As the youngest of the Little Rock Nine—the nine African American teenagers who, in 1957, walked past violent crowds to integrate Central High School—Carlotta’s name is forever tied to a national story of bravery. Yet the life she built afterward in Colorado tells another kind of story: how a young woman who once stood at the center of the civil-rights storm built purpose and possibility in the West. Carlotta Walls LaNier sat down for a recent oral-history interview at History Colorado. She spoke reflectively about growing up in the Jim Crow South, witnessing the Civil Rights Movement, then eventually making a home in Colorado, and the following is her story adapted from that interview.

The Decision that Changed Everything

The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 declared segregated schools unconstitutional, but some states defiantly resisted, politically and violently. Nevertheless, the Little Rock school board drafted a plan for a small number of African American students to begin attending all-white public schools during the 1957–1958 school year. Carlotta remembered her father talking about how his family paid taxes, so she had a right to attend the local public schools. In her last year at Dunbar Junior High, Carlotta’s homeroom teacher asked students if they had any interest in attending Central High School, and if they lived within specific street boundaries to please sign a sheet of paper. Carlotta decided to sign without her parents' knowledge and received admission! 

That summer before enrolling at Central, she and thirty-eight other African American students and their families met with the Little Rock school superintendent. They received a rude awakening. Carlotta remembered the rules set forth: “We could not participate in any extracurricular activity. You could only come to school at eight, leave at three. Don't go back for any basketball games or football games. You couldn’t be a part of the student council. You couldn't work on the newspaper. You couldn't be in the choir. You could not be in any of the sports." Unsurprisingly, the initial thirty-nine students dwindled to nine. 

Despite these glum prospects, Carlotta was mildly optimistic. When asked about why she wanted to take on something that could ultimately be dangerous, she replied, “It was access to better books and laboratories with scientific things. I wanted to be a doctor and knew in the biology lab at Central, two kids were dissecting the frog in the science department. Over at the other all-Black schools like Dunbar and Horace Mann High School, there would be ten or twelve kids standing around and pulling at one frog. My aunt was the librarian at Dunbar Junior-Senior High. She had around 5,000 books, whereas at Central, there were 10,000 books. So it was separate, but it was certainly not equal.” 

When the Little Rock Nine approached Central High for the first time on the morning of September 4, the air felt charged. Crowds pressed along sidewalks, some clutched handmade signs, others shouted vehemently as Arkansas National Guard troops formed a barricade at the school's entrance. Piercing chants, hostile stares, and spit met the students as they tried to enter. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus encouraged the angry mob and ordered the National Guard to stop this integration effort. The students decided to immediately leave. Shortly thereafter the Arkansas NAACP leader, Daisy Bates, apprised the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) of the situation. Thurgood Marshall, founder and Director Counsel of the LDF at the time, along with attorney Wiley Branton came to Little Rock to represent the NAACP in federal court. On September 20, 1957, the pair requested an injunction against Governor Faubus's use of troops to impede integration efforts subsequent to the Brown v. Board 1954 decision. US District Judge Ronald Davies granted the injunction, and Faubus relented.

Again, Carlotta and the other eight students attempted to enter Central High on September 23. She described a chaotic scene: "It ended up being the worst day. The mob had grown to over 1,000 people. Some beat reporters. There were people out there trying to rush the school or wanting kids to get out of the school. Kids were jumping out of windows because their parents were telling them to come out."

Eventually, a police officer arrived at her third period class. “My teacher told me to gather my things and follow this man, which I did," she said. Officers had escorted all nine to the principal's office. "We were told to follow the policemen. They were getting us out of the school because the crowd wanted to hang someone," she said. "We were brought down into the bowels of the school and put into two police cars. And then I heard one policeman tell the other policeman, ‘Put your foot to the floor and don't stop for anything.'"
 

President Dwight Eisenhower decided to deploy 101st Airborne Division troops to Little Rock and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school.

“I didn’t know it was going to be historic,” she recalled. “I just knew I had this right. The Supreme Court decision had given me this right.” What followed is etched into civil-rights history: mobs, soldiers, and a nation forced to watch itself on television. “I approached each day like I was going to work,” Carlotta said. “There’s no fun in it, but I had made a commitment. Once you start something, you finish it.” 
 

