Brown and the "road to reunion".

ON MAY 16, 1954, AFTER A HEROIC SCRAMBLE TO MEET A SELF-IMPOSED publishing deadline, the University of North Carolina Press released Harry S. Asbmore's The Negro and the Schools just hours before the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Ashmore's conclusion to his impressive compilation of interdisciplinary insights reflected his characteristic optimism, as well as his lifelong pursuit of the status of a prophet. "In the long sweep of history," he wrote, "the public school cases before the Supreme Court may be written down as the point at which the South cleared the last turning in the road to reunion--the point at which finally, and under protest, the region gave up its peculiar institutions and accepted the prevailing standards of the nation at large as the legal basis for its relationship with its minority race." Abandoning all caution in his death-defying plunge into prophecy, the Arkansas editor continued: "This would not in itself bring about any great shift in Southern attitudes, nor even any far-reaching immediate changes in the pattern of bi-racial education. But it would re-define the goal the Southern people, white and Negro, are committed to seek in the way of democracy." (1)

How good a prophet was Harry Ashmore? The Arkansas editor was simply the first in a long line of commentators on the Brown decision, such a long succession, in fact, that the ongoing debate has begun to exhibit the characteristics of a cottage industry. George B. Tindall captured some of the spirit of the enterprise when he cautioned his former graduate students, "I've managed to make a pretty good living out of this for a good many years, and if you all will just keep your mouths shut, you can too. Just stop talking about 'the vanishing South'!" (2) Academic assessments of the Brown decision have ranged from questioning its legitimacy to trumpeting its vast reach to decrying its insignificance, but because of the decision's symbolic importance in heralding an end to segregation in this country, it has assumed an iconic status that scholars have challenged at their peril. (3) Brown's fiftieth anniversary invites reflection and renewed dialogue, although the arena of debate on this issue is clearly no venue for the timid. Surely Ashmore's no-holds-barred attitude is the appropriate one for the undertaking, just as surely as his spirit hovers--in a pose of expectant urgency--over the entire enterprise.

The Ford Foundation employed Ashmore (as he said, because no southern university would risk placing its imprimatur on such an endeavor) to provide the federal courts and southern school districts with an assessment of the status of black education in preparation for the expected success and implementation of Brown. (4) While fact-finding was his first priority and assignment, Ashmore admitted to a confidant that a major focus of the project was "necessarily a quiet public relations job intended to line up some of the big wheels in the South to step forward i[f] the blow falls and urge everybody to count up to ten before they start talking about blood in the streets." (5) The Ford Foundation subsequently applied the funds left over from the "Ashmore Project" to create the Southern Education Reporting Service, a neutral agency charged with tracking the progress of desegregation in the South (its monthly Southern School News quickly became the standard source of information for school boards and editors across the region). (6)

One of the "big wheels" Ashmore lobbied to respond positively to Brown was Little Rock school superintendent Virgil T. Blossom. At least in part as a result of Ashmore's influence, Blossom led his school board--an exceptionally moderate and enlightened group of public servants--into an immediate endorsement of desegregation in the city's public schools; within a matter of months he had fashioned the so-called Blossom Plan of gradual implementation of Brown in his city. As early as 1952, retiring Little Rock School Board president Dr. Edgar Barton had admonished his colleagues: "I believe it is your duty to understand the Negro citizen and his yearning to improve himself, and to help him in every way.... There is in Little Rock a foundation of racial goodwill and respect and understanding, laid down by the wise of both races. In our turn we should seek to enlarge this foundation and to keep building upon it." (7) Blossom and his school board believed that they were building on a firm foundation, and with the daily encouragement and cheerleading of the state's premier newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, they forged ahead confidently into the post-Brown world.

One of the key strategies Ashmore used in promoting acceptance of the Brown decision in Little Rock, and one that he marketed successfully to his colleagues on the board of the Southern Regional Council, was his development of the "Doctrine of Inevitability." (8) Day after day he hammered home--in editorials, speeches, and private audiences with a vast array of visiting dignitaries and journalists--the theme that desegregation was coming, the Supreme Court had decreed it, and resistance was futile. Beyond futile, resistance was counterproductive and even destructive of the larger goals of advancement for the region. Until Orval Faubus called out the National Guard and surrounded Central High School, most folks in Little Rock grudgingly accepted the Blossom Plan because they believed that desegregation was inevitable. (9) When their governor gave them hope that constituted authority had found a way to resist, the genie was out of the bottle.

