Remember Little Rock

Erin Krutko Devlin

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613765036
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Remember Little Rock Erin Krutko Devlin explores public memories surrounding the iconic Arkansas school desegregation crisis of 1957 and shows how these memories were vigorously contested and sometimes deployed against the cause. Delving into a wide variety of sources, from memoirs to televised docudramas, commemoration ceremonies, and the creation of Little Rock High museums, Devlin reveals how many white moderates proclaimed Little Rock a victory for civil rights and educational equality even as segregation persisted. At the same time, African American activists, students, and their families asserted their own stories in the ongoing fight for racial justice.Devlin also demonstrates that public memory directly bears on law and policy. She argues that the triumphal narrative of civil rights has been used to stall school desegregation, support tokenism, and to roll back federal court oversight of school desegregation, voter registration, and efforts to promote diversity in public institutions. Remember Little Rock examines the chasm between the rhetoric of the "post–­civil rights"era and the reality of enduring racial inequality.

— Chapter One —

Defining Successful Integration

During the 1957–58 school year, segregationist students inside Little Rock Central High School continued their campaign to halt the progress of school desegregation long after protestors, soldiers from the 101st Airborne, and representatives of the press disappeared from the lawn outside of the building. As part of their campaign of harassment, they distributed small printed cards that derided members of the Little Rock Nine, the school administration, and the NAACP. With the support of adult organizations like the Capital Citizens’ Council and the Mothers League of Central High School, students passed out materials that accused Superintendent of Schools Virgil T. Blossom of entering into a conspiracy with the president of the NAACP’s Arkansas State Conference, Daisy Bates, to impose integration on the residents of Little Rock. The Capital Citizens’ Council distributed literature insinuating Bates had been given “free access” to Central High School and had been provided with authority as an “unofficial ‘principal’ ” to “cross-examine” white students resisting desegregation during disciplinary procedures. “Who is running Central High School?” they asked. “Blossom or Bates . . . or Both!”1 Even the “permit” cards circulated by segregationist students sanctioning the abuse of the Little Rock Nine gestured to this supposed conspiracy by stating that the authorization for such action came from “Daisey Blossom.”2

FIGURE 3. Segregationist students at Little Rock Central High School distributed small printed cards like this one in order to encourage the harassment of the Little Rock Nine throughout the 1957–58 school year. On this card, the conflation of NAACP Arkansas State Conference president Daisy Bates’s name with that of Superintendent of Schools Virgil T. Blossom was designed to suggest that civil rights leaders and school officials were conspiring to impose desegregation on the city of Little Rock. (Image 127769, Wisconsin Historical Society)

Although the forces of massive resistance attempted to cast Blossom and Bates as collaborators, these two central protagonists clashed repeatedly over school policies and admission procedures in the months leading up to the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, not only in informal meetings but also through their legal representatives in courts of law. While Blossom advanced his token integration plan as a moderate and measured response to the Brown decision that could be implemented without sustained damage to the system of public education, Bates and the NAACP argued that tokenism continued to deny thousands of African American school children their constitutional rights and was a smokescreen designed to preserve the dual system of education in Arkansas’s capital. Both the Little Rock school district and the NAACP made these arguments in federal court. The courts’ determination that the Blossom Plan marked a reasonable start to integration put in motion the selective screening procedures that ultimately winnowed the number of African American students entering Central High School in the fall of 1957 down to nine. But crucially, these same questions would continue to be litigated in the aftermath of the school desegregation crisis, not only in federal courts of law but also in the field of public memory. Blossom and Bates published two of the first retrospective accounts of the crisis. Their books were written with an eye toward constructing a public memory that would shape the trajectory of school desegregation litigation in the 1960s as courts struggled to define the parameters of successful integration.

Blossom’s It HAS Happened Here (1959) and Bates’s The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962) revealed that they were far from co-conspirators during the events leading up to the school desegregation crisis. When Bates’s memoir was published, the Arkansas Gazette acknowledged the persistence of these rumors in the state capital but suggested it was time to put them to rest. “There is a popular belief that Virgil Blossom, the Little Rock school superintendent during that time, conspired with Mrs. Bates to integrate the Little Rock schools,” observed reviewer Roy Reed. “Mrs. Bates’ book does not leave that impression . . . Overall, she seems to have as little use for Blossom as for most of the other white principals in the crisis.”3 Indeed, in many respects Bates’s memoir was written in direct counterpoint to Blossom’s own retrospective account, in which he worked diligently to distance the overt opposition of massive resistance from what the historian John A. Kirk has described as his strategy of minimal compliance.4 In contrast, Bates sought to collapse the distinction between these courses of action. Although she was not privy to the backroom deals brokered between Faubus, Blossom, and the school board, she highlighted the rhetoric of white supremacy and the presumption of white privilege that undergirded both of these approaches to resisting school desegregation. She described Blossom’s strategy of minimal compliance not as a model integration strategy assured of success, but as a devious means of evading the mandate of Brown and preserving segregated education. In her account, massive resistance to school integration was not imposed on Little Rock by “outsiders.” Instead, the 1957–59 school desegregation crisis was the predictable byproduct of Blossom’s own public rhetoric and the efforts of the school board to minimize and delay the implementation of desegregation.5

