The Little Rock Crisis

What Desegregation Politics Says About Us

R. Perry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137521347
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica europea

The Little Rock Crisis frames the story of the Little Rock 1957 desegregation crisis through the lens of memory. Over time, those memories – individual and collective – have motivated Little Rockians for social and political action and engagement.

Part I

Ideas, Institutions, and Interests in the Little Rock Era of School Integration

In the past there have been great inequalities among us, based only on legislation. What could be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority! What more contrary to human instincts than permanent differences established between such obviously similar people! Nevertheless, these differences have lasted for centuries and they still subsist in very many places; everywhere they have left traces which, though imaginary, time is hardly able to obliterate.

—Alexis de Tocqueville1

The theme of the first three chapters of this book is “people.” We chose this theme as it serves as a reminder that at the center of any change are everyday human beings. People matter. The heroes and heroines of the crisis in Little Rock did not seek praise for their courage—they simply sought a better life in a country that had long promised equality. As history records the lives of the past whose actions inform many of our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs today, it is people who make change happen. In political-science terms, we find ourselves firmly in the culturist school—at least in explaining the powerful role of people who made the crisis both tragic and necessary. Many people risked their lives fighting institutional norms, mores, and systems of inequality—acted upon and enforced by other (white) people, of course.

Time is not on our side. As the days pass, the window of opportunity to better understand what life was like for the ironically named Silent Generation (whose presence was, in fact, loud) closes. There are numerous stories yet untold about the commitment, courage, and sacrifice of those determined few who elected to not let time pass them by. These people sought simply to secure their equal rights and, in turn, the rights of us all. What follows are our interpretations based on firsthand accounts of how key actors confronted the crisis. These people showed the difference between desiring change and making change happen; they chose to do something about inequality, to protest against injustice, and volunteered their lives to the cause of justice and equality.

Institutions

The second theme in Part I is the role of institutional actors and their efforts to carry out their respective agendas during the crisis. We theorize what motivated some of the actors who, as representatives of a political institution were not generally supportive of integration, and in most infamous examples were ardently opposed to it, using the power of their institutional positions to press their points of view. In doing so, the future reputations of the institutions were often ignored. How the Little Rock Public School Board and the office of the governor would come to be viewed through history’s lens was little considered at the time. What seemed to matter most was not the integrity of the institutions or the judicious and expeditious upholding of the law. Rather, attention was paid to individual reputations that determined how they would be perceived in the short term by “their” community. Displaying an absence of courage, and an abuse of institutional power, the examples of key institutional actors in the Little Rock crisis show how easily personal mores and beliefs become institutional norms and policy. It’s a story of how a prejudicial culture influenced institutional actors to act in the interest of the perceived many, despite the basic rights they owed to everyone equally.

Mores

A natural prejudice leads a man to scorn anybody who has been his inferior, long after he has become his equal; the real inequality, due to fortune or the law, is always followed by an imagined inequality rooted in mores.

—Alexis de Tocqueville2

The final theme in Part I is of conflicting mores. These confronted each other, leaving the equal educational opportunity of nine teenagers in the balance and ultimately resulting in no secondary education for an entire year in an entire city—for everyone. As this book’s cover coveys, many Little Rock students had to complete their lessons on television during the year in which there was no school. Because, for white segregationists, no education was better than an education with nine black teenagers. Social norms and customs had become laws that resulted in the complete segregation of the races. And even when those laws changed, as in the unanimous Brown decision, the norms remained. The Little Rock segregationists’ mentality could not make sense of how a conservative-led US Supreme Court and a moderately conservative president could tell them want to do in their city. Their mores, despite changes in the federal law, remained their personal law—and many indicated they’d rather die than see their white children sit in a classroom with black children.

The conflict between mores (culture) and laws (institutions) defined the prolonging of a crisis that didn’t have to happen. Luckily, not all mores were couched in prejudice. Active and not-so-active segregationists’ views were counterbalanced by the mores of civil disobedience, non-violence and the beginnings of the strong minority protest politics that would go on to define the 1960s civil rights movement—and the lives of engaged citizens well after the 1960s came to an end:

. . . [A]s they pushed their Jim Crow laws, southerners told a sympathetic nation that the immoral black tide had just not been ready for freedom; African Americans, they had said, endangered white women, children, and democracy . . . This time, however, the old supremacist story flopped. Segregationists failed to pin the old moral stigma on black Americans . . . white segregationists turned into the moral villains . . . What a different history southern leaders might have written if they had calmed the racial furies rather than leaping forward to inflame them.3

CHAPTER 1

Perceptions: Black and White Views on Race Relations

Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures uses the term “webs of significance”1 to identify laws, history, codes of behavior, symbols, and icons that man spins for himself, which, once explicated, dissolve a person’s and a culture’s opacity.2 Interpreting the contrasting descriptions of race relations in the Little Rock community renders a perspective more accurate and thorough than any single view, thereby accounting more holistically for the friction that gave way to the crisis. The conceptual structures of divergent characterizations of the Little Rock community in the 1950s and immediately following translate, then, to symbols of a frame of mind.3 Such frames of mind account for the translucent racially polarized city whose simmering cauldron reached the boiling point in the wake of the arsonist, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

