Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time.

Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time. By Beth Roy. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999. Pp. viii, 400. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 1-55728-554-3; cloth, $32.00, ISBN 1-55728-553-5.)

What went wrong in Little Rock? In 1957 the Arkansas capital city had what most southerners regarded as a liberal business-class leadership. The Little Rock school district had announced that it would comply with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision by gradually desegregating its public schools beginning in the fall of that year. Although Little Rock was the headquarters of the state's active NAACP branch, the city's whites were certain that, if the African Americans in the state were not content with segregated public facilities, they were at least satisfied to dismantle Jim Crow gradually and in piecemeal fashion. But the integration of public facilities in Little Rock was far from peaceful. Segregationists from outside of Little Rock made an example of the city, and Marvin Grinn, the conservative governor of Georgia, came to Little Rock in 1957 as a guest of the Capitol Citizens' Council and asked, famously, "Why do you have to have integration here?" Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas who had tried not to take a public stance either for or against the desegregation of Little Rock schools, found himself embroiled in an emotional crisis he had done little either to create or diffuse. On the day that nine African American students were to enter the previously all-white Central High School, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard and ordered the soldiers to prevent the students from entering the school, ostensibly for their own protection. His actions touched off a public riot and a major constitutional crisis, and also turned the city, in the eyes of the rest of the nation and the world, into a symbol of white resistance to integration and equal rights for African Americans. The episode became what Little Rock native Elizabeth Jacoway, the co-editor with C. Fred Williams of Understanding the Little Rock Crisis: An Exercise in Remembrance and Reconciliation, calls "a festering wound that has plagued the city for forty years" (p. 1).

Both the contributors to this volume and Beth Roy, the author of Bitters in the Honey, examine the crisis in Little Rock's public memory. Understanding the Little Rock Crisis resulted from Jacoway's involvement with the Central High Museum Planning Committee; the ten essays in this book (which also features a helpful introduction and a concluding bibliographic essay) were presented in 1997 at a public symposium on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the crisis. Bitters in the Honey is the product of a series of oral history interviews that the sociologist Roy conducted in the mid-1990s with several white Central High alumni who in 1957 saw their senior year mined, in their perception, by black interlopers and "white trash" mobs; a handful of blacks in Little Rock; and a very few members of the local white power structure. Roy intentionally avoided interviewing members of the Little Rock Nine. Her book is not a history of integration at Central High School so much as an examination of the role the episode has played in the lives of Little Rock whites in the years since.

The subjects of the essays in Understanding the Little Rock Crisis vary widely, and their relevance to the crisis itself vary as well. It is difficult to determine, for instance, what George C. Wright's memories of growing up on one side of the color line in Kentucky, or Joel Williamson's story of his childhood on the other side of the line in South Carolina, have to do with Jim Crow in Little Rock. Other essays relate more directly to the events of 1957 and their consequences. The introduction by Jacoway provides an excellent overview of the crisis and its place in Little Rock's public memory. David R. Goldfield looks at the creation and hardening of the segregation regimes throughout the South. His essay evolves into a passionate plea for integration in contemporary American society. James C. Cobb synthesizes the work of Edward Ayers, Howard Rabinowitz, Don H. Doyle, John W. Cell, and C. Vann Woodward to demonstrate that segregation was not inevitable, that the "tradition" to which Brown opponents appealed was false, and that segregation was in fact a product of modern urbanization. In other words, Little Rock's segregationist system in 1957 was not a lingering relic of the Old South but a construct that coexisted quite easily with the pro-business ethic of the New South. Nothing "went wrong" at all in Little Rock.

Three essays are particularly compelling when read together. John A. Kirk examines reaction to the two Brown decisions on a statewide level and argues that there was a window of opportunity for the sort of gradual integration that the school board originally proposed. Anthony B. Badger examines Arkansas politicians' reaction to Brown in the "Southern Manifesto." He disagrees, at least implicitly, with Kirk's conclusion. A racialized political culture was already in place, he argues, that made gradualism all but impossible. Badger uses the experience of Senator J. William Fulbright as convincing evidence. Roy Reed's sympathetic portrayal of Orval Faubus's performance during the crisis engages both of these arguments. Legal historians will find useful essays on the constitutional lessons of the crisis from Kermit L. Hall and Tony A. Freyer. A bibliographic essay from Michael Dabrishus concludes the volume.

There is much to recommend Roy's Bitters in the Honey, but it will prove frustrating to historians, many of whom will wish that Roy had written a different book. The author asks good questions that elicit powerful and at times poignant answers from her interviewees, and she makes forceful arguments about the meaning of Little Rock. Her historiography is curious, however; her single source on the Reconstruction era, for instance, is W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935). This is a remarkable book, but it is one that numerous historians have built upon over the decades. Roy also asserts that "race applies [only] to people of color; white people seem--to white people, that is--to have no race, because.., dominance tends to define normalcy, and what is normal is unremarkable" (p. 273). This may be true in the popular imagination, but it misses entirely the rich literature on whiteness that has been available for several years now. More problematic is Roy's repetitive style, which she utilizes to hammer away at the same arguments over and again unnecessarily. She draws conclusions that, it must be said, prove at least generally persuasive from what turns out to be a deceptively small pool of interviews. The names of several interviewees are changed, and Roy apparently has not made any of the interviews available to other researchers by placing them in an archive.

These criticisms aside, Bitters in the Honey is a nice example of scholarship that is passionately engaged with contemporary problems. The same can be said of the collected essays in Understanding the Little Rock Crisis. Each of these works should be valuable both for students of Arkansas history and for historians of the civil rights movement. The books will also prove interesting to those interested in the possibilities of public history.

J. TODD MOYE College of Charleston