Little Rock
Race and Resistance at Central High SchoolBy Karen AndersonPrinceton University Press
Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09293-5
Contents
List of Illustrations.....................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments...........................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Not Here, Not Now, Not Us...................................................................................11. Mapping Change: Little Rock Forges a Desegregation Plan................................................................192. "Occupied Arkansas": Class, Gender, and the Politics of Resistance.....................................................553. Uncivil Disobedience: Th e Politics of Race and Resistance at Central High School, 1957–1958.....................944. The Politics of School Closure: Massive Resistance Put to the Test, 1958–1959....................................1375. The Politics of Fear and Gridlock......................................................................................1666. Politics as Usual: Reviving the Politics of Tokenism...................................................................190CONCLUSIONS Little Rock and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education..................................................228Abbreviations.............................................................................................................245Notes.....................................................................................................................247Index.....................................................................................................................315
Chapter One
Mapping Change: Little Rock Forges a Desegregation Plan With the confident air of a high pressure salesman Dr. Blossom produced charts, maps and statistics describing where Negro and white high school pupils lived. He explained that ... attendance areas could be developed which would result in maximum avoidance of the mixing of the races.
—Rev. Colbert Cartwright
In 1953, the Little Rock School Board hired Virgil Blossom, then director of schools in Fayetteville, as its new superintendent, a decision that would profoundly shape the future direction of school politics in Little Rock. A former football player, the tall and burly Blossom was physically imposing. Willful, visionary, and ambitious, the school administrator could project a daunting political presence. A former student at Fayetteville High School, who had been sent to Blossom's office after one too many infractions, reported this encounter with his school's principal: "Mr. Blossom just talked to me, but as he talked I started getting smaller and he started getting bigger. By the time he got through, he was the biggest man I ever saw." Regarding Blossom's "conference methods," another observer noted that he had "played tackle on the football team of the University and he still relies on power plays."
Blossom used such strategies of domination in policy discussions as well. Arkansas Council for Human Relations executive director Nathan Griswold reported that school patrons often reported difficulty in "getting through" to Blossom and that the superintendent "seemed quite uneasy in any meeting where he was not in charge." When Blossom spoke before community groups about Little Rock's school desegregation plan, for example, he presented it as a given ("the way it's to be," in the words of businessman Grainger Williams) and managed to exclude differing views or probing questions. At the same time, Blossom's verbal dominance often masked deeply rooted insecurities and ambivalences. As Griswold noted, he had "an ego that was hungrier than most." Blossom's contradictory temperament would play an important role in his state's volatile politics of race in schools, reflecting in microcosm the confidence and caution, hubris and fear that characterized Little Rock's political and economic leaders in the postwar era.
Those contradictions marked moderate responses to the issue of school desegregation from the local to the national level. From Virgil Blossom to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, moderate white male leaders sought to confine the legal, political, and social effects of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education so as to maintain their own authority. At the same time that they faced challenges from local African Americans and civil rights leaders to realize the promise of equality entailed in the Court's ruling they also faced, throughout the South, immediate strong segregationist resistance to racial change. Those sources of opposition intensified the already fervent conservatism of moderates in Little Rock and elsewhere.
No group demonstrated their conservatism more than Little Rock's business leaders, who were closely tied to Blossom from the beginning of his tenure as superintendent. Indeed, they had played a critical role in recruiting him and working closely with him as he established his authority in the school system and defined his role in the community. In December 1953, the leaders of the city's power structure hosted a dinner for Blossom that featured Arkansas Governor Francis Cherry and Winthrop Rockefeller, chairman of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, as speakers. Blossom reciprocated, speaking before men's civic groups, urging them to provide "citizen leadership" for the public schools and offering his support for the business development strategies advanced by local economic elites. In return for his efforts on their behalf, he was named the Little Rock Man of the Year for 1955. Everett Tucker, Jr., manager of industrial development for the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, congratulated him on his "well deserved honor ... that I and your many friends in the Chamber of Commerce are delighted to see you receive."
White businessmen also played a critical role in recruiting and raising funds for candidates to run for vacant positions on the school board. Although these business leaders believed that their activism was but an expression of their civic generosity, it is clear that they expected new school board members to share the views of Little Rock's power structure with respect to the operation of the schools. As a general rule, this business leadership was averse to taking risks and was convinced that race relations in Little Rock were generally positive. Throughout the desegregation process, board members would consult exclusively with those who had put them in office.
