The Little Rock school desegregation crisis: moderation and social conflict.

ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1957, ARKANSAS GOVERNOR ORVAL E. FAUBUS placed Arkansas National Guard troops around Central High School in Little Rock in order to prevent the entry of African American students to the all-white school. At that moment Little Rock became a national and international symbol of violent resistance to federal authority and to racial change. The governor's decision initiated a round of legal and political maneuvering that ended with a federal court decision enjoining Faubus, the Arkansas National Guard, and specific others from interfering further with the admission of black students to Central High School. After Faubus removed the state troops, Little Rock police attempted unsuccessfully to maintain order when the African American students entered the school on September 23. Confronted by a menacing segregationist mob that the officers did not believe they could control, local police removed the black students at midday. In order to enforce federal authority, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock. With the assistance of the troops, the nine African American students entered again on September 25, eight of them for the duration of the academic year. (1)

When Ernest Green in May 1958 became the first black student to receive a diploma from Central High School, the crisis remained unresolved. Discipline in the school had deteriorated badly as a group of white students tried to use harassment and intimidation to drive the African American students from Central High. School officials confronted frequent bomb threats and spent inordinate amounts of time dealing with the disciplinary and political problems that arose in the wake of massive resistance. In the fall of 1958 Little Rock's public high schools were closed following a referendum in which the city's citizens refused to vote for integration in order to keep their schools open. The future of public education was clearly at risk. (2)

In addition, the national notoriety that resulted from Little Rock's turmoil threatened its nascent economic development program. Since World War II the business leaders of Little Rock, in alliance with the state government, had worked to attract new businesses and jobs from outside the South. The national business elite was unwilling to invest in a community experiencing the social instability, violence, and threats to the public schools that accompanied massive resistance. By endangering Little Rock's economic and educational base, the crisis had placed the future of the city's middle class in jeopardy. (3)

The unsettling events also placed local leaders in a dilemma. As in other American cities, effective political power in Little Rock rested with a small number of businessmen who took for granted their right to decide the city's fate. This group of business leaders generally tried to exercise power from behind the scenes, thus distancing itself from public visibility and accountability as a political actor. In this way businessmen could deny the connections between their economic and political roles and minimize the risks to their businesses that public activism entailed. These men were socially conservative and sought to avoid public association with controversial issues. Not surprisingly, the school desegregation crisis made it virtually impossible for them to act effectively while remaining behind the scenes. (4)

The business leaders in Little Rock were divided over the importance of segregation and over how to safeguard their economic and political interests; their uncertainty left them virtually paralyzed during the first two years of the crisis. Most supported segregation but were unhappy about the high cost of retaining it. When violence erupted in 1957, they were willing to condemn it but were not willing to engage in public discussion of the issue that had occasioned the unrest. Unable to act, they faced various challenges to their local monopoly on power, ranging from segregationists in the Capital Citizens' Council and the Mothers' League of Central High to the middle-class white women who organized the moderate Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) in September 1958. African Americans' access to the courts also undermined local white leaders' ability to make uncontested decisions. (5)

In order to secure its power and safeguard economic development, Little Rock's business elite had to enable token compliance with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision without re-igniting the public disorder that had occurred in the fall of 1957. For that reason, placating the arch-segregationists became a critical goal for local leaders. This task would not be easy. While the moderates sought token compliance with federal court orders, the segregationist resisters were opposed to any integration and were very wary of the class privilege and power wielded by the city's elites. According to Graeme Cope, who analyzed membership lists of the Capital Citizens' Council, activist segregationists were primarily small-business owners and working-class people employed in semiskilled industrial jobs or in sales or service work. Led by fundamentalist ministers and other lower-echelon professionals, the ardent segregationists did not represent the most economically marginal citizens of Little Rock. Nonetheless, as outsiders to the local establishment, they were convinced that affluent whites intended for integration to happen only in working-class schools. (6)

The Little Rock case offers an opportunity to examine the ideologies and strategies of local elites under pressure from diverse contenders for power. When conducted more systematically than has previously been done, an analysis of white businessmen's actions in the context of local social relations illuminates more fully not only the institutional and ideological bases for the success of the business leaders in maintaining their dominance over local politics but also the assumptions and goals that informed their actions. This study also follows the advice of historians Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis by examining the South's movement from massive resistance to token compliance in terms of "the political conflict and historical contingency which marked that moment in time," rather than seeing the transition as a "relatively seamless" process. Focusing on male business elites' relationships to working-class whites, middle-class white women, and African Americans also highlights the importance of local considerations in motivating activism and shaping political rhetoric, goals, and outcomes. As the Little Rock case suggests, local conflicts developed not only over what should be done with respect to desegregating the schools but also over the interrelated questions of who was to exercise power in their communities and how to define the public good. (7)

In Little Rock the business leaders had to engage in a delicate balancing act in order to retain their power. By the fall of 1958, as they struggled to keep control of the school board, they were reliant on the organizing efforts of the WEC and the votes of African Americans. At the same time, local elites sought to distance themselves from both the WEC and the NAACP and to discredit the latter as a radical organization unreflective of the sentiments of most African Americans in Arkansas. In a similar fashion, white businessmen characterized the segregationists as dangerous extremists who threatened public order and progress. The elite business leaders hoped that by positioning themselves as the reasonable middle ground, they could keep control of local politics and advance the politics of token integration first devised by the city's school board in 1955. (8)

African Americans in Arkansas could register and vote, limited only by the poll tax and by informal but effective white pressures on black voters in rural areas. These practices secured the power of eastern Arkansas planters in state government while denying African Americans any form of consequential political power at the state level, most especially on the issues that concerned them the most. Arkansas congressman Brooks Hays, who attempted to mediate the conflict between Faubus and Eisenhower, stated later that he did not talk with blacks during the crisis because "the political thinking of the black community was not as vital at that time as it later became, of course, because it was not a matter of political weight or thinking...." In Little Rock, divisions among whites over the politics of school desegregation and school closure gave black voters a small amount of leverage in school-board elections. That leverage, however, existed only within the range of choice provided by white leaders: diehard segregationists or white moderates, who reluctantly supported a very slow program of token integration. (9)

A small group of white businessmen in Little Rock had grown used to running the city without significant participation or resistance from other members of the community. This group recruited school-board candidates and raised money for their campaigns. Although business leaders believed that their activism was but an expression of their civic generosity, they clearly expected the 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 convinced that race relations in Little Rock were generally positive. Although engaged in an intense conflict with the segregationists, including Faubus, for the political support of working-class and other voters barred from the city's circle of power, establishment leaders hoped to manipulate and conciliate those groups while maintaining a monopoly on public authority. (10)

African Americans, therefore, were not the only group excluded from meaningful participation in school-board decisions in the early stages of desegregation planning in Little Rock. Working-class whites, however, wielded visible power in elections at the local and state level. Their influence, particularly in state politics, received essential support from those in the middle class whose advocacy for segregation was less publicly visible but nonetheless was essential to Faubus's success and from arch-segregationists throughout Arkansas, who wielded considerable power in state politics. At the local level, working-class segregationists mobilized to thwart desegregation in the schools and to deny business leaders the appearance of social peace they required to advance their own interests. (11)

In Little Rock, middle-class whites stigmatized disorderly resistance as the work of poor whites, often linking it to Faubus's rural background and his support for the empowerment of dispossessed whites. For example, Adolphine Fletcher Terry, a founder of WEC, wrote of her reaction to the 1957 mob scenes at Central High School as follows: "For days I walked about, unable to concentrate on anything, except the fact that we had been disgraced by a group of poor whites and a portion of the lunatic fringe that every town possesses. I wondered where the better class had been while this was being concocted." When Faubus attacked Terry in 1960 for her opposition to him, a friend wrote to her that Faubus was a "man of small caliber and low breeding." Some journalists worried about the rising power of the so-called rednecks who supported Faubus, and the media depicted violent resistance to integration as predominantly a working-class affair. In short, class politics shaped racial politics to a significant degree in Little Rock and in Arkansas. (12)

As historian David L. Chappell concludes, the desegregation crisis in Little Rock made incompatible several values that many whites had taken for granted: segregation, economic development, public education, the appearance of social harmony, and the maintenance of law and order. Different groups of whites, however, had different levels of investment in these values and different degrees of power to mobilize on behalf of their goals. Many middle-class whites saw closed public schools and the reduction of economic development as threats to their own economic interests and their children's mobility. At the same time, middle-class women placed a higher priority on open public schools than did middle-class men. Ultimately, these whites decided that they were not willing to compromise on these issues to secure segregation. Many working-class whites, by contrast, saw desegregation as endangering their status as whites and were often willing to jeopardize the other goals to resist its implementation. When the predominantly middle-class Hall High School was left all-white while Central High admitted African American students, many working-class segregationists experienced the change as a form of class discrimination. (13)

Working-class resisters, as Pete Daniel perceptively notes, were seeking "respectability" through the retention of their historic association with whiteness. These segregationists tried to claim whiteness as a basis for their moral worth by labeling African Americans immoral, violent, and dependent. Citizens' Council propaganda, which harped incessantly on the perceived threat of "race-mixing," featured many pictures of black men with white women and reports of crime, illegitimacy, and venereal diseases attributed to blacks. Interestingly, the pictures of interracial couples featured consensual relationships, expressing the fear that desegregated schools would lead to a loss of patriarchal control so profound that white men would no longer be able to control their daughters' racialized sexuality. Although Arkansas segregationists opportunistically appealed to white racial interests by alluding to sexual and moral fears, those appeals worked because they resonated with real concerns of many leaders and followers in the movement. (14)

