We Need More Enemies of the People

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/enemies-of-the-people-jerry-dhonau.html

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The obituary for Jerry Dhonau in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last month contained all of the usual information. He was 83 years old and lived in Little Rock and Albuquerque. He’d had a long career in journalism. Survivors included a wife, a daughter and a granddaughter.

But it also contained a forgotten slice of history.

When a racist mob surrounded 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford near Little Rock Central High School on the morning of Sept. 4, 1957, he and a few other journalists — armed with only their notebooks, pencils and cameras — had protected her.

Yet the article omitted a crucial fact about Mr. Dhonau: To some back then, he was a card-carrying enemy of the people.

Mr. Dhonau, who’d graduated from the same high school only a few years earlier, had joined The Arkansas Gazette the previous January. He’d been outside Central the night before, as Arkansas National Guardsmen deployed by Gov. Orval Faubus encircled the campus. And he’d returned the following morning to see a solitary black girl alight from a city bus down the street from the school.

With a reporter’s eye and a Southerner’s sensibility, he had known something was awry: The mob outside Central into which she was heading that day was every bit as white as the student body inside, and much, much angrier.

He’d followed Ms. Eckford, who had inadvertently been separated from the eight other black students attempting to desegregate Central that morning. He’d watched her walk intently toward the school and seen the soldiers raise their rifles to block her when she had repeatedly tried to enter. He’d seen the hecklers gather around her, and listened to them, and took down what they said. “Go back where you came from!” a woman shouted. “Don’t let her in our school” another exclaimed, appending the usual racial epithet.

For two blocks Ms. Eckford proceeded, the mob on her heels. Finally she reached the bus stop at 16th and Park Street, taking her place at the edge of an empty bench, waiting for the ride that would, she hoped, carry her to safety. “A crowd of about 50, supplemented by several Central High students, pressed closely,” Mr. Dhonau was to write. “The abusive shouts from the crowd continued.”

He’d seen Benjamin Fine of The New York Times briefly sit alongside Ms. Eckford — “Don’t let them see you cry,” Mr. Fine had told her — and a white woman named Grace Lorch also try to comfort her, gestures that only further inflamed the mob.

That was when Mr. Dhonau and a small group of reporters and cameramen — Mr. Fine, Ray Moseley of The Gazette, Paul Welch of Life and a couple of others — formed an informal cordon around Ms. Eckford. A photograph of them, far less famous than the one of Ms. Eckford negotiating the mob a few minutes earlier (both taken by Will Counts of The Arkansas Democrat), captured the scene.

In it, Mr. Dhonau, a lanky young man in a suit, stands near the bench, writing in his notebook. He and Mr. Fine, wearing a bow tie, were hardly intimidating. Still, they were two points in the makeshift line that, for whatever reason, none of Ms. Eckford’s tormentors dared cross.

Afterward, Mr. Dhonau reproached himself for what he had done. “The only time I lost my objectivity,” he said. Gene Foreman, another former Gazette colleague and later the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, thinks he was being too hard on himself. “His was a passive act, as opposed to Fine’s active intervention,” said Mr. Foreman, author of a textbook on journalistic ethics.

To some that day, Mr. Dhonau and his ilk were very much “enemies of the people.” Members of the mob tried toppling the telephone booths from which he and other reporters were transmitting what they had just seen to the rest of the world.

That night, Mr. Dhonau received angry, anonymous phone calls. And twice the F.B.I. awakened him — not to ask him what had happened that day, but to find out whether the Times reporter had indeed egged on the crowd, as some locals had claimed.

Mr. Dhonau, whose older brother had been killed in World War II, came by his wicked ways early. As co-editor of The Little Rock High School Tiger in 1952, he’d written a column urging that the school’s new field house be named for Riley Johns, a black man who had long tended the athletic fields. The column never ran; it would upset the principal and the school board, he was told. He promptly quit.

Ernie Dumas, a longtime Gazette reporter to whom Mr. Dhonau gave an oral history in 2000, asked whether that soured him on journalism. “No,” Mr. Dhonau replied. “It made me more committed.”

The year after Little Rock blew up, Mr. Dhonau applied to the Columbia School of Journalism. While one committee there admitted him, another awarded him and his Gazette colleagues a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Dhonau soon returned to The Gazette, where he remained, largely as an editorial writer, until it folded in 1991.

“We will take our leave,” he wrote in The Gazette’s final edition, “mindful of the words of St. Paul, who wrote, ‘I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.’”

And so, too, did he that day in 1957. “Enemies of the people”? Let’s have more of them.

David Margolick, a former legal affairs reporter for The New York Times, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock.”

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