The Central crisis at 50

A new book finds failure all around

BY STANLEY N. KATZ SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Sunday, March 18, 2007

LITTLE ROCK — Dr. Stanley N. Katz is Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

As I was beginning to write this review, the New York Times reported that federal district court judge William R. Wilson Jr. had declared the Little Rock school district “unitary,” bringing the Little Rock integration crisis to a happy conclusion.

The newspaper reprinted a well known photograph of National Guard troops escorting the nine black children into the massive brick Central High School building, as groups of sullen looking white students looked on from the school steps and through classroom windows. Current School Superintendent Roy G. Brooks is quoted as boasting that Judge Wilson’s decision “is a clear indication that 1957 is not 2007.” But a civil rights lawyer is quoted as having a very different reaction: “In 2007 we have people in big houses celebrating the return to 1957, a return to the concept of white supremacy.” Plus ca change, plus c’est Little Rock.

I first visited Little Rock sometime in the early 1970s. I came to give some lectures on American history at UALR, where my former University of Wisconsin graduate student S. Charles Bolton was teaching in the History Department.

I also went because I was developing a teaching unit on the Little Rock integration crisis for a document-based course in American legal history. I had earlier assisted the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in acquiring the papers of Daisy Bates, the local head of the NAACP, and I was interested in seeing what else I could learn about her and the crisis.

Knowing that, Charlie introduced me to a brilliant young UALR colleague, a native of Little Rock, who was thinking of writing a study on the Central High School saga. Her name was Betsy Jacoway, and she undertook to be my guide to local history.

Most important, Betsy arranged for us to have tea with Mrs. Bates on an afternoon that is still fresh in my memory more than 30 years later. Betsy showed up wearing white gloves and carrying a pocket book, not standard attire for young academics in the 1970s.

We “called upon” Mrs. Bates, who produced a silver tea service and porcelain cups, and had a wonderful conversation with us about her role in guiding the nine students through the crisis, while dealing both with the school authorities and the national office of the NAACP. I learned a tremendous amount that has informed my teaching of the Little Rock crisis ever since, but mostly what I learned was something a naïve northerner could not have known about race relations and the sociology of the upper south.

Mrs. Bates and Professor Jacoway approached one another with a formality and respect that I will never forget. Betsy seemed to me to represent the enlightened liberal elite of Little Rock, and Mrs. Bates (which is how Betsy consistently addressed her) represented a dignified, educated middle class black presence.

The solemnly friendly and sympathetic tone of that engagement informs the remarkable book that Jacoway has now finally completed. Turn Away Thy Son is a magnificent book that more than justifies its long gestation.

This is a book that could only have been written by an insider, and yet it is a book that does not suffer from the self-absorption that ordinarily characterizes insider literature. Jacoway was a young teenager in 1957, unaware of the drama engulfing her community. She later attended the new and dominantly white Hall High School, the refuge of well-to-do Little Rock families, although she was placed in a private Catholic girls school in 1958-59.

Her father was a lawyer who was close to many of the Little Rock leaders who were protagonists in the school crisis: school superintendent Virgil Blossom, Representative Brooks Hays, Capital Citizens’ Council lawyer Amis Guthridge and school board lawyer Richard Butler. Her family was, then, part and parcel of the elite leadership in the city.

Jacoway was almost entirely insensitive to the implications of the school crisis as a high school student and only became aware of the implications when she began her doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina with the great historian of the South, George Tindall.

It was only then, she says, that she had a “Damascus Road experience,” that revealed to her the nature and extent of the all-embracing bias that engulfed her hometown. She realized that she “had mindlessly participated in and benefited from a racist culture.” This book is an attempt to understand how that white dismissal of blacks’ worth determined the course of the crisis of 1957 and beyond.

A FEAR OF ‘RACE-MIXING’

One of the most interesting aspects of Turn Away Thy Son is Jacoway’s take on the trigger mechanism of Arkansas racism in the 1950s. She identifies “race-mixing” in general and miscegenation in particular as the underlying concern that motivated the opponents of desegregation and gave strength to defenders of the old racial order.

