frontline roles in desegregation. At the time, they said Thursday in Muscatine, the motivation in the Black community was not necessarily integration. Tate and LaNier repeatedly stressed the surpassing quality of teachers in all-Black schools, but said they were working with inferior educational materials.
LaNier said her previous all-Black high school had half the books in the library that Central High in Little Rock did.
Kelly Lao, director of the Muscatine Art Center, said the presentation in this eastern Iowa city is relevant today.
“The inequality of resources is still apparent in today’s society,” Lao said. “What they went through, the bravery. They had to be the ones that did it. The work’s not done. We still have more to do to have these resources be equal.”
Keith Porter, president and CEO of the Stanley Center, said Muscatine is a fitting place for the launch of the desegregation speaker series.
Chase noted that a Muscatine girl in the 1860s, Susan Clark, and her father, civil rights activist Alexander Clark, were instrumental in integrating Iowa schools. After 12-year-old Susan was denied admission to Muscatine’s all-white school in 1867, her father took the case to the Iowa Supreme Court. In 1868, they won.
“In 1868 Iowa was the first state to desegregate schools based on the Supreme Court decision,” Porter said in an interview after the event.
“I think about what an honor it is to meet these women,” Porter said. “This is stuff we see in history books, that we see in documentaries like Eyes On The Prize.”
“This wasn’t so long ago,” Porter added.
LaNier said the hate that fed the ugly encounters she endured as a girl animates people today.
“It’s still going on, folks,” she said. “You have to stand up. You have to stop this.”
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll and the founder of The Iowa Mercury, where this story first appeared.
