40 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
system was devastated as teacher morale plummeted and whites fled the dis-
trict to escape desegregation. As integration took hold, white flight left a
black majority in Central High. In what became a national pattern, white
parents enrolled their children in all-white private academies or suburban
public schools. As the embarrassing violence over desegregation continued,
Little Rock’s industrial development ground to a halt. In 1957, the city
attracted eight new plants worth $3 million; in 1958, there were no new
plants. L.C. Bates lost his newspaper as subscriptions declined. Woodrow
Mann, who tried to uphold the law as mayor, saw burning crosses on
his lawn and fled to Texas, abandoning his insurance business and
once-promising political career. Brooks Hays, Little Rock’s Democratic
congressman, was defeated for trying to resolve the crisis. The strain of
implementing desegregation pushed assistant police chief Gene Smith to kill
his wife and then himself. Across the South, only 49 more school districts
desegregated in Eisenhower’s last three years in office, compared to 712 in
the three years after Brown.
Some benefited from, or at least endured, the crisis, especially Orval
Faubus, who was identified in a 1958 Gallup poll in the US as one of the
world’s ten most admired men. By dividing Arkansas along the color line,
Faubus not only won a third term, which was unusual, but six in all. Other
southern politicians like Alabama’s George Wallacefollowed this racist
recipe with similar results. All of the Little Rock Nine went to college, and
most developed successful careers. The television networks, rocked by quiz
show scandals, regained respectability with their captivating reports from
Arkansas. Other southern cities, including Atlanta and Raleigh, learned that
resistance to integration harmed business, and they avoided large-scale civil
rights disturbances. Most important, the president’s use of federal troops in
Little Rock signaled that segregation in the South could not survive. But to
make further gains against Jim Crow, blacks would have to fight community
by community, beginning in Montgomery.Wallace, George(1919–
98): Alabama governor
who symbolized the seg-
regationist cause in the
South.