Little Rock's business leadership had a contradictory relationship to the city's African Americans, acceding to their requests at times while excluding them from meaningful power over issues important to blacks. In 1950 Georg Iggers, a white professor at Little Rock's all-black Philander Smith College, wrote a letter to the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, asking that the Little Rock Public Library be integrated so that his students could have the books that were necessary to their studies. Neither the college library, which depended primarily on white donations for its support, nor the black public library, which had few books and was open only a few hours a week, was adequate. In response, the public library board met privately and agreed to allow African American adults access to the "white" library on an unrestricted basis.
In response to his success in persuading the library board to integrate its facility, the local NAACP invited Iggers to join. Subsequently, he successfully negotiated with the owners of downtown department stores to remove the racial designations from their drinking fountains. The concession was important to African Americans because it removed a hated symbol of white disrespect and it also encouraged white moderates and liberals to believe that changes could occur without litigation or white backlash. For moderates, these changes exemplified white voluntarism, a keystone in their racial politics. For liberals, both white and African American, such reforms offered hope that school desegregation in Little Rock would also proceed smoothly. Historian John Kirk concluded that the changes were limited concessions designed "to enable whites to retain control over the segregated system by self-regulating reforms" and to avert more systematic changes enforced by federal courts.
White voluntarism did not suffice to address African American concerns, especially those related to housing. Little Rock's business leadership actively supported racially based urban renewal policies opposed by many blacks. In a series of interrelated decisions beginning in the late 1940s, the city razed housing in African American neighborhoods and built public housing and recreational facilities for blacks on the far east side of Little Rock. As noted by the Arkansas Gazette, these decisions channeled "residential growth into the most desirable patterns," moving and directing the African American population to the east and the south in the interests of "natural expansion" while reducing "the chance of conflict with the rapid growth of white communities to the west." In short, city officials did their best to segregate neighborhoods by race during the period in which school authorities implemented school desegregation.
When Little Rock's business leaders targeted a black neighborhood near Dunbar High School for urban renewal in 1952, African American women organized against the proposal. One woman wrote to the Arkansas Gazette protesting the city's plan to take her property and that of the other homeowners in her neighborhood in order to make the land available for private development and a new school and community center:
We have given almost everything we have except our very life blood over a long period of years to pay for these homes, improvements and educate our children.... Is there a law anywhere in the United States that says one private property owner must sell what he has so another private owner can buy it to make a profit?
The protestors received support from the State Press, an African American weekly owned by L. C. and Daisy Bates, which accused city officials of trying "to centralize all Negroes in one area and forget about them while the city progresses in another direction." As this editorial implies, "progress" was a highly racialized notion in the postwar South. In this instance, as in others, African Americans paid the price for white advancement.
The problem of providing adequate school facilities and programs for African American students occasioned continuous conflicts between civil rights leaders and the city's governing elite. The policies pursued by city leaders over the half century preceding the Brown decision typified those of the South in the era of segregation. While officials saw the provision of education to white children as a civic responsibility to be shouldered by southern taxpayers, they expected private philanthropies and African American parents to assume a significant proportion of the costs for educating black students. Over time, Little Rock's black parents grew tired of the burdens imposed by a system of partially privatized, poorly funded, and segregated black schools and sought improvement through both equalization and integration.
For decades, Little Rock school officials had relied on northern philanthropy and fundraising efforts by local blacks to supplement inadequate public funding for African American schools. When Dunbar Jr./Sr. High School was built in 1929, part of its $400,000 cost was provided by a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Little Rock High School (later renamed Central High School), which was built in 1927 at a cost of $1,500,000, was fully funded by local and state taxpayers. Public funds bought more books for the Little Rock High School library than for the Dunbar High School library, which had a more vocational curriculum than that offered at Little Rock High. Dunbar lacked the science labs, equipment, gymnasium, band instruments, and other resources that school officials funded for Little Rock High.
African Americans in Little Rock started asking for a gym and health center for Dunbar High School in 1938. In 1944, school authorities suggested that they seek private funding. In 1949, officials finally provided public money for the facilities. A survey of Dunbar alumni in 1981 reveals the deep anger felt by blacks who were compelled to volunteer their time and labor when school authorities denied adequate funds for the school: "Staff , students, and parents had to spend too much time raising money and collecting student fees for needs that the district should have supplied." As this statement indicates, the systematic "privatizing" of America's public schools began with the South's historic refusal to assume public responsibility for the education of black children.
In 1951, the Little Rock School Board had closed the African American Gibbs Elementary School, calling it a "dangerous fire trap," but had not provided for its replacement. The board also refused to build a school for children of African American families removed to the Granite Mountain housing project as a result of urban renewal, claiming that the county should provide the school. Meanwhile, the board spent $250,000 to build a new field house for Little Rock High School. Board member Edwin Barron said that much of the money from the last two bond issues had been spent on black schools and that the money to build a school for the housing project residents would come at the expense of white schools and students. The state, however, disagreed, passing a law placing the proposed school for the Granite Mountain housing project within the boundaries of the Little Rock school district.