Little Rock segregationists also sought acknowledgment of their prerogatives and dignity as whites in their politically charged interactions with school officials at Central High School. School officials' efforts to discipline the white students who harassed African American students as part of an orchestrated campaign to drive them from the school in the 1957-1958 academic year provoked especially intense reactions from segregationists. In mid-December 1957, the Mothers' League sent a letter to Central High School principal Jess Matthews alleging that "In every incident of violence between a white and negro student, you suspend, discipline or otherwise humiliate the white child and exonerate the negro" and that he had granted NAACP activist Daisy Bates the "right of cross examination of our children ... when fights or trouble" occurred. The segregationist mothers further complained that the principal's "sympathies and love are altogether on the side of the negroes," protesting that the "common decencies of one white person to another are being outraged--to say nothing of the respect a white child has a right to expect of a white school official." Their charges that public officials allowed Daisy Bates to interrogate white students and to influence school decisions about discipline reflected the conviction of the members of the Mothers' League that blacks had excessive and illegitimate sources of public power secured at the expense of whites. Therefore, segregationist efforts to purge forty-four teachers in Little Rock in the spring of 1959 were not only about removing supporters of desegregation from within the public schools but also about restoring esteem for whiteness by eliminating some of those believed responsible for its loss. (15)

At the same time, many opinion leaders among middle-class whites resented the actions of working-class whites and classified them with the NAACP as "extremists" whose opinions were outside the acceptable political spectrum, simultaneously discrediting both groups. Terrell E. Powell, who succeeded Virgil Blossom as superintendent of schools in January 1959, for example, assessed the situation as follows: "[T]he leaders of the blacks were just as radical as the leaders of the radical whites. We had two radical elements to contend with in Little Rock." According to Powell, the efforts by local blacks and the NAACP to move beyond tokenism in desegregation meant that African Americans "wanted to just go overboard, and it couldn't have been done." (16)

When segregationists used violence to thwart school desegregation in Clinton, Tennessee, and Mansfield, Texas, in 1956, President Eisenhower responded by claiming that "extremists on both sides" were preventing "reasonable, logical" progress toward "equality of men." According to Eisenhower, the resistant segregationists and "the people who want to have the whole matter settled today" were equally responsible for drowning out the voices of "people of goodwill." In a measured but angry rejoinder, Thurgood Marshall wrote to Eisenhower, stating that he was certain that the president did not "mean to equate lawless mobs with federal courts as 'extremists.'" Marshall noted that the conflict was a "question of unlawful violent opposition against the orders of duly constituted federal courts. These are the only 'two [sides]' involved." (17)

Herbert L. Thomas, an insurance entrepreneur in Little Rock, shared the president's opinions on the matter. Convinced that the "uncompromising attitude" of the "extremists," embodied by the Capital Citizens' Council and the NAACP, had heightened racial tensions and made the resolution of the crisis more difficult, in the spring of 1958 Thomas offered his own plan for a local solution to the conflict. Thomas, who was the former chairman of the senior advisory committee of the State Chamber of Commerce, was well connected to the business elite and to political leaders in Arkansas. As a former chairman of the board of trustees for the University of Arkansas, he believed that his experience in supporting the desegregation of the University of Arkansas Law School in the late 1940s qualified him to offer solutions for the current dilemma. (18)

Thomas's behind-the-scenes maneuvers revealed as much about the politics of moderation embraced by business leaders in Arkansas as did the particulars of his proposal. As William H. Chafe suggests, moderation in practice "functioned as a mystique, a series of implicit assumptions, nuances, and modes of relating that have been all the more powerful precisely because they are so elusive." Thomas embodied those assumptions and methods in an especially clear fashion. He combined public speeches and other publicity on behalf of his plan with private meetings and correspondence in which he enacted and revealed the logic of power at the heart of his proposal. In public and private he communicated almost exclusively with traditional white power brokers and with some black leaders (not including Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP state chapters). His avoidance of segregationist leaders from the Citizens' Council and the Mothers' League and his very limited contact with WEC leaders reveal the politics of exclusion that was both strategy and desired outcome for him. The contrast between his tactics and his proposal and the more inclusive approach of the WEC exposes the gendered and situated nature of moderation in the South in this period. (19)

Under Thomas's "State Plan of Voluntary Progress in the Field of Negro Education and Desegregation," local African Americans were to withdraw their support for the NAACP court case and look to Arkansas whites for assistance in securing blacks' rights and opportunities, an interracial advisory body was to be formed to consult with public officials on school issues, all other court cases (including those directed at the NAACP) were to be withdrawn, and people of both races would look to local institutions to solve the problem "without Court interference...." Although his interracial commission was to operate without formal legal authority, Thomas attempted to get the State Board of Education to endorse his ideas and to file a brief asking the federal court to accept the plan as voluntary compliance with previous court orders. (20)

Thomas promoted his plan in a series of speeches across the state. He told white audiences that different local areas would devise different strategies: some would integrate fully and immediately, some would move to a politics of gradual tokenism, and others (generally those with large African American populations) would retain segregated systems while enhancing black schools in those systems. In all cases, progress would be predicated on majority (meaning white) acceptance of the proposals to be implemented. He also reassured white audiences that for African Americans and whites in Arkansas "racial ties and racial loyalties lie deep in our hearts." In a speech to segregationists, he promised that his commission could find that desegregation in eastern Arkansas, a hotbed of segregationist sentiment, would disadvantage students of all races and could recommend against its implementation there. That promise derived from his ability to take power for granted. He was confident that he and other white power brokers could control the political processes they created, so he did not worry inordinately that the outcomes they desired would be jeopardized. (21)

Moreover, Thomas told whites that black leaders in the state supported his view but were afraid to challenge the leadership of Daisy Bates and the NAACP. In his public speeches and his private correspondence, he consistently reiterated the charge that Bates and the NAACP were exercising some form of tyrannical power over the public opinions expressed by black leaders in Arkansas. These charges drew from and reinforced the mistaken view, common among whites, that local blacks did not actually desire desegregation. In fact, a poll taken by Mid-South Opinion Survey, Inc., in November 1957 found that the vast majority of Little Rock African Americans surveyed believed that the black students at Central High School should stay there despite the difficulties they were experiencing. (22) Despite the poll and the sentiments it reflected, Thomas confidently asserted the contrary, stating that blacks were only professing support because they were vulnerable to the pressures of an authoritarian outside organization. In a speech to a group of white businessmen, for example, he questioned blacks' capacity for democratic practices by implying that Bates's influence over African American men constituted a subversive gender inversion: "It is my opinion that she is uncompromising, and that most other Negro leaders--men and women alike--yield to her command and judgment. I believe her to be a well paid NAACP organizer--trained, rehearsed and disciplined in the art of leadership according to the dictates of the national organization." (23)

When Thomas spoke to African American audiences, he tried to discredit the leadership of the NAACP and to claim that Arkansas had experienced substantial racial progress through voluntary actions by whites. With some justification, he noted that prior to 1957 Arkansas had set the standard for the South in voluntary and careful desegregation of selected public institutions, stating that this would not have occurred had it been accompanied by black pressure or court orders. The latter claim rested on a willful misreading of the historical record, as he well knew. When communicating with Daisy Bates, Thomas denied that he had only supported the integration of the law school because he was under court pressure, but he stated in a speech to white businessmen that university officials had faced "the prospect of a court fight which we could not hope to win" if they tried to resist desegregation of the law school. While claiming in his addresses to African American audiences that racial change in Arkansas had resulted from white voluntarism, he also told his black listeners candidly that the pace of change would be slower than they desired. He added that much of their progress would come through increased funding for separate black schools, but that it would not occur at the cost of "a miserable coexistence" with southern whites. On balance, he told them, their interests were best served by a resumption of an alliance with Arkansas whites. (24)

The conditional nature of Thomas's support for an interracial commission revealed the price in deference and compromise he and others expected of Arkansas blacks. The African American students still at Central High would be protected from daily threat and harassment only if blacks agreed ahead of time to Thomas's rules. In addition, desegregation in Little Rock would be halted pending the recommendations of his commission and public officials. This, he believed, was necessary in order to placate the segregationists in Arkansas. In his private actions as well as his public statements, he made it clear that only African American leaders acceptable to whites would be welcome on his interracial commission. In private correspondence and meetings, Thomas attempted to divide more "moderate" black leaders from Bates and the NAACP, and he communicated with whites regarding the political views of various local black leaders. In a speech to an African American audience, he stated that unless blacks chose his moderate course, the white moderates would align with the segregationists, and all blacks would experience "suffering far beyond anything we now anticipate." Thus, although Thomas denounced the Citizens' Council as extremist, he relied on its presence as a threat to coerce black acceptance of the power of moderate whites to dictate the terms of race relations. It is no wonder that his call for blacks to trust Arkansas whites was met with skepticism by many African Americans. (25)

In private discussions and public statements, African Americans expressed considerable disaffection with Thomas's efforts despite their enthusiasm for a public interracial commission of some kind. At a meeting held with black leaders by proponents of the Thomas Plan, the Reverend Roland Smith of the First Baptist Church in Little Rock read a statement opposing what he called the "Proposal of Voluntary Segregation." He pointed out that blacks had obeyed the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and that whites should do the same for more recent Court decisions. Smith said that if blacks renounced their recent gains and refused to struggle for their children's educational rights, they "would further be held up to the world as cowards and unworthy of the respect of other people." Nathaniel R. Griswold, executive director of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, concluded that the proponents of the Thomas Plan had "received considerable up-dating on who the Negro leaders are and what they think. Were they surprised!" (26)

The response to the Thomas Plan reinforced the moderates' perception that their agenda was beset by extremist opposition. Jim Johnson, a leader of the segregationists in the state, denounced the plan as integrationist. That it included any possibility for school desegregation and entailed the creation of an interracial commission alienated ardent segregationists. Black leaders expressed their reluctance to relinquish the gains they had made in initiating desegregation in Little Rock by returning to a fully segregated system the following year. Moderates, by contrast, responded enthusiastically to Thomas's call for voluntarism and trust. The Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, in a cartoon captioned "Let's Try This One," placed "Good Will" at the top of a stack of papers that included "military orders, restrictive state laws, and court actions." Even the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, a supporter of Orval Faubus's massive resistance, concluded that the plan deserved "earnest consideration." (27)