It was, she argues, the fear of “allowing black men to have access to white women” that predetermined attitudes toward potential changes in racial public policy. She quotes an NAACP memorandum that reports a White Citizens Council leader as saying that “All of us feel that integration is impossible here because we are realists enough to know that it would eventually lead to intermarriage, mongrelization and the destruction of the white race in the South.”

This is a useful reminder 50 years later of the deep-seated psychology of racism that shaped southern attitudes, and Jacoway uses it to situate her analysis of the politics of the school crisis in a deep understanding of why her compatriots behaved (in ways that seem to us now) so badly.

There are only two sets of heroes in Jacoway’s history. The primary set is led by the “Little Rock Nine”- the children who attended Central High School in 1957. Over the years we have learned a great deal about the contemptible viciousness with which they were treated by adult and child alike, but Jacoway’s account is the most open-eyed and horrifying picture of the hatred and violence with which the black children were greeted at Central.

Above all, Jacoway makes clear how impressive the Nine (whom she calls “young warriors”) were in terms of intelligence, maturity and commitment, and she reminds us forcefully of what a remarkable group of adults they turned out to be.

Jacoway also paints an admiring picture of Daisy Bates (whom the NAACP considered the “one person and one person alone” who “carried the ball” for the children) and the members of the black community who supported the students. She concludes in fact that the entire black community responded to the crisis: “ . . . [the Nine] supported each other, and the black community supported them. Through sheer determination and unflagging courage, Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine kept that movement alive.”

The second group for whom Jacoway has respect are heroines-some of the elite women of Little Rock, led by Vivion Brewer and Adolphine Terry, along with Velma Powell, the wife of J. O. Powell, Central’s vice principal for boys.

These women organized the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools. They ultimately mobilized more than 1,000 women to appeal to the business community and to the established political leadership with the message that the issue was not one of maintaining segregation, but of preserving public education.

Jacoway sees the women’s initiative as the beginning of the end of the crisis, for it was the mechanism through which the leaders of Little Rock began to focus on the restoration of political stability and the economic vitality of the city. The women waged a successful educational campaign aimed at encouraging the political community to climb down from the cross of segregation and to focus on rebuilding the city’s civil society.

But for the most part this is a book about failure, not heroism. Jacoway is clear eyed in her analysis of what went wrong during the crisis, and almost no white leader comes away unscathed by her judgment.

Readers of this newspaper may be particularly interested in the role of Harry Ashmore who, partly through his subsequent self-praise but also through the award of a Pulitzer Prize, has generally been considered the journalist hero of the crisis-along with the Arkansas Gazette.

But Jacoway paints a quite different and mostly unflattering portrait of the editor and his paper. To be sure, she acknowledges that Ashmore and publisher Hugh Patterson bravely campaigned against Governor Faubus in a manner that cost the Gazette more than a million dollars in lost subscriptions and advertising.

Jacoway makes a strong case that Ashmore consistently and deliberately “blur[red] the distinction between news and opinion.” That is, Ashmore used the Gazette as a weapon against Faubus and the segregationists in a way that discredited it with moderate citizens of Little Rock and reduced its capacity to provide the sort of news that a city in crisis required.

No fan of the governor, Jacoway nevertheless accuses Ashmore of placing all the blame for the crisis on Faubus in a way that was “disingenuous and less than fair.”

In Jacoway’s account, though, almost everyone failed, of course, and Orval Faubus is the most obvious example. But in Turn Away Thy Son we have the most complex and convincing account of the governor’s role in the crisis that I have read.

Jacoway’s Faubus is neither fully evil nor a buffoon, but something almost tragically in between. He is caught amongst the segregationists, the business community, the legislature and every other group with an agenda affected by the segregation issue. At one point Jacoway comments that: “Animated by a complex mix of idealism and calculation, Orval Faubus backed into the arms of the segregationists; in order to avoid looking like a fool, he stayed there.”

