Little Rock Crisis 39Ernest Green, the first black graduate of Central High, went unharmed.
Rumor had it that there was a price tag of $10,000 on his head. No one
clapped when Green crossed the stage for his diploma, but, as he said, ‘I had
accomplished what I had come there for.’
In August 1958, the US Supreme Court ruled in Cooperv. Aaronthat Little
Rock’s public schools must integrate despite the threat of violence. Rather
than obey the Court in this first test of Brown, Faubus defiantly shut down
all four of the city’s secondary schools. The governor’s school closure was
approved overwhelmingly in a popular referendum, 19,470 to 7,561. The
main concern of some white parents was to keep Central High’s cham-
pionship football team playing, even when the school itself was closed.
Overnight, the governor’s wealthy supporters set up T.J. Raney High School,
a private school in an abandoned building on the University of Arkansas
campus, and 750 white students enrolled. Nearly 3,700 students – white and
black – scrambled for schooling elsewhere.
The vote to close Little Rock public schools was too much for many
whites. Now their own children’s future was being damaged. All but one of
the school board members resigned, only to be replaced by segregationists.
The new board fired superintendent Blossom and forty-four teachers and
school employees who supported desegregation. This wholesale sacking
prodded many civic leaders into action, including Adolphine Fletcher
Terry and the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, a
group of 1,500 white middle-class women. The Parent-Teacher Association,
Arkansas Education Association, and chamber of commerce also demanded
the reopening of the public schools. Within days, these groups formed an
organization called STOP – Stop This Outrageous Purge – and recalled the
segregationist board members in May 1959. The newest school board
rehired most of the fired teachers. After a federal court struck down the law
permitting public schools to be closed, the board announced that it would
admit black students to the white schools that fall.
Surprised by this turn of events, the bitter-enders rallied. Several men and
women lobbed tear gas into a school board meeting, dynamited the fire
chief’s car, and heavily damaged the school administration’s building and a
commercial building owned by the mayor. With the continuing turmoil,
desegregation slowed to a snail’s pace in Little Rock. When Central High
reopened, only three blacks enrolled. Once more, Elizabeth Eckford faced a
mob, but this time the police protected her as she entered school without
incident. As late as 1964, just 123 black children out of 7,000 attended
desegregated schools in Little Rock. Not until 1972 were all grades in the
public schools integrated.
The Little Rock crisis left many casualties and an unfinished revolution.
Dozens of blacks and whites lost their jobs or moved away. The public school