At a fundamental level, these two memoirs advanced competing arguments related to how successful integration should be defined not only in the past, but also in the immediate present. While both the Little Rock school district and the NAACP advanced their claims through the courts, Blossom and Bates advanced arguments in support of the litigants through their retrospective accounts. What did the Brown decision require? Did the Little Rock Nine represent successful tokenism or the promise of deeper systemic transformation? What were the responsibilities of the federal courts, civil rights organizations, local school boards, national and state political leaders, and citizens in relation to the transformation gripping Southern schools? Both authors believed that their answers to these questions, and their proposed strategies of change, still spoke directly to the needs of their community and the nation at large. Both sought to relitigate the arguments advanced in the courts in hopes of securing broader public acceptance of their actions during the school desegregation crisis, while furthering their goals and bolstering their professional reputations in its immediate aftermath.

Defining the Brown decision as narrowly as possible was a central strategy of passive resistance to school integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, despite Little Rock’s iconic status as a site of massive resistance, under the leadership of Superintendent Virgil Blossom, the city was at the vanguard of developing administrative procedures and legal arguments that token integration satisfied the Supreme Court’s requirements in Brown I and Brown II.6 In the mid-1950s, Blossom had staked his professional reputation on the strategy of minimal compliance. Following the Court’s implementation order in Brown II, the superintendent developed the “Blossom Plan,” an approach designed to capitalize on residential segre-gation in Little Rock and reduce the number of African American students transferred into the city’s white schools. Blossom argued that this approach would help preserve support for public education in the white community while fulfilling the requirements of federal courts of law. If implemented successfully, the superintendent believed his plan might serve as a model for the nation and provide a viable strategy for Southern school districts struggling to reconcile themselves to Brown. Blossom certainly hoped that the public visibility of his plan would help propel his career to greater heights. Years later, he reflected, “My career, my whole interest, were bound up in that hope of future progress.”7

The 1957–59 crisis derailed these ambitions. Across the political spectrum, few viewed Little Rock as a successful model of school desegregation. Blossom, however, was unwilling to abandon this project and determined to rehabilitate his professional reputation in the wake of the crisis. Indeed, he had little choice in the matter. During the 1958–59 school year, the Little Rock school district released Blossom and bought out the remainder of his contract. Nationally, the superintendent faced criticism as well; Blossom admitted that he received a lukewarm reception at the meeting of the American Association of School Administrators in St. Louis at the end of the 1957–58 school year in the wake of reports that he had expelled one of the Little Rock Nine for responding to repeated provocation from white students.8 In the market for a new job, Blossom was determined to defend the plan of action he had developed for Arkansas’s capital city and the disciplinary procedures he had instituted inside Central High.

In his memoir, first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, the superintendent cast himself as a moderate and painted minimal compliance as a reasonable and lawful alternative to massive resistance as well as immediate integration. In his view, the crisis in the fall of 1957 was the product of nefarious “outside” influences who worked vigorously to discredit him and to derail his carefully wrought plans, precisely because they promised to be so successful: “They decided they must stop our plan just because it was so reasonable and initially involved so few Negro students that it had every chance of success.”9 The superintendent’s memoir was designed to demonstrate that it was the inability of the school district to adhere to his moderate course that precipitated the crisis in Little Rock, not weaknesses in the Blossom Plan itself. Moreover, Blossom contended that even in the aftermath of the crisis and Little Rock’s “lost year,” when all of the city’s high schools were closed in defiance of federal court orders, his approach remained the only viable strategy tailored to the needs of Southern white communities that would pass constitutional muster.

