In September, 1957, the nation was transfixed by nine black students who tried to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Governor Orval Faubus defied the city’s integration plan by calling out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school. Newspapers across the nation ran front-page photographs of whites, both students and parents, screaming epithets at the quiet, well-dressed black children. President Eisenhower reluctantly deployed troops from the 101st Airborne, both outside and inside the school. Integration proceeded, but the turmoil of Little Rock had only just begun. The black students endured outrageous provocation by white classmates. The governor’s popularity skyrocketed, while the landmark case Cooper v. Aaron worked its way to the Supreme Court and eventually paved the way for integration throughout the South. In Little Rock the initial response to Cooper v. Aaron was to shut down the public high schools for a year.

Elizabeth Jacoway was a Little Rock student just two years younger than the youngest of the Little Rock Nine. Her “Uncle Virgil” was Superintendent of Schools Virgil Blossom. Congressman Brooks Hays was an old family friend, and her “Uncle Dick” was Richard Butler, the lawyer who argued Cooper v. Aaron before the Supreme Court. Yet at the time, she was cocooned away from the controversy, in a protective shell that was typical for white southern “good girls.” Only in graduate school did she begin to question the foundations of her native world, and her own distance from the controversy.

Turn Away Thy Son is the product of thirty years of digging behind the conventional account of the crisis, interviewing whites and blacks, officials and students, activists and ordinary citizens. A tour de force of history and memory, it is also a brilliant, multifaceted mirror to hold up to America today. Jacoway knows what happened to the brave black students once they got inside the doors of the school. She knows how the whites’ fear of ‘race mixing’ drove many locals to extremes of anger, paranoia, and even violence. She knows that Orval Faubus was only a reluctant segregationist, and that her own kinsman’s timid tokenism played a key role in precipitating the crisis.

Above all, Turn Away Thy Son shows in vivid detail why school desegregation was the hottest of hot-button issues in the Jim Crow South. In the deepest recesses of the southern psyche, Jacoway exposes the fear of giving black men sexual access to white women. The truth about Little Rock differs in many ways from the caricature that emerged in the press and in many histories--but those differences pale in comparison to the fundamental driving force behind the story. Turn Away Thy Son is a riveting, heartbreaking, eye-opening book.