Shaking hands with history

How would you feel if Abraham Lincoln walked out of his portrait in the National Gallery and shook your hand? Or if you saw Mahatma Gandh...

How would you feel if Abraham Lincoln walked out of his portrait in the National Gallery and shook your hand? Or if you saw Mahatma Gandhi climb off his pedestal near Sursagar and playfully touch you with his stick?

That’s what happened to me, or nearly so, here in Little Rock. I was at the Central High School Museum and Visitors’ Centre, looking at an enormous portrait of seven little Black schoolgirls fighting for their right to enter a "whites-only" public school in defiance of the rules of segregation. Arrayed against them were the Arkansas National Guard, sent by Governor Orval Faubus. Jeering the niggers’ was a large crowd of white boys and girls. Two people stood out: Elizabeth Eckford, a Black teenager in a white skirt, and Hazel Massery, a white girl in a check skirt.

The battle for the right to equality was long and bitter, as such battles usually are. It was fought nearly a century ago by Abraham Lincoln, who had proclaimed, "A nation cannot survive half free and half slave". He fought a bitter Civil War, the result of which was freedom from slavery’ for the Blacks. That was, however, only in narrow legal terms; slavery survived for a long, long time, in the minds of men.

The Little Rock battle for equality’ was fought by seven Black schoolgirls in September 1957, nine decades after Lincoln fought for it. President Dwight Eisenhower called the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort Black students into the school. The school authorities, however, shut the doors. What was called the Blossom Plan’ — the right to equality in education in a public school — went to the US Supreme Court. In its historic judgment, the Supreme Court held that the Black students’ right to entry "cannot be muffled by legislature or executive".

Deeply moved by this extraordinary picture-story of the seven brave teenagers’, I was slowly moving out of the Museum when a chorus from my hosts, Archita and Nila, pulled me back. "They are here, they are here, Elizabeth and Hazel. Please come!"

I turned, as if in a dream. Yes, they were there, the two former adversaries, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Massery. Obviously, not the teenagers I saw in the painting but fully-grown ladies and the best of friends! My daughter, Archita, herself a member of "Friendship International," introduced me to the two "fighters": now fighters for a common cause: Love, replacing hate. "My father; he has come from India." Their eyes brightened.

I bowed in reverence and said: "May I have a handshake with you, Madam?" It was an unforgettable handshake. Not with two individuals, but with one value: the bond that binds us together in one Human Family, in real life.

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I could not help asking a question to Elizabeth, "What were your feelings, on that day of entry in 1957?" She said, thoughtfully, "Frightened then; hopeful now". " And Hazel, the white American who had the courage to apologise to Elizabeth six years after the incident, responded beautifully: " I was confused then. Now I feel relieved and joyful."

I was reminded of the immortal lines of the poet William Blake, in the Auguries of Innocence:
To see a world in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

The author may be contacted on e-mail at: bucharistotle.net