African American leaders and white liberals formed the interracial Little Rock Council on Schools and issued a report in 1952 documenting the poor state of public schools for Little Rock's black children. The report focused particularly on the situation at Dunbar Jr./Sr. High School and concluded that the school's facilities, staffing levels, curriculum, and budget were inferior to those in white schools. In 1950-51, for example, the state and the local school board spent $164.21 per pupil at Dunbar High School and $225.17 per pupil at Little Rock High School. As a result of inadequate funding, African American students, whose achievement test scores in second grade were nearly as high as those of white Little Rock second graders, lagged substantially behind whites by the sixth grade. After that, the gap widened even further.
According to the drafters of the study, equalizing the spending for all students would be inefficient, expensive, and insufficient to the goals of equal educational opportunity. Providing Dunbar High School students with the staffing and equipment necessary to duplicate the courses at Little Rock High School and at Technical High School, an all-white vocational school, would entail prohibitive and unnecessary costs. The report went further, indicting segregation itself as a barrier to equal educational opportunities. Black children's separation from "the cultural advantages of the privileged majority" impaired their ability to acquire "that part of education which the white child learns not necessarily through formal instruction but acquires more indirectly from fellow students and teachers."
Its report completed, the Council on Schools proposed informally to the Little Rock School Board that it consider opening some classes at Little Rock High School to selected African American students. The council, along with the local NAACP branch, hoped that such informal negotiation would enable it to persuade the board to begin the process of dismantling segregation without a lawsuit. For reasons that remain unclear, local NAACP branch president Thad D. Williams announced the proposal to the press, stating that the NAACP planned to end school segregation in Little Rock through "peaceful negotiation." The school board, which was extremely reluctant to discuss racial issues in public, then declined to hold a private meeting with representatives of the Council on Schools scheduled for February 20, 1952.
Instead, school superintendent Harry A. Little wrote a letter to the school board on that date, taking issue with some of the conclusions drawn by the Council on Schools. He justified the broader curricula at Little Rock High School and Technical High School by noting that Dunbar offered courses not available at the two white high schools, including bricklaying and trade laundry. The differences in per pupil expenditures, he claimed, derived solely from the fact that some black teachers had lower salaries because they had not completed degrees at accredited colleges. He further attributed black students' failure to achieve at the same scholastic level as white students solely to factors within the African American community: irregular school attendance, "poor home conditions," and inadequate instruction by black teachers. Little further claimed that "many of the colored teachers who are average teachers for their race could not qualify for teachers in comparison with our white schools." A few months later, the board met formally with representatives of the interracial council, but in a closed session decided not to adopt its recommendations, in part because Little was so strongly opposed to any integration.
In response, the local NAACP chapter voted to file suit against the Little Rock Board of Education. The national office of the organization, however, opposed this action, urging the Little Rock branch to await the decisions in the promising cases that were in litigation and that would eventually form the basis for the Supreme Court's historic finding in 1954. The local NAACP leadership agreed to rescind its resolution to file suit, suggesting the reciprocal relationship and the potential for conflict between grass- roots activism and national civil rights leadership over the issue of school desegregation. This early activism by local leaders gives the lie to the later assertion by segregationists that the national NAACP foisted its desegregation goals on southern blacks who would otherwise have been content with their lot.
When the United States Supreme Court held unanimously on May 17, 1954 that public school segregation violated the constitutional requirement that all citizens be treated equally before the law, public authorities in Arkansas generally stressed the necessity of compliance. Governor Francis Cherry dissociated his state from the talk of massive resistance developing elsewhere in the South. Carroll C. Hollensworth, speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives, concluded that "it is immaterial whether we agree with the court's decision or not. We are confronted with the necessity of making our laws conform."
Little Rock School Board President Foster Vinyard reacted with surprise, claiming that the Supreme Court ruling had caught the board off guard because it had "been working on the idea of equal facilities." Indeed, the school district was in the process of implementing a costly school construction program predicated on equalizing racially segregated facilities and meeting the increase in school population caused by the postwar baby boom. School superintendent Virgil Blossom claimed that their "position at the present time is probably one of the best in the South." In short, they had come closer than others in the South to complying with the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. They had done so, of course, in response to the NAACP's national success in litigating and threatening cases based on segregated "equality."
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Excerpted from Little Rockby Karen Anderson Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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