Jacoway sees Faubus as limited in his capacity to act by the actions of others. At one point midway through the crisis, a leading lawyer (Henry Woods) invites Congressman Brooks Hays, Harry Ashmore, Sid McMath and other members of the elite leadership to a meeting at his house for a strategy session: Every person at Henry Woods’ house had participated in the process of pushing Orval Faubus into a narrowing corridor. Whether out of ideological commitment, lack of clarity, or self-interest, all had made choices that limited those of the governor, pointing him increasingly in the direction of his own political advancement down a path that he did not, from his background and inclination, want to take. Faced with repeated betrayals from old friends and former allies, as well as from the government agencies he might have expected to oppose him, Orval Faubus finally hardened, and succumbed to opportunism.

This as much as any other passage in Turn Away Thy Son, captures Jacoway’s take on the tangled and counterproductive politics of Little Rock and Arkansas during the crisis. It is a story of multiple and interactive weakness and failure, utterly without heroes.

Nor does Jacoway have praise for the federal government actors involved. President Eisenhower appears weak and vacillating, though he sometimes got good advice from his attorney general, Herbert Brownell.

But the Arkansan Arthur Caldwell, then head of the new Civil Rights Section of the federal Department of Justice, perceived by many in Little Rock as a federal official who might have been of help, appears inept in Jacoway’s account.

Worst of all, to my way of thinking, was the federal district court judge, John Elvis Miller, a former U.S. senator and congressman, who appears to have completely forgotten his responsibilities as a member of the federal judiciary. Millerfrequently gave out of court advice to participants during the crisis, wavered or disappeared at crucial junctures and helped as much as anyone to weaken the capacity of the federal courts to play a constructive role.

Jacoway is also characteristically clear-eyed in understanding the larger implications of federal attitudes toward the Little Rock crisis. She attacks a report by the FBI on happenings in Little Rock as “ . . . a travesty of justice. It reflected a culture of arrogance and secrecy within the national government that alienated civil rights and antiwar activists in the next decade . . . .” And she concludes that the report reveals something crucial about the northern take on the South: “A backwoods governor and a small, poor state served as convenient targets of northern, liberal wrath, tools rather than objects of sincere study. As symbols of southern wrongdoing they merited no mercy, and in the long term they offered psychic release and satisfaction to a broad spectrum of the American population who wanted to rail against America’s racial failings without having to confront the evidence of similar behavior in their own backyard.”

This is a reminder, which few Little Rock readers will need, that their city was not alone in its problems. But Little Rock was on every front page in the nation in the last years of the 1950s, and on television every evening just as national television news was coming of age. What happened in Little Rock seemed to matter to all of us.

For all of Jacoway’s admiration for the behavior of the Little Rock black community and for the enlightened leadership of elite women, she stresses what has become the standard historical assignment of blame for the segregationist fervor in her hometown.

While many contended that segregationists were of lower to lower-middleclass origins, “the vast majority of the population espoused the segregationists’ arguments and favored their goals if not their methods.” The segregation crisis was, then, a community failure in general and a failure of elite leadership in particular. Faubus was not wrong in blaming “The Cadillac Brigade.”

COLD COMFORT

Elizabeth Jacoway’s concluding pages will bring cold comfort to readers of the Democrat-Gazette: “The fifty years since the Little Rock crisis have failed to bring a true spirit of community to Arkansas’ capital city. While the practice of legalized segregation went by the wayside and meaningful educational and career opportunities opened for individual black citizens, residential segregation and white flight have had a devastating impact on the city. White families have moved to the far western reaches of the city and into rapidly growing neighboring communities. In addition, unremitting lawsuits over desegregation have kept the Little Rock School District embroiled in costly court battles for most of the last fifty years . . . while the results in terms of racial balance and improved student performance were negligible. The Little Rock Story shows in microcosm the difficulty of extending justice to a historically powerless group in the absence of a majoritarian will to do so.”

What we hear in this marvelous, insightful and courageous volume is the voice of a native southern liberal judging her own community honestly and harshly.

But for northerners like myself, Turn Away Thy Son is also a reminder that the nation as a whole has not made the progress toward racial justice that liberals have long believed in. In the end, the Little Rock crisis needs to be seen as a national, not a local, tragedy. I agree with Jacoway when she concludes: “Only when the nation chooses to name [racism as its] adversary, and discuss candidly the fears that continue to animate white racism, can we hope to move at last toward the goal that one of the Little Rock Nine so forthrightly named, the hope of ‘liberty and justice for all.’”