Although Thomas sometimes blamed blacks for the downfall of his plan, Faubus's reluctance to risk alienating segregationist supporters and moderate fears were equally crucial to its demise. The State Board of Education, which consulted with Faubus immediately after its meeting with Thomas, ultimately decided not to support his proposal, stating that the board thought local districts should make their own decisions without a statewide interracial advisory committee. In April, Elizabeth Huckaby had written to her brother that the plan did not have "a ghost of a chance unless Mr. Faubus can make political capital of it." Moreover, the unwillingness of many moderates to be identified publicly with the Thomas proposal suggests that they were, as he feared, only reluctant reformers. Whether from agreement with segregation or fear of retribution, the moderates were still unwilling to take risks in the controversy. Tellingly, the Arkansas Democrat ran a cartoon depicting Thomas's plan as a victim of assault from the Citizens' Council and the NAACP while racial moderates wearing blinders kept their backs turned. (28)

Thomas's strategies typified those of moderate leaders. Throughout the crisis they sought to conciliate segregationist resisters, hoping to allay their fears and reach a consensus among whites about what to do in response to efforts by African Americans to secure their rights. Moderates did so in part because the arch-segregationists could create visible public disorders that threatened to harm the image of their community as one characterized by racial harmony, social order, and institutional stability. However much moderates deplored the violence of the segregationist activists, many moderates nonetheless sympathized with efforts to impede racial change, and they relied on the segregationists as the frightening alternative to moderates' own offer of "protection" for African American interests. As one Little Rock businessman told reporter Gertrude Samuels, "I have no use for Faubus or [Amis] Guthridge [president of the Capital Citizens' Council]. Yet I feel a bit of comfort whenever a roadblock is thrown up to stop the plans of the N.A.A.C.P., and they're the biggest roadblocks to have come along." (29)

This businessman's willingness to allow ardent segregationists to do the public dirty work of his politics was widely shared with others of his class. Lawyer Henry Woods later noted the silence of the business leaders: "In fact, the vast majority of them were so blinded by prejudice and by the fact that they didn't want that high school integrated, period--they were sympathetic with whatever would be done to delay it or stop it. Now, I'm not saying that they liked the idea of a mob, I don't think they liked that." But according to Woods they did believe that the resistance discredited the very idea of social change. Elizabeth Huckaby attributed middle-class silence in the face of mob action to intimidation: "Unfortunately, many people not in their class--much above it, in fact,--are using this violence [sic] feeling as an excuse for defending the governor's actions. The parallel with Hitler ... is too close for comfort: the leaders in school and town silenced by physical threats, principally to children, and by economic boycotts; second-rate professional people doing the big talking for the rough and rather inarticulate mob--inarticulate except for the usual epithets...." (30)

Some Little Rock activists tried to take up Thomas's support for the creation of a biracial commission to deal with the school crisis and race relations in hopes of creating a means for African Americans to have a legitimate public voice. The WEC, which was led by women whose commitments to racial justice were greater than those among most of their peers, launched an effort to create an interracial public body to address problems of race relations directly and to facilitate communication between African American and white leaders. The leaders of the WEC envisioned a biracial committee that would act as an advisory group to local governments, including the school board and the Little Rock City Board of Managers, which would select the committee's members. A small number of blacks and whites in Little Rock, including WEC founder Adolphine Terry and NAACP leader Daisy Bates, had discussed the desirability of forming such a group. According to Terry, blacks in Little Rock had wanted some kind of interracial com mission for many years but had not gone beyond the talking stage, a fact that annoyed Terry. She wrote in her diary: "I believe in prayer, but I also believe in action and less conversation." The board of the WEC translated her convictions into action. (31)

Begun in late 1958, the push by the WEC for a civic interracial committee met with resistance from the white power structure, which wished to control the modes and terms of public discussions, particularly those involving race or the schools. As a result, the Chamber of Commerce opposed the formation of such a group. In March 1961 the WEC recommended to the Board of Education the creation of a biracial advisory committee as school officials planned to extend desegregation to the junior high schools. School officials declined to act. Mayor Werner Knoop refused his support for an advisory committee to city officials during a 1962 meeting with WEC leaders. At that time, he also told them he would only desegregate city recreational facilities under a court order. (A court order was issued in 1963.) According to the WEC's first president, Vivion Brewer, "Even the moderates are convinced the good they can do transcends the good such a committee could do." Her language reveals the WEC leadership's outsider relationship to those understood to be Little Rock's moderates. Male city leaders expressed the fear that the formation of an interracial civic group would heighten racial tensions, meaning that it would antagonize the arch-segregationists. Downtown businessmen similarly refused to meet with black leaders over lunch-counter desegregation until continuing sit-ins forced the businessmen's hand in 1962. (32)

In order to direct the group's message to "the moderates, the uninformed stay-at-homes, the segregationists who yet realized the importance of public education," the WEC excluded blacks from membership for several years. A subject of ongoing controversy, this decision reflected the liberal leaders' conviction that they would not receive a hearing from whites if they broke the taboo on interracial cooperation. As Vivion Brewer put it later, "We could afford no hint of being an integration group if we were to win any election in the hysterical atmosphere which our governor knew so well how to foment." The fear of the Women's Emergency Committee that public association with blacks would render its efforts ineffective and its simultaneous conviction that African Americans should have some formal access to Little Rock's governing bodies expressed the contradictions and internal divisions of the WEC. (33)

These contradictions also reflected the organization's ambivalent relationship with the male power structure of Little Rock. As middleclass women, WEC leaders and members were both close to and distant from the channels of power in Little Rock. Divided among themselves and barred from formal power, the women of the WEC depended on moderate business leaders for money to support their activism and for political expertise. At the same time, the women complained bitterly regarding the reluctance of most of the men to speak out during the first two years of the crisis. Years later WEC activist Sara Murphy concluded that "Little Rock had an incredible number of gifted, tough, courageous women at a time when there were few men who could meet that description." (34)

Indeed, in the Arkansas capital city, moderation was a highly gendered affair. Some WEC leaders, while effectively using the fact of declining outside investment in Little Rock businesses to pressure the local elite, expressed disdain for the business values that motivated that elite. In 1960 the majority of WEC members reported that they supported school integration, while only 31 percent expressed the desire to use pupil-placement laws to minimize the number of blacks admitted to previously all-white schools. These survey results placed the members of the WEC squarely in support of more systematic change than was desired by the business elite, for whom tokenism represented the most extreme acceptable position. (35)

As was true of women in other public-schools movements formed in the South during these years, the women of the WEC sought to leave behind the debates over race, law, and public policy that had caused the crisis of public education in the first place. Their fliers and ads focused only on open schools, eschewing the disputes over states' rights and racial threats that so animated both the arch-segregationists and the male moderates. Gendered differences over how to discuss, define, and construct the public good as well as great differences in access to formal power shaped the WEC's relationship to local male leaders. Vivion Brewer noted the special difficulties the women faced in making any headway with the school board, commenting that when she spoke to moderates on the board, she "usually ... had the feeling we had talked to a blank wall." (36)

Concerned about the slow pace of desegregation being pursued by the school board, the WEC called a meeting in November 1959 to allow its members to interrogate board member Russell Matson regarding the board's application of the state's pupil-placement law. According to Vivion Brewer, "Some of the questions flung at Mr. Matson were sharp, a few little short of rude." Matson, who called the pupil-placement laws the "salvation of the Little Rock schools," further claimed that the school board "treated all students and parents alike in the assignments hearings." Matson's conviction that any significant presence of African American students in Little Rock's previously all-white schools jeopardized academic standards in the schools contrasted significantly with the views of WEC activists. (37)

Despite the organization's growing tensions with local leaders, WEC leaders believed in the fall of 1959 that they were not in a position to offer their own candidates for the school board. In a letter to Muriel Lokey of the Help Our Public Education (HOPE) organization in Atlanta, Billie Wilson said that the WEC members were "still 'untouchables'" whose political work had to be done quietly and with no credit. She also expressed her conviction that a black candidate or one from the WEC would only divide the moderate vote and allow a segregationist to be elected. Such an outcome would jeopardize the most important goal shared by the diverse women whose labor sustained the WEC--the goal of open public schools. In fact, no woman who ran for the Little Rock school board between 1958 and 1963, whether segregationist or moderate, was elected. Many in the WEC would come to realize, however, that only a thin line separated the male moderates they had been helping to elect from the arch-segregationists. (38)

By 1962 some WEC board members had concluded "that the 'king makers' in the industrial community should not be permitted to make selections for the entire city" and that the WEC should consider running its own candidates for school board. Incumbent school-board president Everett Tucker had indicated that he would step down if a candidate acceptable to him offered to run, and Sara Murphy decided to throw her hat in the ring for the seat occupied by Tucker. After he met with Murphy, who did not indicate her affiliation with the WEC, Tucker announced his decision to run for another term. Murphy and others in the WEC believed that Tucker, who was the industrial development manager for the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, was only representing his economic interests and doing nothing to create meaningful change. Indicating their displeasure at being unpaid and disempowered workers for the power structure, the women noted that he "was elected, not by his own efforts, but by a tremendous amount of hard work by any number of leaders better qualified to represent [Little Rock's] viewpoint." Moreover, the WEC members concluded, Tucker had supported "hopeless but expensive" lawsuits so he could claim he was forced into desegregation by the federal government. In short, his "actions had not been in accord with the general thinking of our Board for a peaceful and progressing school system." (39)

According to Murphy the local business elite galvanized to defeat her candidacy. At a meeting of businessmen supporting Tucker, one of them reportedly said, "We've got a fire and we've got to put it out." Tucker and his supporters, who included many of the school-board members elected with the assistance of the WEC, used their financial clout and exploited tensions between the WEC, which was still all-white, and Little Rock blacks to douse the "fire" started by the WEC. The latter strategy was particularly effective given the WEC's refusal to support Dr. M. A. Jackson, an African American who was running for one of the other positions, because the WEC had already promised its support to Jackson's opponent. Tucker's racial strategy was also quite cynical given that the school-board president used racial epithets and freely expressed his segregationist views in private conversations. An oral history given by Tucker in the early 1970s confirms his racist views: "But even if I had been in favor of segregation to the bitter end, I would have had to say we've got to have the schools open, if it takes having some nigger children admitted that's what we have to do to get the schools open." Despite ads signed by some prominent black leaders urging Murphy's election, she lost both the black vote (which was quite divided but favored Tucker) and the election. (40)