At late as July 1957 Harry Ashmore held to his hopeful vision of his region's future, sending off to W. W. Norton in that month the manuscript for his meditation on the changing South, lamentably entitled An Epitaph for Dixie. Considerably less optimistic after two years of massive resistance to school desegregation, he remained persuaded that the general thesis he had postulated would hold. Ashmore argued that a variety of what he would later call "great, impersonal forces" had worked inexorably to change the face of the region and that even though the white South's preoccupation with race continued to cripple its embrace of democracy that stance too was changing as the region's businessmen pursued their own self-interest. In his words, "the bustling gentlemen at the local Chambers of Commerce or the state Industrial Development Commissions" should now be able to lead the way into a more democratic and rational future, and they would bring their communities and their region along with them. (10)

Ashmore soon found himself thoroughly chastened, as within a matter of weeks the supposedly moribund Old South rose up and scoffed in his face. The people whom Ashmore wanted to dismiss with characteristic disdain as rednecks took the field, and the Arkansas editor watched in horror as the dreaded Yankee enforcer returned with a vengeance and imposed a Second Reconstruction in Little Rock. After Eisenhower sent in federal troops, the local Citizens' Council went from being perceived as a motley assortment of fundamentalist preachers and second-rate professional types to speaking with authority as the dominant voice of the community. One of the group's leaders thundered to a South Carolina audience in November 1957: "We weren't solidified in Arkansas before that happened [sending in the troops]. But we are now. We've had to hire a fulltime secretary to handle the business of our Capital Citizens Council. I once might have been from that state in the Southwest but tonight the majority of people in Arkansas are from the Deep, Deep South." (11)

What had happened to Ashmore's great impersonal forces and his bustling gentlemen? In a word, history had happened to them. Human agency had intervened, as it always does, and stolen from determinism its story line and its command of the field. Forced to confront the specter of the South's most ancient and terrifying fears--federal control and racial intermingling--Little Rock's civic leaders fled from their hopeful experiment in future-building, allowing their community to fall into the hands of their social and intellectual inferiors.

The flight of the civic elite is not something that can be quantified or explained with charts and graphs, and it was not a tide that Harry Ashmore could stem with eloquent editorials and sighing admonitions. But despite its elusive nature, that flight is at the very heart of what happened to Brown in the South and why that hopeful decision failed to set the region on the "road to reunion." (12) By the time the businessmen recovered their resolve, and their courage, in Little Rock, their city had fallen so far out of the orbit of Ashmore's forces that a new agenda was driving the region's response to the quest for racial equality. The new schemes to subvert the intent of the Brown decision would eventually move north of the Mason-Dixon Line; the resulting "reunion" of the nation would be a product of national recognition that the South's racial attitudes were not peculiar to the South, that they were in fact proof, long overdue, of an American dilemma.

Black as well as white Little Rock citizens had to struggle toward an acceptance of Brown. As late as September 1957, Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was still combating African American apathy and even hostility to the NAACP, although the plight of the Little Rock Nine quickly solidified the black community in support of the young warriors who had integrated Central High School. (13) In Little Rock's divided white community, an experience that caused consternation in many hearts and minds was the dawning awareness of racism. Now for the first time the city's white citizens had to confront unexamined assumptions and unspoken expectations that touched every aspect of their lives. Until the glare of national and world attention had focused relentlessly on their public and private arrangements, most whites in Little Rock had not brought into clear view the contradictions inherent in accepting segregation in a Christian, democratic nation. Now many people began the process of sorting out what they believed and what they valued, and what would be the costs of holding on or of letting go. It was a lengthy, painful process that would remain unfinished many, many years in the future.

Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the South saw very few concrete changes in its patterns of racial interaction. A proponent of charts and graphs would be tempted to conclude that Brown made very little difference in the evolving tapestry of American democracy, but such a conclusion would miss profound, if subtle, alterations in the American psyche. In the absence of Brown the Little Rock School Board would most assuredly not have adopted a plan for gradual integration as early as 1955, despite its liberal membership and its historic concern for black strivings. Brown opened the way to fairness and decency and initiated a dialogue in Little Rock that was long overdue. In the absence of Brown a homegrown liberal such as Harry Ashmore could not have brought race so forcefully to the center of his city's consciousness, if only because southern manners prevented public, unashamed discussion of such things. In the absence of Brown Little Rock's African Americans would have overpowered L. C. and Daisy Bates's initially halting and feeble attempts to carry the fight for black rights to their own people. In the absence of Brown Harry Ashmore's great, impersonal forces would have continued to press toward change in the region's patterns of living, but the needed alterations in racial dynamics would have come much more slowly.

