The Third Little Rock Crisis

IN SEPTEMBER 1958, I was poised to enter my senior year at Hall High School in Little Rock. My sophomore year of 1956-57 had been spent at the famous Central High School. That was the year before the Little Rock Nine were admitted to Central High and federal troops were deployed to enforce the Brown decisions.1 During the year of the Little Rock Nine, which was the 1957-58 school year, I attended Hall, the new all-white high school in Little Rock. Hall had been built in the affluent part of the city. There were no black students enrolled that year as there were in Central. This, in itself, was a significant bone of contention with some Central High parents. Nor were there white students enrolled at the newly constructed all-black high school, Horace Mann. As I waited into the second week of September 1958 for the school year to begin, it dawned on my parents that the three Little Rock high schools would not open that school year. On August 28, 1958, the Little Rock School Board had argued in favor of a two-and-a-half-year delay in implementing the Brown decisions before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Cooper v. Aaron. Judith Kilpatrick and Elizabeth Jacoway have discussed this case in more depth. Suffice it to say that the Supreme Court refused to delay desegregation in Little Rock and ordered it to proceed forthwith.2 Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, had called the General Assembly into special session to enact a package of legislation to thwart integration. One bill authorized the governor to close any school where integration had been ordered.3 After the court's decision in Cooper v. Aaron was announced, Faubus signed the act authorizing him to close public schools affected by integration, and he shut down the Little Rock high schools by proclamation on September 12, 1958. A special election of the voters of the Little Rock School District subsequently affirmed his actions. As a result, a generation of Little Rock students was put "at sea," struggling to determine how and where we could pursue our secondary education. My class became known as the "Lost Class of '59." It was not until the spring of 1959 that certain leaders of the Little Rock business community moved into high gear. Little Rock had received an international black eye because of the crisis, and business development and city growth were at a standstill. These business leaders and a group of extraordinarily brave women known as the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools worked diligently to reopen schools and correct the situation. They were successful in ousting segregationist members of the school board and retaining moderate school board members.4 The result was that the high schools reopened in August 1959, with both Hall and Central admitting black students. The crisis at Central and the crisis of the "lost year" had passed. But were the crises over? In 1965, black parents of the Little Rock School District filed suit in federal district court contending that their children were being denied enrollment in white schools and relegated instead to black neighborhood schools.5 Since that time, the Clark litigation, as it has become known, has continued in various forms and consisted of federal court review of whether various plans put forth by the school district and other interested parties were constitutional. Those plans included student assignments based on geographic attendance zones, plans that alternated between busing students to schools in heavily white and heavily black neighborhoods depending on the grade, and plans for elementary schools that included four all-black schools in order to allow for better black/white ratios in the remaining schools. For the most part, these plans were approved by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit with certain modifications.6 In many respects, then, the first crisis of Little Rock continues to have a ripple effect on public education in my city as well as on the central Arkansas economy in general. …