During the campaign the Arkansas Gazette defended Murphy's decision to run for office against criticism coming from "some businessmen who are bitter about the WEC's endorsement of the opponent of School Board President Everett Tucker." Noting that the women's organization had been "very effective," the editorial added that the group's "outspoken stands have made the WEC a villainess at the Statehouse and may have caused some more conservative 'moderates' to think they would like to see the WEC broken." After stating that Tucker and Murphy both were highly qualified, the editorialist concluded that "if the board of the WEC felt that Mrs. Murphy had the better qualifications or that a woman ought to be on the board, then it had every right to endorse her." (41)

Murphy's decision to run indicated how far the WEC had come between the fall of 1958, when the organization assisted the city's traditional leadership in recruiting a slate of businessmen to run for the board, and 1962, when the women decided that they needed their own representation in order to speed the pace of desegregation and broaden community participation in local political bodies. From the outset the business elite's terms for its partnership with the WEC had included the invisibility and subordination of the women's group and its leaders. Ironically the activist women had developed the electoral base for moderate successes in Little Rock politics but were regarded by those whom they had empowered as tainted by the WEC's open advocacy for shared moderate goals. Murphy's defeat--which owed as much to opposition from Little Rock's male moderates as it did from the WEC's strained relations with African Americans--suggests the considerable obstacles the women of the WEC faced when they sought to exercise political power directly. The gradual process of white women's politicization in the Little Rock crisis and the WEC's conflicts with male business leaders belie any claims that moderation can be understood simply as a particular policy position. In fact, moderation did not entail a fixed, monolithic, or uncontested stance in Little Rock. (42)

Some women in the WEC moved beyond the moderate position, a change facilitated by their increasing isolation from segregationist friends who had ostracized them for their public stance and by the participation of some in interracial gatherings organized by religious and other groups. In a letter in 1960 to a public-schools activist in Atlanta, Billie Wilson described an interracial meeting she had attended with her husband as "one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives." She favorably compared the blacks she had met there to the politicians they were opposing, concluding that the state was ill served by "overlooking well educated, clear thinking, qualified tax-payers who happen to have a dark skin color." She further noted the WEC's efforts to change the thinking of male leaders on this issue: "Of course this is the type of thing I have felt all along we had failed to do and one the W.E.C. has urged the city fathers, the Chamber of Commerce and any other interested group to do. No one would touch it. It is all very strange as I am afraid I was definitely a moderate until the segregationists pushed me too far--I guess I am now definitely a liberal." (43)

African American leaders traveled a political path similar to that of WEC leaders, seeking an informal voice in school policies throughout the crisis while attempting in 1959 and 1962 to run and elect their own candidates to the school board. At a school-board meeting in September 1959, black leaders suggested that the board assign a liaison to meet regularly with a committee chosen by local African Americans in order to improve communication with the board. School-board president Everett Tucker responded that the board had no problems with communication with any group in the community and that the board "was not consciously communicating with one group more than another." He declared that African Americans could come to the public board meetings. At the same time his reply indicated the board's fear of legitimating opinions generated independently by blacks. In response the Reverend James T. McCullum of the Steele Memorial Baptist Church said that the board had "closed minds already." (44)

The result was a decision by African American leaders that the only solution was to elect a black to the school board. At a series of community meetings African Americans in Little Rock expressed their considerable disaffection with the temporizing of the moderates, many blacks claiming that the moderates were as committed to segregation as those whites sympathetic to the Citizens' Council and more effective than them in securing the retention of Jim Crow practices. For their part the moderates exacerbated the situation by telling black leaders that their plan to run an African American for the board would jeopardize white moderate candidates and threaten the future of public schools. Dr. M. A. Jackson expressed interest in running for the board but ultimately decided not to do so, citing family reasons. Although it is impossible to weigh the effects of other considerations, it is important that he was under substantial pressure from some white liberals and some African American leaders to withdraw his candidacy. Like Sara Murphy, he ran and lost in 1962. (45)

In 1963 the Council on Community Affairs, an African American group, asked that the board constitute an interracial advisory committee with representatives chosen by constituent groups. It also recommended that the board abandon its use of the pupil-placement law, speed up its desegregation efforts, and employ African Americans in policy-making positions. The group's request for a formal advisory role was ignored, as were its suggestions for policy changes that were similar to those the WEC had been advocating. (46)

As a result, the conviction that the school board (and the business leadership it represented) was acting in bad faith spread widely among African Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Given blacks' lack of access and the various policies pursued by the board, their alienation was not a surprising outcome. From the beginning, the Little Rock School Board consistently advocated a program of minimal integration implemented very slowly, telling white school patrons that, although the board had no choice but to comply with federal court decisions, the fewest blacks possible would be admitted into previously white schools in any given year. The implementation of the pupil-placement policy had subjected black applicants for transfer to nonsegregated schools to a series of bureaucratic obstacles, including tests and interviews designed to call into question African American students' qualifications for entering previously white schools. The NAACP expressed the anger of blacks over their treatment by the board in a brief challenging board application of the pupil-placement law as discriminatory, charging that the board treated African American students who sought to attend previously white schools "as if they were 'presumptive disease-carriers' who require 'screening' before release from the quarantine of 'jim-crow' schools." (47)

For its part the school board was much more concerned about its standing with various white constituencies than about its strained relations with African Americans. Through its minimalist approach to desegregation, its refusal to offer public support for desegregation on moral grounds, its constant returns to the courts seeking approvals for delays in the implementation of desegregation, and its careful selection of the very small numbers of black students to admit to previously white schools, the board hoped to placate the arch-segregationists while addressing moderates' concerns regarding the maintenance of educational quality in a context of court-ordered desegregation. The decision to back off from strict disciplinary policies at Central High School, especially in 1957-1958, was designed to avoid the creation of martyrs to the segregationist cause and to minimize the damage done to moderates' relationships with segregationist whites. As a result, the African American students at Central High, who faced daily intimidation and harassment, paid a disproportionate part of the political price for desegregation in Little Rock. (48)

In the summer of 1959 the board and some of its allies pursued a plan to allow some form of support for the private, whites-only Raney High School by the Little Rock School Board. Orchestrated by the ubiquitous Herbert Thomas, who served as a middle man between the board and Governor Faubus, the plan was pursued as a device to placate segregationists, to provide Faubus with a face-saving way to desist from further obstructionist actions, and thus to enable the reopening of the public high schools in Little Rock in the fall. The design involved the leasing and operation of Raney High by the board under the guise of a "voluntary segregation plan," which the board hoped the courts would allow. Legally, this was a high-risk strategy, given that a federal court had enjoined the board from using public funds or facilities for private segregated schools in the fall of 1958. As school-board president Everett Tucker explained later, the board members pursued the idea "largely as a matter of a safety valve, that if you were just so adamant and so opposed to any form of integration," there would be a segregated school. Segregationists' hopes for the retention of a dual system, however, were undermined by the concerns of the school board's lawyers that the courts would not permit the board's involvement in such a scheme and, more importantly, by the unexpected announcement in August 1959 that Raney High School did not have the funds to continue. (49)

Because it sought to placate the arch-segregationists, the school board refused to deploy all of the legal authority available to it in fighting against those who fostered resistance to desegregation, including the Citizens' Council, the Mothers' League, and the resisting white students at Central High School. The board refused to seek injunctions against the segregationist organizations, in part out of the fear that such actions would only worsen things politically. In the fall of 1957 Superintendent Virgil Blossom rejected a plan to allow a lawyer to speak to a student assembly and threaten that injunctions and criminal proceedings would be used to discipline students and others who conspired and acted to resist federal court orders. Blossom was afraid that such an action "might inflame matters." Wayne Upton testified in court that the board had not cracked down on students who harassed the African American students because board members believed that "If we had operated with an iron fist we would have been in for more trouble than we would have prevented." Noting that the "'moderate' leadership of the city was paralyzed," Elizabeth Huckaby concluded that maintaining discipline at Central High was impossible "without community backing." Nathaniel R. Griswold, executive director of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations and a critic of the board, remarked later that it almost seemed as though the board "wanted it to get bad so that they could get a court order to delay. They just somehow didn't have the stomach to discipline those brats that were really making the trouble." (50)

The school board generally sought a sufficient consensus among whites to protect the stability of class relations (and of middle-class power) and to retain high academic standards for middle-class white students. Moreover, it concluded that tokenism was important to its definitions of quality schools and would ultimately succeed in keeping working-class resistance at bay. Excluding black actors and interests was critical to the achievement of these political goals, as was the policy of defending desegregation only in terms of compliance with court orders while avoiding any discussion of changes in race relations that might antagonize the arch-segregationists. Thus, the same board that went to court asking for delays on the grounds that public opinion was not ready for desegregation actively avoided any statements that might challenge segregationist sentiments. While working-class segregationists stressed the need to maintain all-white schools in order to protect the reproduction of their moral values and the political claims they sustained, middle-class segregationists worried that the inclusion of large numbers of blacks in previously white schools would erode the academic standards they deemed important for their children. For example, in the original Little Rock school desegregation plan, dubbed the Blossom Plan, school officials proposed that they would examine the effects of integration at each stage in the plan to insure "that the mixed classes were not resulting in lowering educational standards." (51)

The moderates who controlled the school board thus moved at a glacial pace in desegregating Little Rock's schools. In the fall of 1959 they admitted a few African American students to Hall High School, primarily to defuse the class resentment engendered when only Central High was designated for desegregation in 1957. Prodded by a series of adverse court decisions that forced it to continue desegregation, the board complied with desegregation mandates as slowly as possible. It received yet another unfavorable court decision in March 1961 when the appellate court found that Little Rock officials had used the pupil-placement law in a discriminatory fashion and urged them to enable "integration in more than a token fashion." School officials' actions prompted Ted Lamb, the one liberal on the board, to charge that the board had paid "more attention to a handful of bigots and racists than to those who work for justice and righteousness in our city," that it had wasted public money in futile litigation, and that it had "never seriously sought to rally the forces of Christianity and good will in our town to enter into compliance with the court on a moral basis." Under legal pressure, the board extended desegregation to the junior high schools in 1961 and to the elementary schools in 1963, but it continued to use pupil placement to minimize the number of African American students in desegregated schools. In 1964, though, Lamb continued to complain about the school board's lack of good-faith compliance, stating "that he was attempting to discredit what he considers unconstitutional use of the pupil assignment law by the board." (52)