Of course, in the absence of the Brown decision there would have been no rise of massive resistance either. Perhaps if the business elites had maintained control at the helm they could have initiated change in the South more rationally and with less upheaval and general dismay. But the ferocity of massive resistance makes this an unlikely scenario, and only the widespread dismay following the decision eventually fostered sufficient discomfort to force an awareness of black complacency and white racist assumptions. In the absence of Brown this awareness and the resulting introspection--so crucial to any movement toward genuine equality and democracy--would have been forfeited.

Probably most important, in the absence of Brown (or some other earthshaking proclamation by the Supreme Court that undermined the constitutional basis of segregation) the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act could never have garnered sufficient southern votes to pass the Congress. Only when enough southern people had undergone the painful process of examining their racial attitudes and deciding to reject (or at least significantly modify) American apartheid was there the slightest hope that Lyndon B. Johnson's strong-arm tactics and civil rights activists' suffering could bear fruit. Harry Ashmore was probably right that, given time, the problems of race would have worked themselves out in this country. Brown, however, unquestionably sped up the calendar and placed racial issues front and center on the southern agenda. The painful lessons of the reaction to Brown forced southerners white and black to clarify their values and their aspirations for their region.

(1) Harry S. Ashmore, The Negro and the Schools (Chapel Hill, 1954), 139.

(2) Elizabeth Jacoway, Dan T. Carter, and Robert C. McMath Jr., "Interview with George Brown Tindall," in Jacoway, Carter, Lester C. Lamon, and McMath, eds., The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge, 1991), 290.

(3) One of the earliest scholarly assessments of Brown, penned by Justice Felix Frankfurter's law clerk Alexander M. Bickel, questioned whether the decision reflected the original intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. Bickel, "The Original Understanding and the Segregation Decision," Harvard Law Review, 69 (November 1955), 1-64 (esp. p. 58). For studies that question Brown's effectiveness in ending segregation, see especially Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville, 1984); Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (Chicago, 1991); and Michael J. Klarman, "Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement," Virginia Law Review, 80 (February 1994), 7-150. For studies that champion Brown's impact in changing American race relations and inspiring the civil rights movement, see especially David J. Garrow, "Hopelessly Hollow History: Revisionist Devaluing of Brown v. Board of Education," Virginia Law Review, 80 (February 1994), 151-60; Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York, 1994); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (2 vols.; New York, 1975); James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York and Oxford, 2001); Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York and Oxford, 1994); and J. Harvie Wilkinson III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration: 1954-1978 (New York and Oxford, 1979).

(4) Harry S. Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston, 1989), 348. Ashmore later recalled that "they looked into all the major universities in the South, ... and nobody would touch it with a ten-foot pole." Harry S. Ashmore interview with Elizabeth Jacoway, November 17, 1978, in possession of the author. Ashmore also remembered that the project carried with it such risk that "It also turned out to be impossible to bring together the presidents of the major Southern colleges and universities as an advisory committee.... " Harry S. Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie (New York, 1958), 161 ; see also Harry S. Ashmore interview with John Egerton, June 16, 1990, Interview A-353, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

(5) Harry Ashmore to Robert S. Alien, July 21, 1953, File 15, Box 3, Harry Ashmore Papers (Archives and Special Collections, Ottenheimer Library, University of Arkansas at Little Rock).

(6) Harry S. Ashmore, Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York, 1982), 215.

(7) Minutes, March 20, 1952, Little Rock School Board (Little Rock School Board offices).

(8) Transcript, "Face the Nation," September 29, 1957, p. 30, Folder 3, Box 9, Ashmore Papers.

(9) At least this was the conclusion of the Little Rock School Board after the March 1957 elections, in which two Citizens' Council met defeat at the hands of two businessmen who had run on a platform endorsing the Blossom Plan.

(10) Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths, 348 (first quotation); Ashmore, Epitaph for Dixie, 118 (second quotation).

(11) Eldridge Thompson, "Faubus Will Win, Guthridge States," Charleston News and Courier, November 19, 1957, pp. 1A, 9A. File 12, Box 6, Ashmore Papers.

(12) For a discussion of this process in Little Rock and in thirteen other southern cities see Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge, 1982).

(13) Transcript of telephone conversation among Clarence Laws, Gloster Current, Henry Moon, and John Morsell, September 27, 1957, Container 98, Group III, Series A, Papers of the NAACP (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), microfilm, Part HI, Series D, reel 1; Kenneth Clark, "Some General Observations in the Negro Community of Little Rock, Arkansas," May 1958, Southern Regional Council Papers (Archives, Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, Georgia).

Ms. Jacoway lives in Newport, Arkansas.