Excerpt from TURN AWAY THY SON

CHAPTER ONE - Harry Ashmore

The "City of Roses" was beginning to bloom.   June in Arkansas has always been delightful, and in the early summer of 1957 it was especially so.   Temperatures in Little Rock hovered around 75 degrees through clear and balmy days, children played in backyards and collected lightning bugs in mason jars at dusk, and the gifted young editor of the Arkansas Gazette spent long, pleasant afternoons in his downtown office crafting the final phrases of the book about southern life that he had been preparing himself for twenty years to write.    Harry Ashmore had come to Little Rock ten years before (at the young age of thirty-one) to direct the editorial page of Arkansas' leading newspaper, and in that post-war decade he had seen the city take on new business vigor under the blandishments of returned World War II veterans such as himself.   He had also participated in the realignment of Arkansas politics under the liberal leadership of another young veteran, his friend and ally in numerous causes, former Governor Sid McMath.

By the summer of 1957 the city fathers of Little Rock had reason to believe they were on the threshold of a promising new era in Arkansas's history and development.   Following the leadership of a group of young veterans who had broadened their vision in their sojourns out into the world beyond the South, the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce had overseen the development of an industrial district and had participated in attracting an Air Force base to the metropolitan area.   In the summer of 1955 the Little Rock School Board had announced its plans for voluntary desegregation of the city's public schools.   The following year the city's business leadership had succeeded in changing their community from a mayoral to a city manager form of government, a "reform" that aimed to make the city more responsive to the needs and desires of the business community.   And in the early-1957 session of the state legislature the reform-minded young governor, Orval Faubus, had pushed through a dramatic increase in the state's sales tax that would make possible some desperately-needed improvements in education and other state services in Arkansas. 1 

By all accounts Little Rock enjoyed an earned reputation as one of the most progressive cities in the South with regard to race relations, and visitors from other regions and countries frequently responded with genuine surprise to the beauty, graciousness, and sophistication they encountered there.   In short, all of the elements seemed to be in place for Little Rock's long-delayed entry into the mainstream of American life.   In this upbeat environment, Harry Ashmore thought he could see the coming together of several themes, or "great impersonal forces," he had first detected at work in the South Carolina of his youth and young manhood.   He had believed for some time he was witnessing the end of an era in the South, and as the balmy days of an Arkansas June began to wilt into the steam and sweat of mid-summer, the celebrated young editor put the finishing touches on an elegant and hopeful study that he entitled An Epitaph for Dixie . 2 

In this slim volume Ashmore prophesied a new order for the South, one he believed was the inevitable result of the passing of the Old South's "peculiar institutions" of the agrarian economy, one-party politics, and legal segregation (all three tied to the white man's determination to control the position of the Negro in southern society).   In the face of the dramatic population shifts of black Americans from the southern countryside to the cities (and especially the northern cities), and as a result of the Brown decisions outlawing segregation in the public schools, Ashmore argued that white southerners would follow their own economic self-interest into a new ordering of race relations.   In particular, the New South's businessmen - "the bustling gentlemen at the local Chambers of Commerce or the state Industrial Development Commissions"- would lead the way into a more democratic and rational future, and they would bring their communities and their region along with them.   At last, thought Ashmore, the white people of the South could affirm of their own accord the reality of the accommodation the nation had reached at Appomattox almost a hundred years before.   However haltingly such an effort might proceed, the young writer predicted the people of his native region would head in that direction, and the road they would take "leads inevitably to reunion."   In just two short months Harry Ashmore would have reason to rue his foray into prophecy. 3

1 Author's interviews with Everett Tucker, December 5, 1977; B. Finley Vinson, December 21, 1977; Richard C. Butler, December 15, 1977; A. Howard Stebbins, December 16, 1977; all in the possession of the author.   See also Elizabeth Jacoway, "Taken By Surprise:   Little Rock Business Leaders and Desegregation" in Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge:   Louisiana State University Press, 1982).   For an engaging discussion of Orval Faubus' 1957 sales tax increase see Roy Reed, Faubus:   The Life and Times of An American Prodigal (Fayetteville:   University of Arkansas Press, 1997), pp. 155-158.

2 Historian Michael J. Klarman described Little Rock as "one of the South's most racially progressive cities"; Michael J. Klarman, "How the Brown Decision Changed Race Relations:   The Backlash Thesis," The Journal of American History (June, 1994), p. 103.   For the reactions of visitors to the city, see the office correspondence of Harry Ashmore between 1947 and 1959 in the Harry Ashmore Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Ottenheimer Library, University of Arkansas at Little Rock.   Harry S. Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths:   The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston:   Little, Brown and Company, 1989), p. 348.   Harry S. Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie (New York:   W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1958).

3 Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie , pp. 1, 118, 149.