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 raised the threat of the loss of federal education funds for districts that continued massive resistance to school desegregation and set timetables for compliance, prompting politicians in Little Rock and in Arkansas to move beyond tokenism. On the advice of its lawyers, the Little Rock School Board adopted the freedom-of-choice plan acceptable to the federal government in 1964-1965. Although the board continued to devise evasive strategies thereafter, the pace of desegregation accelerated rapidly, especially at the high-school level. From 1964 to 1965 the number of African Americans attending desegregated schools in Little Rock jumped from 213 to 621, while the number of desegregated districts in Arkansas increased from 24 to 152. By 1967-1968 there were 415 African Americans enrolled at Central, 142 at the Metropolitan Vocational School, and 5 at Hall High School. Massive resistance was dead in Arkansas. (53)

The class divisions that marked the Little Rock crisis created and heightened differences among whites over the relative importance of segregation in local politics. Paradoxically, the tensions between white social classes also reinforced the tendency of those warring parties to exclude African Americans from significant political roles in the resolution of the conflict. Although the moderates eschewed the red-baiting employed by the segregationists, the moderates also saw African Americans as a divisive and disruptive political presence that had to be controlled by whites. To do so, moderates were willing to do all within their power to evade federal court orders and to demean the NAACP members as "extremists" bent on sacrificing the social good to their own ill-conceived ends.

Fearful that continuing disorder would further impede economic development and that working-class political mobilization would undermine elite control of local politics, business leaders worked hard to discredit African American political participation and to marginalize black perspectives and interests in the resolution of the crisis. Instead, establishment leaders sought to appease the arch-segregationists with tokenism and gradualism and to counter their electoral clout with effective mobilization of a coalition of moderates and African Americans, who were left without meaningful alternatives. Like the conservatives, many moderates appealed to a fiction of a recent golden age of race relations in which white goodwill had sufficed to create an equitable and viable social system. (54)

The leaders of the WEC, by contrast, developed an educational campaign for their members that stressed the need for whites to abjure their racial prejudices and discriminatory practices, including segregation. The refusal of WEC members to engage these issues publicly, however, caused Nathaniel R. Griswold of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations to conclude that they had not advanced education for social equality. On the other hand, the willingness of the WEC leaders to support more systematic changes in race relations than local business leaders were willing to endorse made local elites apprehensive about the WEC's growing power in local politics. One banker told WEC president Brewer that no one had been harmed by the closing of the schools, concluding: "You women ought to leave this thing alone. You are the ones stirring up trouble." Another man stated that the businessmen believed that the WEC was wielding too much power and that they especially feared its liberal leadership. School-board member Russell Matson, who owed his election to the WEC, called its members "those power-hungry women." (55)

When the segregationists on the school board attempted to purge forty-four public-school teachers and administrators in May 1959, the list included many employees with long service in the Little Rock schools who were much beloved in the community. In so doing, the segregationists gave the male business leaders the kind of unassailable issue they needed in order to come out of hiding. During and after a campaign that recalled the segregationist board members (in the name of meritocratic hiring decisions, rather than integration), the business elite assumed public leadership of the public-schools movement. Their success, however, was predicated on the political labor and expertise provided by the WEC, which also mobilized other women's groups, African American leaders and voters, labor unions, and others. In the final analysis, the male business elite--the Chamber of Commerce and its allies--let the women of the WEC take the political risks for their shared social class while the men reserved for themselves control over the moderate political agenda. (56)

In the wake of the victory in the recall election, some moderate male leaders worked to marginalize the WEC in the political arena. They formed the Committee for the Peaceful Operation of Free Public Schools, which included women members but engaged in the usual behind-the-scenes decision-making that effectively excluded them from actual power in the organization. Its legislative subcommittee included no women members and, in effect, sought to take over the lobbying role in the state legislature that had been effectively managed by the WEC up to that point. The business elite and the school board devised and advanced the plan to operate Raney High as a segregated public school without consulting the Women's Emergency Committee. (57)

Claiming that he was speaking for others as well as himself, Herbert Thomas sent a letter to Brewer in June 1959 asking the WEC not to place ads in newspapers anymore because, he asserted, people had accepted open public schools and the ads "would irritate the extreme segregationists and possibly the Governor." He added that "the less we say publicly that could irritate anybody, the more quietly we could work, (if the other side will permit us), the more successful the school opening will be." Brewer wrote back, expressing her concern that any requests that the WEC demobilize and silence itself would be premature. She stated that many in Little Rock were pessimistic regarding the opening of the schools and that "mothers seek our advice, trying to weigh probabilities, worried to the point of discussing moving out of Arkansas in order to educate their children." She questioned the moderate males' long-term strategies of silence and inactivity and added that those tactics might "not serve to hold together the splendid organization the Women's Emergency Committee has built." In July, Thomas responded to a proposal that various civic groups, including the WEC, issue public statements in support of the board's decision to open all schools in the fall, suggesting that the WEC volunteer its clerical help but not make any public announcements. (58)

For their part, the arch-segregationists remained suspicious of the moderates' willingness to tolerate token desegregation and continued to mobilize against them, although with diminishing effectiveness after the defeat of segregationists in the special election in 1959 to recall the school board. For them, the appeal to maintain law and order sounded like a call for their political demobilization. Given the segregationist resisters' goal of putting moral and political distance between themselves and blacks, the moderates' tendency to associate the ardent segregationists with African Americans as demeaned political outsiders may well have reinforced segregationist resistance. Moreover, the lack of a vocabulary for class antagonisms in the political culture of the 1950s made race an appealing default category for the expression of class enmity by working-class whites. Indeed, one segregationist woman wrote Thomas that "I personally am sick of so-called 'successful businessmen' integrating white people against their will and against our United States Constitution; white people from whom your so-called success has been drawn." (59)

African Americans were left with little choice but to rely on their alliance with the NAACP and the federal courts in order to advance public-school desegregation. With local leadership often weak and divided, blacks did not attempt systematic community mobilization in the formative years of the crisis. They did marshal local activists in support of the NAACP's legal strategies, ensuring that judicial pressure on the school board would continue. In the early 1960s some African Americans cooperated in a growing, but still marginalized, interracial movement in Little Rock, while others, mostly college students, took part in sit-in demonstrations. Although these efforts did not directly affect school policies, the new tactics did begin the process of opening up local politics to African American participation. (60)

After the election to recall the school board in 1959 and the opening of all public schools in the fall of the same year, middle-class men's monopoly on formal power and the diminished sense of crisis experienced by many whites enabled local elites to marginalize both the women of the WEC and the working-class segregationists, thereby assuming greater control over the politics of race and class. The male elite's continuing strategy to allow only token desegregation of schools compelled African Americans to resort to litigation and civic demonstrations. Despite serious threats to its control of local politics, the business elite succeeded in forcing members of other social groups to operate from the margins of the political community while the businessmen made fundamental policy and electoral decisions. A series of bombings planned and executed by a member of the Capital Citizens' Council and others in 1959 further discredited massive resistance, strengthening the power of Little Rock's white male middleclass leadership. (61)

The allegiance of white moderates to relationships, values, and institutions created in a segregated system made change very difficult if that change was perceived to come at the expense of those commitments. Businessmen feared the loss of clients and investors; family members and friends acted to maintain harmonious relations in a situation where change entailed conflict; and white parents wanted open public schools for their children but sought that goal through concessions to others in the white political community, concessions that often came at the expense of African American rights and opportunities. Among whites, only the Women's Emergency Committee offered an alternative to the politics of minimum compliance pursued by local elites. Ultimately, its members were too divided and in the early years too unwilling to challenge business leadership (and male dominance) to wield their growing power in service to new leadership and policies. Politicians, from the school board to Governor Faubus to President Eisenhower, sought political power and partisan advantage. At the local level those political interests--combined with the moderates' lack of commitment to racial justice--constructed a situation in which the outer limit of possibility was a politics of tokenism justified only as a business and political necessity. As journalist David T. Wieck observed generally of the failure of leadership in Little Rock, "[O]ne can act heroically only on grounds one has wholeheartedly accepted." (62)

(1) John A. Kirk, Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970 (Gainesville, Fla., 2002), 106-38; Roy Reed, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal (Fayetteville, Ark., 1997), 181-239; Tony Freyer, The Little Rock Crisis: A Constitutional Interpretation (Westport, Conn., 1984).

(2) Elizabeth Huckaby, Crisis at Central High: Little Rock, 1957-58 (Baton Rouge, 1980); J. O. Powell, "Central High Inside Out (A Study In Disintegration)," Box 1, Velma and J. O. Powell Collection, MC 1367; hereinafter cited as Powell Papers (Mullins Library, Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, hereinafter cited as UAF); Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York, 1994); Sara Alderman Murphy, Breaking the Silence: Little Rock's Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1963, edited by Patrick C. Murphy II (Fayetteville, Ark., 1997), chap. 4.

(3) Irving J. Spitzberg Jr., Racial Politics in Little Rock, 1954-1964 (New York, 1987); Elizabeth Jacoway, "Taken By Surprise: Little Rock Business Leaders and Desegregation." in Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge, 1982). 15-41; Freyer, Little Rock Crisis, 30.

(4) Spitzberg, Racial Politics in Little Rock; Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 58-60; Freyer, Little Rock Crisis, 18-22, 29-30.

(5) Robert R. Brown, Bigger Than Little Rock (Greenwich, Conn., 1958), 32-34, 50; Spitzberg, Racial Politics in Little Rock. 69-74; Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 58-114; Elizabeth Jacoway, "Down from the Pedestal: Gender and Regional Culture in a Ladylike Assault on the Southern Way of Life," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 56 (Autumn 1997), 345-52; Lorraine Gates, "Power from the Pedestal: The Women's Emergency Committee and the Little Rock School Crisis," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 55 (Spring 1996), 26-57; Graeme Cope, "'A Thorn in the Side'? The Mothers' League of Central High School and the Little Rock Desegregation Crisis of 1957," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 57 (Summer 1998), 160-90; Cope, "'Honest White People of the Middle and Lower Classes'? A Profile of the Capital Citizens' Council during the Little Rock Crisis of 1957," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 61 (Spring 2002), 36-58.