Blossom positioned his memoir as a primer that would enable other school districts to avoid the stumbling blocks that had pitched Little Rock headlong into a constitutional crisis.10 According to Blossom, the catastrophic consequences of massive resistance and “forced” integration “by bayonet” demonstrated not only the superiority of his original plan but also justified the school board’s perpetuation of this strategy through pupil placement laws and freedom-of-choice plans well into the 1960s. “One thing is obvious,” Blossom noted, “if the South does not plan the future of its system of public education in line with the mainstream of progress, then the federal government will do it for us.”11 By provoking the direct intervention of the federal government, overt resistance might result in more integration than plans like his own that were designed to minimize Brown’s impact. With his guidance, Little Rock had developed a plan rooted in minimal compliance that had survived the ups and downs of the school crisis. As the nation moved into its second decade of school desegregation in the 1960s, Blossom argued that the city was in a good position to build on the foundations of his plan and implement pupil placement provisions approved by the Supreme Court that would allow school boards to continue to minimize African American transfers into white schools. Although written in racially neutral language, Blossom understood that transfer policies could be used to maintain a “high degree of segregation” in the name of preserving “educational standards.”12 Indeed, the historian John A. Kirk has argued that it was precisely the “low-key and surreptitious approach to school desegregation” adopted by the architects of passive resistance in Little Rock that made their strategies “far more effective in undermining the Brown decision in the long run.”13

Little Rock’s superintendent acknowledged that the plan he developed for the Little Rock school district in the late 1960s “represented minimum integration,” but defended his approach on the grounds that circumventing systemic desegregation “was definitely what the majority of white residents wanted.”14 Blossom’s primary concern while developing his proposed course of action was that it be accepted by the majority of white Little Rock citizens; it was in this direction that his social relationships and his prospects for advancement lay. In contrast, the approval of Little Rock’s black community about the district’s approach to school desegregation was a low priority. Even overt opposition from civil rights leaders seemed little more than an inconvenience and did little to disrupt Blossom’s confidence that he, or other officials in his position, could command the co-operation of local residents and maintain control over the speed and pace of integration in the Little Rock school district. Blossom’s preoccupation with white public opinion shaped his initial response to the Brown decision in 1954, and it was equally evident in his memoir. The superintendent argued that school districts could not develop school desegregation plans without consideration for their white patrons. In Southern communities where voter registration procedures disenfranchised the majority of African American residents, Blossom clearly felt that the future of the school system rested in the hands of white citizens who turned out for school board elections, supported or rejected school bonds, and enrolled their children in the public schools; if school districts did not take preemptive measures to minimize Brown’s impact, white public support for the school system itself would be in jeopardy.15

Consequently, Blossom highlighted the strategies he had adopted to appease this constituency as a model for other school districts interested in adopting his approach. As superintendent of Little Rock schools, Blossom introduced a phased plan designed to limit the initial impact of desegregation to high schools, with middle and elementary schools to follow at a later date. The superintendent reported that the benefit of starting with older students was that their understanding of Southern social mores and racial etiquette was more fully developed than that of their younger peers.16 Moreover, the architecture of the Blossom Plan was built on the bedrock of geographic segregation in the city. For over a decade, the city’s public housing authority had been razing African American housing in Little Rock’s central core and relocating black families to segregated public housing units on the east side of the city. Simultaneously, as development in the city of Little Rock spread to the west, affluent white neighborhoods collectively known as the “country club” sector or “silk-stocking district” emerged.17 Under Blossom’s plan, Little Rock would not proceed with any plan of desegregation until two new high schools were constructed that would service these areas. Horace Mann High School was designated as a “Negro” high school on the east side of the city, while Hall High would serve the affluent white developments on the west side. As a result, the “first impact” of integration would be concentrated on Central High School.18 School districts following Blossom’s model might also consider building new school plants in highly segregated neighborhoods or gerrymandering school attendance zones to achieve the same effect.

Blossom was careful to note, however, that his plan did not rely on geographic attendance zones alone to minimize integration. Both white and black students resided in all three zones. Consequently, the school board developed a system of “voluntary transfers” and screening procedures to address this issue. By default, African American students would continue to attend school at Horace Mann unless they expressed interest in attending Central. In this regard, Blossom’s transfer system was built on Little Rock’s long legacy of maintaining a dual system of racially defined schools. The superintendent conceded that 80 of the 526 African American students who resided in Central’s attendance zone volunteered to integrate the high school in 1957, but in his memoir he provided insight into how he reduced the number of prospective registrants even further. First, Blossom asked African American junior high and high schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Defining Successful Integration
• 2. Obscuring Effective Mechanisms of Change
• 3. Recasting Moderation and Resistance
• 4. Displacing Blame
• 5. Resisting Historical Erasure
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index