So it was in Little Rock, where histories—personal, collective, racial, and legal—were mingling. In the customary habits of the Little Rock culture, a change that pointed to egalitarian diversity was not to be achieved because individualist raw nerves were being exposed.4 Those life-sustaining nerves needed protection from outside elements. Limited knowledge, and limited acquaintance with the “other,” assumed to be deleterious, provided the impetus for resistance to someone else’s view of the same circumstances. Little Rock became an “us versus them” community.5

One illustrative case is that of a veteran tenth-grade English teacher at Central High who took on the responsibilities of a vice principal during the desegregation period in 1957. Her book about that year was made into a movie. Mrs. Elizabeth Huckaby in Crisis at Central High asserts that prior to the Central High crisis, Little Rock was a “peaceful city.”6 Her statements reflect the reality: “Having grown up in the South, I had never known any black well except those in household employ.”7 She writes of “a profound experience—my first introduction to a black woman who was not a servant. It had been at a YWCA convention in Indianapolis, during my college days, and naive as it sounds today, I had discovered that blacks could be as interesting and attractive as my white acquaintances and in the same way.”8 Her relatives, who had similar orientations, “loved Louise, the black woman whose help she and others shared and who ‘knew her place,’ on the bus and elsewhere.”9

According to Little Rock Public Schools superintendent Virgil Blossom, “Little Rock was proud, too, of its reputation as a city of excellent race relations. Buses, hospitals and certain other public facilities were integrated. Biracial meetings commonly strove in a spirit of harmony to solve community problems. Negro and white employees worked side by side on many jobs with a minimum of tension or friction.”10 Those working side by side however, did not include school teachers. The public school institution was so rigidly segregated that at the annual state teachers’ meetings, guest speakers were required to address the white and African American teachers separately. Teachers’ salaries differed according to race. As a means of protecting the institution, Blossom emphatically assured concerned segregationists that no African American teachers would be employed at Central High. His use of the term “staff,” in his many presentations to civic groups as he shared desegregation plans, somewhat clarified what was meant by side by side. “Staff” did not include such workers at the school as janitors and cooks, who were mostly African American.

The “side by side” claims were also discounted by Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the nine teenagers who first desegregated Central High:

I didn’t agree with the radio announcers who described Little Rock as a nice, clean Southern town, a place where my people and whites got along peacefully. City officials boasted there hadn’t been a Klan hanging of one of our people in at least ten years. They called our citizens forward-thinking because they were completing construction of the Strategic Air Command military base nearby that brought in lots of different races of people. But I didn’t think we were so progressive because I still couldn’t eat at the lunch counter at the five-and-dime, go to a movie unless I sat in the balcony, ride the merry-go-round at Fair Park, or go into the white ladies’ bathroom. The city fathers bragged about the way our people and white folks were working side by side . . . They said blacks earned good wages, but that wasn’t true. Most of my people who earned tolerable salaries were either teachers, preachers, or doctors. For us, there were very few jobs as clerks, policemen, bus drivers, or insurance salesmen.11

Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, ever a reader of the mind-set of the citizenry “majority” in the capital city of the upper South, averred, “It is evident to me that Arkansas is not ready for a complete and sudden mixing of the races in the public schools and that any attempt to solve this problem by pressure or mandatory methods will jeopardize, in many communities, the good relations which exist between whites and Negroes.”12

If, unlike the blind men, the governor had felt the entire “elephant” of public opinion in Arkansas, then the following account by the first African American graduate of Central High, Ernest Green, must be fictitious:

[I]n the downtown department stores, sales clerks who would know a woman’s name when she used a credit card always addressed black women by their first names. Well, my mother made sure her store credit cards only read ‘Mrs. Green’ so the clerks would have to address her like that. She was always ready to tell clerks they didn’t know her well enough to call her by her first name. My mother was also part of the black teachers’ group back in the forties who had to fight for pay equity because their salaries were significantly lower than white teachers. These experiences seem small, but they were cumulative . . . I wanted to change a piece of my existence in Little Rock. To me, life was terrible.13

Again, if Governor Faubus’s assessment of “good relations” was accurate, then Melba Pattillo Beals must be mistaken as well:

Whenever we walked uptown, among white people, Mother held my hand too tight. I could see the fear in her eyes, feel the stiffening of her body as white people walked past. If we happened to be in their path, she quickly shoved me aside, according them the privilege of first passage. If white adults were accompanied by children, those kids scowled or stuck their tongues out at us. Even worse, they’d sometimes say, “Mama, look at that there nigger.” Those trips to town became my primer on relating to white people.14

As co-author with his wife of The Case of the Sleeping People, Dr. Dale Alford—an ophthalmologist, a school board member favored by active segregationists, a successful write-in candidate in 1958 against Brooks Hays for the Fif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Meeting of Histories
• Part I: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests in the Little Rock Era of School Integration
• Part II: Contemporary Proceeds: Telling the Story
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index