(6) Kirk, Redefining the Color Line, 93; Freyer, Little Rock Crisis, 33; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, May 11, 1959; James T. Karam, oral history interview transcript, 1971, Columbia University Oral History Project (hereinafter cited as CUOHP), OH 215 (Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum, Abilene, Kansas; hereinafter cited as DDEL); C. Fred Williams, "Class: The Central Issue in the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis," Arkansas Historical Quarterly. 56 (Autumn 1997), 341-44; Cope, "'A Thorn in the Side'?" 160-90: Cope; "'Honest White People of the Middle and Lower Classes'?" 36-58; Wesley Pruden, oral history interview transcript. December 28, 1970, CUOHP, OH 264, DDEL.

(7) Carl Abbott does note the importance of analyzing the role of diverse actors in forging the outcomes of desegregation in Norfolk, as does Andrew B. Lewis in his study of school politics in Charlottesville. Abbott, "The Norfolk Business Community: The Crisis of Massive Resistance," in Jacoway and Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation, 98-119; Lewis, "Emergency Mothers: Basement Schools and the Preservation of Public Education in Charlottesville," in Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, eds., The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville, 1998), 72-103; Lassiter and Lewis, "Massive Resistance Revisited: Virginia's White Moderates and the Byrd Organization," in Lassiter and Lewis, eds., Moderates' Dilemma, 4 (quotations). For a review of the literature on businessmen and desegregation see Tony Badger, "Review Essay: Segregation and the Southern Business Elite," Journal of American Studies, 18 (April 1984), 105-9.

(8) Spitzberg, Racial Politics in Little Rock.

(9) Harry Ashmore to Donald M. Ewing, October 30, 1958, Box S, Harry Ashmore Papers (Archives and Special Collections, Ottenheimer Library, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; hereinafter cited as UALR); Woodrow Wilson Mann, "The Truth About Little Rock: Relations Between Races Had Long Been Cordial," New York Herald Tribune, January 20, 1958, p. 2; Author's interview with Roy Reed, June 19, 1998; David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore, 1994), 97-101; Brooks Hays, oral history interview transcript, June 27, 1970, CUOHP, UALR (quotation). Hays said that he left it to Blossom to talk with African Americans.

(10) Spitzberg, Racial Politics in Little Rock, 38-42; Everett Tucker, oral history interview transcript, August 16, 1971, CUOHP, UAF; Wayne Upton, oral history interview transcript, December 29, 1971, CUOHP, UAF; Virgil T. Blossom, It Has Happened Here (New York, 1959), 191-93; Author's interview with Harry Ashmore, February 5, 1995.

(11) Cope, "'Honest White People of the Middle and Lower Classes'?" 43-46; Blossom, It Has Happened Here, 31: Author's interview with Harry Ashmore, February 3, 1997; Chappell, Inside Agitators, 99-101; Wesley Pruden, oral history interview transcript, December 28, 1970, CUOHP, OH 264, DDEL; James T. Karam, oral history interview transcript, 1971, CUOHP, OH 215, DDEL.

(12) Adolphine Terry. "Life Is My Song. Also" (unpublished manuscript), 231, in Box 2, Fletcher-Terry Papers (hereinafter cited as Terry Papers), RG A-13, UALR (first quotation); David Thoreau Wieck. "Report From Little Rock," Liberation (October 1958), 4-9; E.C. Deane to Mrs. Terry, July 16, 1960, Box 4, Terry Papers (second quotation); New York Times, September 6, 1957; Allison Graham, "Remapping Dogpatch: Northern Media on the Southern Circuit." Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 56 (Autumn 1997), 334-40; Williams, "Class," 341-44.

(13) David L. Chappell, "Diversity within a Racial Group: White People in Little Rock, 1957-1959," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 54 (Winter 1995), 444-56; Chappell, Inside Agitators, 97-121. Clearly, class standing did not fully predict political priorities in Little Rock, although it did affect them. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, May 27, 1959; Vivion L. Brewer, "The Embattled Ladies of Little Rock" (1973), pp. 40-41, Series I, File 2, Vivion L. Brewer Collection (hereinafter cited as Brewer Papers), UALR.

(14) Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill, 2000), 259 (first quotation); Phil [Stratton] to Virginia [Johnson?], n.d. [March 1956], Box 4, Papers of Jim Johnson (Arkansas History Commission. Little Rock; hereinafter cited as AHC); Elizabeth Jacoway, "Jim Johnson of Arkansas: Segregationist Prototype," in Ted Ownby, ed., The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South (Jackson, Miss., 2002), 137-55. For Citizens' Council propaganda (including second quotation), see Boxes 13 and 16, Papers of the Women's Emergency Committee (hereinafter cited as WEC Papers), AHC. The accusation that African Americans were indolent and prone to public dependence, however, would take root in the resistance to civil rights in the 1950s and soon develop as a potent national ideology of race. Indeed, Orval Faubus was one of its architects. "Facts on Welfare," December 11, 1961, Box 8, WEC Papers; Winifred Bell, Aid to Dependent Children (New York, 1965); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (New York, 1992). Many middle-class segregationists also subscribed to these kinds of sexualized racism, although they were less likely to state them publicly. I would like to thank Susan Cahn for drawing attention to the fact that segregationist representations focused on consensual interracial relationships.

(15) Blossom, It Has Happened Here, 163 (quotations). For the administrators' point of view see Huckaby, Crisis at Central High, especially pp. 128-29; and J. O. Powell, "Central High Inside Out," Box 1, Powell Papers. Bates and some of the parents of black students did talk to school administrators in an effort to get them to exert more authority over the harassers, but Bates and the parents had little success. Elizabeth Huckaby, Yearbook, December 9, 1957, and January 31, 1958, Box 1, Elizabeth Huckaby Papers, MC 428, UAF; Beals, Warriors Don't Cry, 188-89.

(16) Terrell E. Powell, oral history interview transcript, November 20, 1972, CUOHP, UAF (second and third quotations). For other examples see Brown, Bigger Than Little Rock, 22, 33, 59 (first quotation); New York Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1958, p. 10; Dale Cowling sermon, "Little Rock, Where to Now?" May 31, 1959, enclosure in Clyde Hart Sr. to Mrs. Joe R. Brewer, June 2, 1959, Box 3, WEC Papers; Unidentified clipping dated March 18, 1958, E. P. Huckaby Papers, UALR. Lillian Smith harshly criticized this moderate strategy. Anne C. Loveland, Lillian Smith, A Southerner Confronting the South: A Biography (Baton Rouge, 1986), 145-53. The NAACP, however, did not exercise power equivalent to the Capital Citizens' Council, which had access to the governor and other officials and engaged the sympathy of many in the elite in Little Rock. Wesley Pruden, oral history interview transcript, December 28, 1970, CUOHP, OH 264, DDEL; Author's interview with Harry Ashmore, February 3, 1997; Chappell, Inside Agitators, 99-101.

(17) Thurgood Marshall to Dwight D. Eisenhower, September 6, 1956, Box 916. Classified Files, General Files, DDEL (all quotations).

(18) Carl C. Gray to Nominating Judges, Man of the Year Election, December 19, 1957, Box 1; Draft address mailed to Bill Good, April 11, 1958, Box 5 (quotations); both in Herbert L. Thomas Papers, MC 437, UAF.

(19) William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1980), 7-9, 41, 43, 60, 245-46 (quotation on p. 7).

(20) Herbert L. Thomas Sr., "A Statement Prepared for a Conference of Protestant Church Leaders," New Orleans, May 13-14, 1958, Box 1, Papers of Robert Brown, A-81, UALR. In addition, the eight black students remaining at Central High School would be allowed to finish the academic year there and be promised an end to the harassment they had endured all year. "The Arkansas Plan," April 7, 1958 (first quotation); Draft address mailed to Bill Good, April 11, 1958 (second quotation); both in Box 5, Thomas Papers.

(21) Herbert Thomas, Speech to Segregationists, April 9, 1958, Box 599, Orval Eugene Faubus Papers, MS F27 301, UAF; Address to Young Business Men's Association, n.d.; "The Arkansas Plan," April 7, 1958 (quotation); preceding two documents in Box 5, Thomas Papers.

(22) Herbert Thomas, Speech to Segregationists, April 9, 1958, Box 599, Faubus Papers; "The Arkansas Plan," April 7, 1958, Box 5; Thomas to I. S. McClintock, April 18, 1958, Box 4: Thomas to Mrs. L. C. Bates, April 28, 1958, Box 4; preceding three documents in Thomas Papers. Interestingly, the black respondents to the survey reported substantially higher support for the continuation of desegregation at Central High when they were interviewed by African Americans (94 percent) than when they were interviewed by whites (71 percent). Untitled, [Mid-South Opinion Survey], November 29, 1957, Box 733, Classified Files, Office Files, DDEL. It is not clear whether Thomas was aware of this poll.

(23) Address to Young Business Men's Association, n.d., Box 5, Thomas Papers (quotation); J. R. Booker to Val Washington, April 19, 1958, Box 10, Staff Files, Files of Administrative Officer-Special Projects Group (E. Frederic Morrow Records, 1950-61), DDEL.

(24) Draft address mailed to Bill Good, April 11, 1958, Box 5; Thomas to Mrs. L. C. Bates, April 1, 1958, Box 4; Address to Young Business Men's Association, n.d., Box 5 (first quotation); preceding three documents in Thomas Papers; Herbert L. Thomas, Speech to Blacks, April 16, 1958, Box 599, Faubus Papers (second quotation); Kirk, Redefining the Color Line, 55-63. In a letter to a critic of the decision to desegregate the University of Arkansas Law School, Thomas stated that the university could not defy federal court rulings in cases similar to theirs. Herbert Thomas to Walter L. Lipscomb, February 10, 1948, Box 2, Thomas Papers.

