Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas

A few days ago, as part of our cross-country road trip, Emily and I spend the better part of a day in Little Rock, Arkansas. I found it to be quite an interesting place, kind of a hip and relatively liberal mecca in a region of the US often stereotyped as backwards and conservative. Presumably Bill Clinton’s legacy and influence have something to do with this, but I imagine the man was equally a product of the place.

After setting up our tent, our first stop was a scenic overlook at a nearby state park. As we were doing our best to point a camera at ourselves blindly with one hand, another couple arrived and offered to take our picture. They were a ‘classic’ Arkansas couple: he a straggly white guy sporting a goatee and a Home Depot polo, she a slender black woman with a pronounced posterior, and both exceedingly friendly and polite.

The man asked where we were from, and after I gave him a brief synopsis, I asked if they lived around here. He positively swelled with pride and drawled, “Why, yes sir, we do!”

“You’re lucky,” I told him, nodding at the sprawling, tree-covered delta spread out below us. They both smiled and offered some suggestions of things to see in the area, most notably the Big Dam Bridge.

I mention their races because it reinforces something I’ve noticed in my limited time in the American South. Despite northern stereotypes about racist hillbillies, Southern cities seem to be a lot more socially integrated than those in the North. I’ve seen many more inter-racial couples or even just groups of friends having dinner or coffee together than I do in places like Boston or Chicago.

Then again, that’s only half of the story. I’ve also heard it said that, “In the South, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too big; in the North, they don’t care how big you get, as long as you don’t get too close.” It may be that opportunities for higher-level education, employment, and economic success are harder for many blacks to come by in the South; I’m really not in a position to say. And of course the Klan is still alive and well in many Southern states. But issues of racial equality, justice, and segregation are very important to me, and I’m always particularly mindful of them when traveling in a new region or culture.

On that note, we also visited Central High School in Little Rock, which in 1957 was the site of a riot that attracted international attention. The Supreme Court had recently declared the racial segregation of public schools to be illegal, but when nine black students attempted to enter Central High School in September, they were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus.

A federal judge then ordered the school integrated. Faubus withdrew the National Guard, but a crowd of over a thousand angry whites gathered to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school. The mayor of Little Rock wrote President Eisenhower for help, and he responded by federalizing the Guard and sending 100 members of the 101st Airborne Division to support the local police in maintaining order. A violent riot ensued. The students were threatened, and many reporters were beaten.

Eventually, the riot ended and the Little Rock Nine did attend school that year, with the only senior among them becoming the first black student to graduate from Central High School. The next year, however, Governor Faubus closed the state’s three high schools rather than proceed with their integration, and students of all colors were forced to find new schools.

It’s sad but important to realize that this was not the work of one misguided governor or a small but loud minority of virulent segregationists. Even after closing down the public high schools altogether, a Gallup poll found that Faubus was one of the ten men most admired by Americans in 1958.

One thing I find interesting about the civil rights movement is the role that pictures and other forms of media coverage have played in its successes. The style of nonviolent resistance popularized by Gandhi and King relies heavily on appealing to the conscience, not only of the oppressors, but of the world at large. You may have seen this powerful image from the Little Rock riot before:

It’s one thing to have a political disagreement about whether schools ought to be integrated. Personally, I don’t consider it a matter, like tax cuts, on which reasonable people can disagree. But especially in that era it kind of was, and regardless, there is such a world of difference between disagreeing with the decision of a judge or politician and cursing, spitting at, and attacking children.

Here we see a crowd of angry adults who are both older and far more numerous than the teenagers trying to do nothing more than attend a school that the highest court in the land has told them they have the right to attend. A lone girl walks calmly and bravely past a mob driven wild by hate, epitomized by the sneer on one woman’s face.

Images like these provoked a kind of moral crisis for white Americans. They were able to overlook or make excuses for the fear, mistrust, hatred, and racism that informed their own support for segregation. But an angry mob attacking children cannot be interpreted as anything but a moral failing of the highest order. Over time, images such as this forced many people to change their opinions and drop their support for many of the most overt forms of discrimination.

This creates an interesting phenomenon where a town like Little Rock, which once festered with racism, can in many ways end up being less racist, or at least more conscious of its enduring racism, than more progressive cities that never saw such a singularly explosive incident of racism.

The epilogue to the picture above is that the the two women, the black teenager and the sneering white woman, met at Central High forty years later to reconcile. There was another moving photo (I couldn’t find it online) of them standing arm in arm. The white woman was in tears.

When a woman, and more broadly a city, is so dramatically confronted with her own racism and forced to acknowledge their wrongdoings, they can ultimately end up more sensitive to the issue and conscious of the need to work actively to overcome it. For the millions who witnessed the Little Rock spectacle and others like it on television, however, it can have the opposite effect: they externalize racism as a belief held by redneck hillbillies who are not at all like themselves. They are inclined to think that if they are not burning crosses or shouting racial epithets, then they are not part of the problem.

Later the same day, we passed through Memphis, but didn’t have much time to spend there. That’s a shame, because I really would have liked to have visited some of the civil rights sites there. It’s a part of American culture that I find really interesting both historically and as a lesson for today. Despite the progress that has been made, so many of the problems targeted by the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, such as segregation and educational inequality, persist today. Yet there is no movement on the scale that there was 40-50 years ago. Why not? Which of those strategies can and should be revived? Which failed? Which need to be adapted for contemporary America?

If any of you have made it through this rant and want to hear yet more of what I have to say on the subject, you might be interested in my review of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.