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Albany 1957

Page history last edited by Mr. Hengsterman 5 years, 10 months ago

WITNESS TO CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY SHARES STORIES

Albany Academy graduate was in Army unit sent to enforce school integration

http://westpointcoh.org/interviews/little-rock-an-active-duty-army-participant-remembers

 

 


 

ALBANY-- Albany Academy alumnus Heath Twichell still gets choked up when he recalls his assignment as a young Army second lieutenant at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in the fall of 1957.



He becomes emotional when he describes how he observed at close range the courage and dignity of the African-American students, who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine.  "They were real-life heroes," he said.  The black students were escorted by Army soldiers as an angry white mob that opposed the school's court-mandated integration spewed racist epithets, taunts and threats.  Twichell cannot get out of his head the snarling voice of a protester he heard yell out, "Lynch 'em!"  Twichell, a member of the academy's Class of 1952, will return to his alma mater today as part of the now-merged Albany Academies' alumni speaker series. He'll talk about his experiences in Little Rock, accompanied by photographs, and will offer other stories about everyday heroes at four history classes.


"I'm impressed by ordinary people who do extraordinary things," said Twichell, 75, a West Point graduate who retired as a colonel after two tours of combat duty in Vietnam, including action in the Tet offensive in 1968. During his 24-year military career, Twichell, who has a Ph.D. in history, taught at West Point and the U.S. Naval War College. He lives in Portsmouth, Va., with his wife, Mary, and continues to teach part-time at the Naval War College.

Twichell was stationed with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered his unit to head to Little Rock, where trouble was brewing. Segregationists had protested at the high school and threatened to block the black students from entering. Gov. Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard on Sept. 4 to back the segregationists in their impending clash with integrationists in the deeply divided city. The black students were prevented from entering the school over the course of a tense three weeks.  Twichell recalled weeks of daily training in Kentucky, facing mock demonstrators who were angry and agitated.


When Twichell's 1,200-troop unit landed in Little Rock, the presence of the unit's roughly 200 black soldiers was deemed too provocative, and they were flown back to Fort Campbell. "That created some dissension and was a blow to unit cohesion," he said. Twichell and his unit's white soldiers drove through the center of Little Rock on Sept. 24 in open Army cargo trucks in full battle gear with bayonets fixed to their rifles. "Jaws dropped. This was a real show of force," he said. The soldiers set up camp beneath the stands at the school's football stadium. The next day, Sept. 25, soldiers took up their positions in an unbroken cordon around the school by 5 a.m. Twichell was told to patrol the perimeter. "Just by pure dumb luck, I saw as much or more as any other single person during those first days," he said. He said a crowd of protesters was in front of the school, along with many members of the media. "A lot of the physical stuff stopped as soon as we got there," he said. "We gave them no opportunity to get close to the kids or to spit on them. They were yelling a lot of racist nonsense, but there were no serious incidents." He said by the second day, the crowd had thinned to about 100, then to about 50 the third day and largely dissolved after that.  "The rednecks were just not organized," he said.


Twichell will recount a little-known story about an elderly woman who presented a package to a soldier whom Twichell knew. He took it to his commanding officer, as she requested. Suspecting it might be a bomb, the package was put in a barrel and taken out to the middle of the football field. It turned out to contain a Bible, with various passages underlined that suggested support of segregation. Twichell followed the lives of the Little Rock Nine as they completed high school and became adults. "They were taunted and harassed in every possible way, but they didn't retaliate and they turned out well," he said. He'll show images of a reunion of the Little Rock Nine in 1997.


Twichell hopes the students apply his stories about Little Rock to their own lives. "It takes real courage and sacrifice on the part of every generation to make a positive step forward in terms of race relations," he said. "I'll tell the students they shouldn't get too smug, because racism goes on even 52 years after Little Rock."

SOURCE INFO: Paul Grondahl can be reached at 454-5623 or by e-mail at pgrondahl@timesunion.com. Friday, April 9, 2010

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