(25) Herbert L. Thomas to I. S. McClintock, April 18, 1958; Rufus K. Young to Joshua K. Shepherd, April 23, 1958; Thomas to Mrs. G. N. McNeil, April 30, 1958; Address to Pine Bluff Rotary Club, August 5, 1958; Thomas to Rev. Paul V. Galloway, April 18, 1958; preceding five documents in Box 4, Thomas Papers; Herbert L. Thomas, Speech to Blacks, April 16, 1958, Box 599, Faubus Papers (quotation); Liz [Huckaby] to Bill, April 9. 1958, Letters to Bill File, Huckaby Papers, UALR; clipping, Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, n.d. [probably June 9, 1958], Huckaby Papers, UALR.

(26) "A Statement of Position as Relates to the Proposal of Voluntary Segregation as Submitted by Herbert L. Thomas, Sr., by Negro Leaders of Arkansas" (first and second quotations); Adolphine Terry to Herbert Thomas, April 10, 1958; Rufus K. Young to Joshua K. Shepherd, April 23, 1958; preceding three documents in Box 4, Thomas Papers; Nathaniel R. Griswold to Mike Harrow, April 18, 1958, Box 20, Arkansas Council on Human Relations Records, MS Ar4 ACHR (hereinafter cited as ACHR), UAF (third quotation); Diary of Mrs. D. D. Terry, March 31, 1958, April 10, 11, 17, 24, 25, 1958, Box 1, Terry Papers. The interracial Arkansas Council on Human Relations supported much of the proposal but noted that Arkansas school boards had already stated that they would only integrate if forced to do so by court orders and, ACHR leaders believed, would only cooperate with an interracial commission if blacks had unfettered access to the courts. "Arkansas Council on Human Relations, Suggestions Apropos the 'Arkansas Plan' to the State Board of Education," attached to Nat R. Griswold to members of the Arkansas Board of Education, May 23, 1958, Box 4, Thomas Papers.

(27) Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, April 7, 1958, p. 1 (fourth quotation), April 8, 1958, p. 1; Little RockArkansas Gazette, April 8, 1958 (first, second, and third quotations); Rufus K. Young to Joshua K. Shepherd, April 23, 1958; Thomas to William N. Roberts, April 23, 1958; Thomas to Mrs. G. N. McNeil, April 30, 1958; preceding three documents in Box 4, Thomas Papers.

(28) Address to Pine Bluff Rotary Club, August 5, 1958; Thomas to Rev. Paul V. Galloway, April 18, 1958; Thomas to I. S. McClintock, April 18, 1958; Rufus K. Young to Joshua K. Shepherd, April 23, 1958; Thomas to Mrs. G. N. McNeil, April 30, 1958; Herbert L. Thomas, untitled [general letter], April 14, 1958; all above in Box 4, Thomas Papers; Liz [Huckaby] to Bill, April 9, 1958, Letters to Bill File, Huckaby Papers, UALR (quotation); clipping, Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, n.d. [probably June 9, 1958], Huckaby Papers, UALR; Herbert L. Thomas Sr., Speech to Blacks, April 16, 1958, Box 599, Faubus Papers; Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, April 18, 1958, p. 8, clipping in Box 5, Thomas Papers. The moderates' use of segregationist groups that they labeled extremist in order to shore up their own authority and legitimacy occurred throughout the South in various forms. Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950's (Baton Rouge, 1969), 206. The Mothers' League opposed the plan. The Mothers' League of Central High to Herbert L. Thomas, April 10, 1958, Box 4, Thomas Papers.

(29) Gertrude Samuels, "The Silent Fear in Little Rock," New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 30, 1958, pp. 11, 78-79 (quotation on p. 78).

(30) Henry Woods. oral history interview transcript. December 8, 1972, CUOHP, UALR (first quotation); Liz [Huckaby] to Bill, October 16. 1957, Letters to Bill File, Huckaby Papers, UALR (second quotation); Brown, Bigger Than Little Rock, 62.

(31) Diary of Mrs. D. D. Terry, April 11, 17, May 8, 1958 (quotation), Box 1, Terry Papers; Brewer, "Embattled Ladies of Little Rock," 227; Mrs. Joe R. Brewer to Board of Directors, City of Little Rock, December 17, 1958, Box 5, WEC Papers; "Suggestions Concerning Desegregation of Little Rock Schools," March 1961, Box 13, WEC Papers. According to Sara Murphy, Little Rock had a Mayor's Interracial Advisory Committee in the late 1940s. At the time it had only one African American member, Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 21.

(32) Brewer, "Embattled Ladies of Little Rock," 227 (quotation); Mrs. Joe R. Brewer to Board of Directors, City of Little Rock, December 17, 1958, Box 5, WEC Papers; Suggestions Concerning Desegregation of Little Rock Schools, March 1961, Box 13, WEC Papers; clipping, Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, n.d. [probably September 14, 1963]. Huckaby Papers, UALR. For an analysis of the relationship between white establishment leaders and an emerging new black leadership, see Kirk, Redefining the Color Line, 139-62.

(33) Author's interview with Pat House, June 28, 1995; Diary of Mrs. D. D. Terry, September 12, 1958 Box 1, Terry Papers; Brewer, "Embattled Ladies of Little Rock," 9-10 (second quotation). 51-53 (first quotation on pp. 52-53); Mrs. Joe R. [Vivion] Brewer, oral history interview transcript, August 20, 1971, CUOHP, OH 171, DDEL; Nat R. Griswold to Dr. Henry Alexander, September 16, 1960, Box 3, ACHR. The WEC board finally voted to admit blacks to membership in May 1963. Minutes, WEC Board Meeting, Box 2, WEC Papers. When the idea of admitting blacks was broached by some people on another committee on which she was involved, Adolphine Terry noted, "I was adamant on that point--no--we are attempting to squirt around the Balm of Gilead not fire water." Diary of Mrs. D. D. Terry, May 16, 1958, Box 1, Terry Papers.

(34) Murphy, Breaking the Silence, xviii (quotation); Pat House, oral history interview transcript, August 22, 1971, CUOHP, OH 193, DDEL; Sara Murphy interview with Parma Basham, September 24, 1992, Box 1; Sara Murphy interview with Jo Jackson, June 3, 1992, Box 2; preceding two documents in Sara Alderman Murphy Papers, MC 1321, UAF.

(35) Mrs. Joe R. [Vivion] Brewer, oral history interview transcript, August 20, 1971, CUOHP, OH 171, DDEL; Pat House, oral history interview transcript, August 22, 1971, CUOHP, OH 193, DDEL; Fliers, Boxes I and 16, WEC Papers. The anonymous survey was mailed to each member of the WEC (whose membership then numbered around 1700), with 720 returning it, Preliminary Survey Results, September 28, 1960, Box 1, WEC Papers. Pupil-placement laws were passed throughout the South in this period. They listed a variety of factors other than race that could be used to assign students to schools and that were used Io limit the number of African American students assigned to white schools. Bartley, Rise of Massive Resistance, 78.

(36) Mrs, Joe R. [Vivion] Brewer, oral history interview transcript, CUOHP, OH 171, DDEL. In Atlanta the Help Our Public Education (HOPE) group reframed public discourse as follows: "HOPE, INC. does not propose to argue the pros and cons of segregation versus desegregation, or states' rights versus federal rights." Its single aim "is to champion children's rights to an education within the State of Georgia" in quality schools. Help Our Public Education, Inc., flier in Box 6, WEC Papers. For information on women in other public-schools movements see Kathryn L. Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), chap. 3; Paul E. Mertz, "'Mind Changing Time All Over Georgia': HOPE, Inc. and School Desegregation, 1958-1961," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 77 (Spring 1993), 41-61; and Lewis, "Emergency Mothers," 72-103.

(37) Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 194, 208 (second quotation on p. 208); Brewer, "Embattled Ladies of Little Rock," 208 10 (first quotation on p. 209).

(38) Billie Wilson to Muriel Lokey, October 31, 1959, Box 5, Murphy Papers.

(39) Procedure [Minutes, WEC Board meeting, September 5, 1962], Box 2; unsigned draft letter to Mr. Reasoner, n.d., Box 4; Minutes, WEC Board Meeting, August 22, 1962, Box 2; all in WEC Papers. According to Irving Spitzberg, Tucker had reportedly voted against integration and for closing the schools in the September 1958 election. Spitzberg, Racial Politics in Little Rock. 85.

(40) Procedure [Minutes, WEC Board Meeting, September 5, 1962], Box 2; and unsigned draft letter to Mr. Reasoner, n.d., Box 4; preceding two documents in WEC Papers; Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 224-30 (first quotation on p. 228); Henry Woods to Sara Murphy, n.d. [December 1962], Box 2; Flier, Vote for Sara Murphy, Box 5; Flier, LITTLE ROCK SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION, December 4, 1962, Box 5; Ad for Everett Tucker, n.d., Box 2; Sara Murphy interview with Edwin Dunaway, October 15, 1992, Box 1; Henry Woods to Sara Murphy, n.d. [1962], Box 2; preceding six documents in Murphy Papers; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, December 8, 1962, p. 4A. A member of Atlanta's HOPE organization wrote to Billie Wilson after a visit there by Tucker that "You--or Irene Samuel--are right in thinking Tucker is an avowed segregationist; his conversations in private fairly curled my liberal hair." Fran [Breeden] to Billie [Wilson], November 30, 1959, Box 5, Murphy Papers. When interviewed in 1971, Tucker could not name one woman in the WEC. Without their labor, he would never have been elected. Everett Tucker, oral history interview transcript, August 16, 1971, CUOHP, UAF (second quotation),

(41) Little Rock Arkansas Gazette. December 8, 1962, p. 4A (quotations).

(42) Those who define moderation as support for token integration put in place to protect public schools and business development narrow moderation to a specific response to particular set of historical circumstances rather than seeing it as a broader set of assumptions and commitments. They also eclipse any disagreements among moderates by defining it in the terms employed by the winners of those disputes. Freyer, Little Rock Crisis, 15; Lassiter and Lewis, "Massive Resistance Revisited," 1-20.