Life at Central High

She and the other Little Rock Nine students met varied interactions with fellow students, teachers, and guards. Each of the nine had a soldier from the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division assigned to them. “The soldiers drove us every morning. We were in a station wagon, and there was a jeep in the front and a jeep in the back with fixed bayonets. Once we got there, our assigned soldier stayed with us during the day. Now, they didn't come inside the classroom, but they walked with us to each place, whether to the locker, lunch or our various classes. All of us seemed to have a good relationship with our guards.” However, Carlotta discovered that she, in particular, received a new guard every week. 

She laughed and reminisced about her unique experience: “I had a different guard every Monday morning. There was one particular girl who would want to walk on the back of my heels. So my heels bled from all of that. My defense mechanism was to walk fast.” She believes to this day that that’s the reason the army assigned her a new guard weekly.  

Carlotta found solace in her surrounding neighborhood and at home. She lived at 1500 Valentine Street in Little Rock, which was part of a somewhat integrated community. Many of her neighbors were professionals, laborers, and homemakers. She recalled how supportive they were during her time at Central. At home, she found comfort in faithfully watching “American Bandstand" with her sisters. In a city gripped by tension, neighbors often checked in on the Walls family and helped maintain a sense of normalcy when school felt anything but ordinary. Their quiet acts of care reflected the broader network of family and community support that sustained many of the Little Rock Nine through the daily hostilities they faced.

Many of her classmates, however, were less supportive. Most of the Little Rock Nine endured physical harassment ranging from being kicked, shoved, or thrown down flights of stairs while making their way to class. Carlotta recalled a story of Terrence Roberts in gym class. “There was so much harassment going on that the PE teacher, who happened to also be the football coach, blew the whistle and said, ‘all right, all of you just line up. All of you want to have a piece of him, just line up.’ Terrence knew that he was done for. He said when the first guy came to him, he quickly grabbed his dog tag chain and just kept twisting it and twisting it to the point that the teacher ended up having to stop it and then it was done. So, if it had gone two or three down the line, he would have been beaten up.” Sometimes Carlotta would find her own school clothes doused in water when she returned from gym class.

The girl next to her locker was on Little Rock’s “Steve’s Show,” which was a locally produced teenage dance show similar to the popular nationally televised “American Bandstand" that the Walls family enjoyed at home. Carlotta wanted to compliment her on her performance on the show, but murmured from the side of her mouth: a favored strategy used to avoid other students overhearing a conversation. She knew that students commonly targeted classmates who expressed kindness or gratitude.

No matter what Carlotta endured, she remained focused on her goal. She remembered her biology teacher in particular—an ally who encouraged her to enter the school science fair, where she ultimately won third place. Because she couldn’t safely walk across the stage, he accepted the award on her behalf and continued to help her succeed in class. “I think I could have told my parents I didn’t want to go back anymore,” she reflected, “but I never felt that way. I wanted that diploma from Central High because I knew it would open doors.”

Governor Orval Faubus, however, remained staunch in his opposition to desegregation and soon found another way to delay it. After the 1957–1958 school year ended, the Little Rock school board asked a federal court to postpone its integration plan, requesting a three-year delay. The court granted the request, extending the deadline to 1961. The NAACP quickly appealed the decision, and by September 1958, the case had reached the US Supreme Court. The justices overturned the lower court’s ruling and ordered Little Rock to proceed with integration.

Anticipating this outcome, the Arkansas legislature had already passed a measure granting Governor Faubus authority to close public schools under the guise of an “emergency” and later called a special election to gauge public opinion. Within days of the Supreme Court’s decision, Faubus invoked that new law and shut down all four of Little Rock’s public high schools. When the special election was held on September 27, 1958, voters overwhelmingly sided with keeping the schools closed rather than allowing integration—19,470 to 7,561. The city’s high schools would be closed for the entire 1958–1959 school year, a period that became known as “the Lost Year.” Carlotta decided to enroll in supplemental courses through the University of Arkansas to stay on track. 

Most of the Nine had reached their senior year and left for other states to graduate, while two others remained in Little Rock, taking correspondence courses alongside her. Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls were the only ones from the original nine that went back to Central High.

When Carlotta returned for her senior year, many Central administrators tried to signal that open hostility would no longer be tolerated. Harassment still came, but not to the point where she needed a guard. Name calling persisted, but the worst had yet to come: In February 1960, someone bombed her home. 

