Richard C. Butler and the Little Rock School Board: The Quest to Maintain "Educational Quality"

IN MAY 1954, just a few days after the announcement of the Brown decision demanding the abolition of segregation in public education, the Little Rock School Board publicly declared its intention to comply. One year later, a week before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its guidelines for enforcement in Brown II, Little Rock school superintendent Virgil T. Blossom unveiled his voluntary Phase Program for school desegregation, calling for a gradual approach to integration beginning at the high school level. As actually implemented, the Blossom Plan became a minimal as well as a gradual program that was designed to preserve "educational quality" while it accommodated the demands of the new court directive.1 As one member of the Little Rock School Board recalled years later, "We didn't set out to integrate the schools, we set out to continue education during the integration process, and we were much more interested in the education process than we were in integration."2 As Blossom explained in his memoir, "Our purpose was to comply with the law in a manner that would be accepted locally, not to wreck the school system."3 The Little Rock chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had developed a growing distrust of Virgil Blossom in the year between the announcements of Brown I and Brown II. The superintendent had indicated in the fall of 1954 that integration would be complete, and that it would be carried out in a timely manner involving children at all grade levels. But after months of meetings with alarmed white parents, Blossom revised his plan in May 1955, calling for integration at Central High School only. He then proposed to extend desegregation down into the lower grades according to a vague, nonspecific timetable. Finally despairing of receiving fair treatment, the local branch of the NAACP eschewed the advice of its national organization and in February of 1956 filed suit in federal district court against the Little Rock School Board in a case styled Aaron v. Cooper. At that point, the superintendent engaged five attorneys to defend his plan. Richard C. Butler, one of the city's social and civic leaders and a great admirer of Virgil Blossom, acceded to the superintendent's urgent request that he join the legal "brain trust." Over the next two years, Butler worked closely with Blossom in deciding how to respond to the growing opposition to desegregation in Little Rock.4 Joining longtime school board attorney Archie House, Butler and the others argued successfully before federal judge John Miller, a former United States senator from Arkansas, that their clients had made a "prompt and reasonable start" toward desegregation and that they should be allowed to proceed along the deliberate course they had charted. Although he ruled in the school board's favor, Judge Miller nonetheless retained jurisdiction in the case as well as setting a deadline of September 1957 for implementation of the Blossom Plan.5 As is well known, that September brought a crisis of major proportions to Little Rock. With soldiers in the hallways and segregationist mobs in the streets, all hope for an effective educational process fell by the wayside. The school year saw daily harassment of the nine black children inside Central High School as well as an escalating pattern of intimidation directed against school board members, school personnel, and students who attempted to support the desegregation effort. After several months of segregationist harassment and community upheaval, the Little Rock School Board in February 1958 yielded reluctantly to the blandishments of the city's business leadership, filing suit in federal district court requesting a "breathing spell" or a "cooling-off period." Arguing before Judge Harry Lemley of Hope, Arkansas, school board attorneys made the case that the educational standards the district had set for itself could not be preserved in such an environment and that surely this was not what the Supreme Court had intended. …