4
Little Rock Crisis
L
ittle Rock, the capital of Arkansas, seemed an unlikely place for the
gravest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. It was a New South
community of 107,000 – a quarter black – in which both races lived
next to each other with few incidents. Pressed by the local NAACP and pro-
fessor Georg Iggers, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, the city desegre-
gated its library, parks, zoo, buses, hospitals, juries, and police force with
little resistance. Harry Ashmore’s Arkansas Gazette, one of the region’s most
respected newspapers, endorsed these integration initiatives. Still, there were
limits to desegregation because the city’s swimming pool, hotels, theaters,
restaurants, drinking fountains, and toilets remained racially divided through-
out the 1950s.
Little Rock’s schools were slated for desegregation early on. A week after
Brownwas decided in May 1954, superintendent Virgil Blossom drafted plans
for gradual desegregation, beginning with the elite Central High School.
Blossom hoped that the governorship could be his if he handled the South’s
most difficult problem smoothly. His plan called for spending more money
on black schools to siphon off demands for integration. Nearly all blacks
would attend a brand-new $1 million Horace Mann High School on the
east side while the children of community leaders could escape desegrega-
tion by attending the brand-new Hall High School in the growing suburbs to
the west. One school board member remarked candidly that ‘the plan was
developed to provide as little integration as possible for as long as possible
legally.’
Although only token blacks would be involved in school desegregation,
the Blossom Plan was criticized by segregationists. Erving Brown, president
of the Capital Citizens’ Council, dismissed the plan as altogether unneces-
sary: ‘The Negroes have ample and fine schools here, and there is no need for
this problem except to satisfy the aims of a few white and Negro revolution-
aries.’ When blue-collar workers and fundamentalist pastors worried about
the social consequences of school desegregation, the school board offered