It blew out one side of her house. Her father wasn't home, and fortunately she, and her mother and sisters did not sustain injuries from the bombing. Carlotta remembers seeing glass from the living room windows scattered about and her mother’s drapes being shredded from the blast. There at the base of the chimney she could see where the dynamite had left a gaping hole. She decided to go back to school the next day, because she felt if she didn’t, the perpetrators would have thought that they won. Returning to school the next day was an act of resistance and resilience in the face of adversity and trauma. 

It wasn’t until twenty years later that she found out that Central’s chemistry teacher helped a group of classmates build a bomb, which she believes was used to make the blast in her home. Even through that, Carlotta walked across the graduation stage, becoming the only female member of the Little Rock Nine to graduate from Central High in May 1960. The next morning she boarded a northbound train. “I took the first thing smoking out of Little Rock.” 

She applied to numerous universities across the country and ultimately decided to attend Michigan State University as a pre-med major. “I wanted to go there because it was a large university and I would just be another number. I wouldn’t be that person you’d been seeing on TV everyday.” However, after a two-year stay, she chose to leave. Her uncle and aunt lived in Denver and invited her to visit during the summer breaks between her freshman and sophomore years. Deep down she knew Colorado would be her next journey.
 

A Landscape of Possibility in Colorado

When she arrived in Denver in 1962, Colorado’s Black population was small but growing, rooted in neighborhoods such as Five Points and Park Hill. The state had passed one of the nation’s early fair-employment laws in 1957 and a fair-housing act in 1959, nearly a decade before Congress enacted similar federal legislation. For Carlotta, the move felt like an exhalation. She found the move so refreshing that she soon convinced her parents and two younger sisters to join her in Colorado.

“What I appreciated about Colorado,” she said, “was that I could be myself.”

She attended Scott Methodist Church and later Park Hill United Methodist Church. “We became the second Black family to belong there,” she remembered. “Two days after moving in, Reverend Babbs knocked on our door to invite us to church. You just don’t get that today.”

Even so, racial lines remained visible. “I heard that Blacks only lived up to York Street,” she said. Her uncle was one of the first Black homeowners in Park Hill—an act of defiance that mirrored her own. “That was an achievement.” Denver’s atmosphere struck her as freer, yet imperfect. “Discrimination wasn’t as blatant as Little Rock,” she explained. “But you could see it in certain people.” What mattered to her was opportunity: “Here you could do whatever you wanted as long as you worked hard and were honest about it. You didn’t have to be somebody’s kid—you just decided what you wanted to do and did it.”

In the early 1960s education was the prime means of economic upward mobility for Black Americans, and Carlotta was determined to finish college. While working in Denver she took night classes at CU Denver, then applied to Colorado State College (now UNC Greeley).
 

When a bank officer refused her a student loan, suggesting she “go to your parents’ bank,” Carlotta pushed back. “I told her, ‘I’m the one getting the loan, not my parents.’ When the officer denied it anyway, I asked to see the president.” The meeting worked in her favor; she received the loan. “That could not have happened in Little Rock,” she reflected. “But here, I could speak up and be heard.” Persistence and resilience in the midst of adversity had paid off.

She graduated in 1968 with a degree in Recreation Administration and Social Science while holding three jobs—at the Hilton, a drugstore, and the post office—and commuting daily to Greeley. “There was no time for socializing,” she laughed. “I had a goal.” Her achievement mirrored a larger national moment across the country: Black women were entering universities at numbers that had never been seen before, and in turn, reshaping professions that had long excluded them.

Her first job after college was with the YWCA of Denver, part of a national organization that, by the late 1960s, was confronting racial and gender inequities. “That work came naturally,” Carlotta said. “It brought back what I’d experienced as a teenager—camp, leadership, community.” She directed youth programs across Denver Public Schools, helping teens of color experience the Colorado outdoors and connect with their communities.

Through the YWCA, she was later tasked with remodeling a donated house that had once belonged to Dr. Clarence Holmes, a prominent Black dentist and civic leader. Holmes had helped found the Colorado-Wyoming branch of the NAACP and the Glenarm YMCA—one of the few YMCA branches in Denver open to African Americans—and was known for establishing the interracial Cosmopolitan Club, which challenged segregation and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan. The project connected Carlotta’s youth work to a longer legacy of Black civic activism in Denver.

When asked if she considered herself an activist, Carlotta answered quickly: “No. That word came later. Back then we called it volunteering or participating. I was just doing what I knew was right.”

Her modesty understates her influence. The Civil Rights era often produced two kinds of leaders: those who stayed in the public eye, and those who quietly worked to transform everyday systems. Carlotta firmly belongs in the latter category.