(43) Billie Wilson to Fran [Breeden], March 2, 1960, Box 5, Murphy Papers (all quotations); Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 214-19.

(44) Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, September 30, 1959, p. 8A (second quotation); Minutes, Little Rock School Board, September 29, 1959. B-5, Box 3, Records of the Little Rock School Board (hereafter cited as LRSB), UALR (first quotation).

(45) Untitled [begins "On November, 10, 1959"], n.d., Box 12, WEC Papers; Kirk, Redefining the Color Line, 140.

(46) "Suggestions Concerning Desegregation of Little Rock Schools," March 1961, Box 13, WEC Papers; Negail Riley and Mrs. Blanche Evans to Board of Education, August 29, 1963, Box 8; Untitled [discussion of school board policies], n.d., Box 20; "Some Concerns of and Suggestions from Negro Citizens to the School Board," n.d. [1959?], Box 20; preceding three documents in ACHR.

(47) At the same time African American support for rapid progress in school desegregation also intensified. Conference with Howard Cockrill. September 3, 1959; "Some Concerns of and Suggestions from Negro Citizens to the School Board," n.d. [1959?]; "An Analysis and Prognosis of the Little Rock Situation," n.d. [1961]; preceding three documents in Box 20, ACHR; Colbert S. Cartwright to Keith Botterud, March 13, 1962, Colbert S. Cartwright Scrapbooks, MC 1026, UAF; Plaintiff's Brief, John Aaron, et al., v. Everett Tucker, Jr., et al., Group III Box J7, NAACP Papers (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) (quotation); Blossom, It Has Happened Here, 19-21, 199.

(48) Colbert S. Cartwright to Harold C. Fleming, November 21, 1957; Colbert S. Cartwright to Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, December 21, 1957; preceding two documents in Cartwright Scrapbooks; Jacoway, "Taken by Surprise," 27, 29-30. Indeed, Colbert S. Cartwright wrote to a friend that the school board was "so oriented toward the extreme segregationists that it wishes no support from constructive elements." Cartwright to Bob, April 4, 1961, Cartwright Scrapbooks.

(49) Herbert Thomas to Orval E. Faubus, April 9, 1959; Orval E. Faubus to Herbert L. Thomas, June 24, 1959; Herbert Thomas to Orval E. Faubus, June 29, 1959: Orval E. Faubus to Dr. T. J. Raney, July 1, 1959; preceding four documents in Box 4, Thomas Papers; Everett Tucker, oral history interview transcript, August 16, 1971, CUOHP, UAF (quotation); WEC Newsletter, November 1961, Box 12, WEC Papers; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, August 5, 1959, p. IA; Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York, 1962), 51-52. The board also communicated with Faubus regarding a plan to retain a segregated system in Little Rock. Everett Tucker Jr. to Orval E. Faubus, July 29, 1959; Herbert L. Thomas to William J. Smith, June 23, 1959. and enclosed Suggested Statement by Governor Faubus; Herbert Thomas to W. S. Mitchell and "'Comments for Consideration," June 23, 1959; preceding three documents in Box 4, Thomas Papers. As evidence of the moderate conviction that segregationists needed an alternative to integrated public schools, the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette stated in an editorial on the closing of Raney High that Little Rock needed a private school. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, August 6, 1959, p. 4A.

(50) Nat R. Griswold to Harold Fleming, November 29, 1957, Box 20, ACHR (first quotation); Arthur B. Caldwell to Warren Olney III, July 24. 1957, Box 5, Arthur Brann Caldwell Papers, MS C-127, UAF; Freyer, Little Rock Crisis, 99-100; Wieck, "Report From Little Rock," 4-9; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette. June 4, 1958, p. 1A (second quotation); Huckaby, Crisis at Central High, 140-41 (third and fourth quotations); Central High School, Student Discipline Records, Daisy Bates Papers (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison), microfilm, reel 6; Nathaniel Griswold, oral history interview transcript, August 21, 1971, CUOHP, UAF (fifth quotation).

(51) Author's interview with Paul Fair, May 28, 1996; Arthur B. Caldwell to Warren Olney III, July 24, 1957, Box 5, Caldwell Papers (quotation). This rhetoric was adopted later by the Committee for the Peaceful Operation of Free Public Schools (CPOFPS), formed in 1959 by the recently mobilized business leaders of Little Rock. In the committee's statements, it advocated compliance with federal law "without lowering the educational standards of our schools and with minimum change in our social practices," Committee for the Peaceful Operation of Free Public Schools, Statement by Chairman, July 29, 1959, Box 19, ACHR. When a teenage girl from Little Rock stated in the summer of 1959 that she would "rather be stupid than go to school with a nigger," she succinctly confirmed moderates' fears regarding the threat posed by segregationist control over the schools. Chicago Defender. August 15, 1959, p. 1.

(52) Freyer, Little Rock Crisis, 163; Minutes of the Little Rock School District Board of Directors Regular Meeting, May 21, 1964, B-5, Box 9, LRSB (fourth quotation); Gerald Walker, "Little Rock--Five Years Later," Redbook (November 1962). 74, 129-33, clipping in Box 25, WEC Papers; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 3. 1961, pp. 1A, 2A (first quotation on p. 1A); Statement Released on March 4, 1961, by Ted Lamb, Cartwright Scrapbooks (second and third quotations); Paul W. Masem, "Resegregation: A Case Study of an Urban School District" (Ed.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1986), 4; Floyd Parsons to Mr, Griswold, March 14, 1962, Box 13, WEC Papers. Jennifer Hochschild has concluded that these kinds of incremental policies to desegregate schools can leave "minorities and Anglos ... worse-off" than if nothing had been done and achieve "less than full-scale, rapid, extensive--but unpopular--change to improve race relations, achievement, and community acceptance and to minimize white flight." Jennifer L. Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New Haven, 1984), 91.

(53) Oren Harris to Herschel H. Friday, April 14, 1965; Allen Lesser to Oren Harris, April 9, 1965; "General Statement of Policies Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964"; preceding three documents in Box 540, Faubus Papers; Everett Tucker, oral history interview transcript, August 16, 1971, CUOHP, UAF; Masem, "Resegregation," 58, 74, 81 83; "Statistical Results of Desegregation in Little Rock Schools, 1957-1963," Box 17, WEC Papers; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, September 17, 1965, pp. 5A, 9A; School Desegregation, Fall 1965, Box 1, Records of Burke Marshall, General Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereinafter cited as RG 60); "A Review of the Activities of the Department of Justice in Civil Rights in 1964," Box 1, Records of John Doar, RG 60. For the status of desegregation in the state in 1963, see Arkansas Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, "Public Education in Arkansas, 1963: Still Separate and Still Unequal," Box 13, WEC Papers. Freedom-of-choice plans did not work well in other parts of the South. Southern Research Council, School Desegregation: Old Problems Under a New Law (Atlanta. 1965), copy in Box 20. WEC Papers.

(54) Author's interview with Henry Woods, June 29, 1995; Brooks Hays, A Southern Moderate Speaks (Chapel Hill, 1959), 7, 95. Tellingly, Harry Ashmore described this coalition as one of African Americans and "respectable whites, moderate whites." Author's interview with Harry Ashmore, February 5, 1995.

(55) Nathaniel Griswold, oral history interview transcript, August 21, 1971, CUOHP, UAF; Brewer, "Embattled Ladies of Little Rock," 40-11 (first quotation); Spitzberg, Racial Politics in Little Rock, 18; Sara Murphy interview with Jo Jackson, June 3, 1992, Box 2, Murphy Papers (second quotation). The failure to recognize WEC leaders' success in reducing racial prejudice among the organization's members has caused historians of the organization to overstate its racial conservatism. Similarly, a focus on the leaders' resort to some traditionally femine modes of interaction with male leaders has diverted attention from the political assertiveness and autonomy they developed over time. Gates, "Power from the Pedestal," 26-57; Jacoway, "Down from the Pedestal," 345-52.

(56) Henry M. Alexander, The Little Rock Recall Election (New York, 1960). copy in Series I, File 14. Brewer Papers; Murphy, Breaking the Silence, 157-80.

(57) Herbert Thomas to William J. Smith. June 23, 1959; Little Rock School Board to Orval E. Faubus, draft, n.d., enclosed in Herbert Thomas to Everett Tucker, August 3, 1959; Herbert Thomas to J. Gaston Williamson, August 10, 1959; "To the Members of the Arkansas General Assembly," n.d.; CPOFPS. Legislative Subcommittee, Suggestions about the Meeting; all in Box 4, Thomas Papers.

(58) Herbert L. Thomas to Mrs. Joe Brewer, June 24, 1959, Box 5 (first and second quotations); Mrs. Joe R. Brewer to Herbert L. Thomas. June 30, 1959, Box 5 (third and fourth quotations); Herbert Thomas to Eugene R. Warren, July 13, 1959, and enclosures, Box 4; all in Thomas Papers.

(59) Dale Alford and L'Moore Alford, The Case of the Sleeping People (Finally Awakened by Little Rock School Frustrations) (Little Rock, 1959), 125; Orval E. Faubus to Herbert Thomas, April 14, 1959. Box 4; Mrs. Bob O. Cook to Herbert Thomas, April 11, 1958. Box 4 (quotation); preceding two documents in Thomas Papers.

(60) Kirk, Redefining the Color Line, 139-62; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, March 18, 1960, p. 1A; Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 25, 1960; Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, March 25, 1960, p. 36: L.C. Bates to Gloster B. Current, July 13, 1960: L. C. Bates to Gloster B. Current, September 26, 1960; Special Report of L. C. Bates, January 1-October 1, 1960; L. C. Bates to Gloster B. Current, December 9, 1960; preceding four documents in Box C222, NAACP Papers.

(61) As Sara Diamond has noted, to be successful, "'massive resistance' would require the development of organizations committed to ... respectable tactics and facilitated, not repressed, by local elites." This did not happen in Little Rock. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York. 1995), 69.

(62) Wieck. "Report From Little Rock," 4-9 (quotation on p. 5).

MS. ANDERSON is a professor of history at the University of Arizona.