Those years of community work placed her within the broader wave of Black civic leadership that followed the Civil Rights Movement—citizens turning protest into institution-building. For Carlotta, it also revealed a new calling. “That’s when I knew I should be in real estate,” she said. “It came easy for me.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, real estate remained circumscribed by America’s color line. Redlining and discriminatory lending had long confined Black buyers to specific neighborhoods. In 1968, Carlotta and her husband filed a complaint after being denied an apartment on Colorado Boulevard. “They said it was taken, but two weeks later we saw it advertised again,” she said. “We took them to court, however, we didn’t win the case, but we stood up.” That act of resilience became a throughline in her professional life in real estate. After earning her license in the early 1970s, she joined Polly Little Realtors, a woman-owned firm where she quickly rose to the top tier of sellers. “I wanted to work in an inclusive environment,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?” By 1977, she launched her own firm, LaNier & Company, focusing on residential development for customers from all backgrounds across the Denver metro.

For Carlotta, housing was more than property—it marked an important point along a common circle of opportunity. “Everything falls back to education,” she said. “People want certain neighborhoods, but they need the jobs and education to afford them. It’s all connected.”

Her view echoed the logic of Brown v. Board: Equality in the classroom builds equality everywhere else. Watching Denver Public Schools evolve over the decades, she saw the same tensions that shaped her youth—progress, then regression, and the need to push forward again. By the 1980s, resegregation and unequal funding had returned to many locales nationwide, even in western states once thought of as more progressive. Carlotta knew the fight for equality had simply shifted from school doors to banks, zoning boards, and real-estate offices.
 

Family Life and Legacy

Carlotta met her husband, Ike LaNier, at a Denver party in 1965, shortly after his military service. He had graduated from Tougaloo College in Mississippi and had taught school in Denver for a number of years before going into the service. They dated for three years and married in 1968. He worked for IBM, part of a generation of Black professionals whose entry into corporate America was made possible through Urban League advocacy. “They helped open doors,” she said. Soon after getting married the couple had two children, son Whitney and daughter Brooke, and the LaNiers prioritized diverse educational settings for them.

“I always wanted my kids in mixed environments,” she said. “That mattered to me.” When her son was bused across town during Denver’s desegregation era of the ’70s and ’80s, she supported it despite the inconvenience. The family later lived briefly in Atlanta. Carlotta and Ike found their children isolated in mostly white classrooms. Consequently they enrolled them in a private academy founded by a retired Navy admiral who believed children should “see people of all backgrounds together.”

Through decades of relocation—from Colorado to Georgia to California and back again—Denver kept calling her home. “I’ve enjoyed it,” she said. “I’m still selling homes. Still working.”

As our conversation drew to a close, Carlotta spoke of home. “I came here on purpose,” she said of Colorado, reflecting on the place she has lived for more than six decades. “I hope people think of me as a good person—someone who helped make this city and state a good place for all people.” She spoke of being a mother and wife, a church member, a neighbor, and a loyal supporter of Colorado sports teams and communities. “The mountains say a lot to me—it’s the strength of those mountains that I gravitate to. It keeps me going.”

In 1997, Carlotta helped establish the Little Rock Nine Foundation. The foundation provided direct financial support through scholarships and mentorship opportunities for students. She served as its acting President before it moved into the Clinton School of Public Service in 2008. Funds from the Foundation helped establish an endowment at the school.

When asked what she sees in today’s cultural and political climate—book bans, debates over history, and politics surrounding race and education—she grew circumspect. “Unfortunately, I feel we are facing some of the same battles,” she said. “There was so much progress from 1954 until just a few years ago, but it’s going to take citizens to insist, to be vigilant about keeping that progress—or reinventing it if it’s taken away.”
Despite this critique, Carlotta remains hopeful. “We need leaders,” she said. “More than one or two. We need to come to the table, discuss our differences, and find a way forward. No one gets everything they want—it’s never the case. But we can still build a better environment for everyone.”

After all these years, her message remains what it was in 1957: Keep moving forward, finish what was started, choose courage over complacency. Her legacy isn’t just that she walked through the school doors—it’s that she never stopped opening them for others.

Carlotta Walls LaNier just published her first children’s book, Carlotta's Special Dress: How a Walk to School Changed Civil Rights History (2026) now available in print and audiobook at Hachette Book Group.