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THE LITTLE ROCK CRISIS AND POSTWAR BLACK ACTIVISM IN ARKANSAS John A. Kirk “History is something that happens when the White Folks show up,” writes civil rights scholar Charles M. Payne in a critical assessment of written accounts of the past.1 Certainly this analysis rings true when one looks at the work on the 1957 Little Rock school crisis over the past forty years. Numerous firsthand accounts have provided us with a variety of white perspectives, including that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Congressman Brooks Hays, Governor Orval Faubus, Superintendent of Schools Virgil T. Blossom, Little Rock’s mayor Woodrow Mann, Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore, segregationist politician Dale Alford, school administrator Elizabeth Huckaby, and Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) member Sara Murphy.2 Secondary works have focused on Governor Faubus, massive resistance and the White Citizens’ Councils, local white clergymen, local white women, the local white business elite, white judges, and the interaction of (largely white-dominated) national and local political and legal issues.3 Useful though these memoirs and studies are, by focusing almost exclusively on the events of September 1957 and Little Rock’s emergence in the national spotlight, they offer little insight into how the school crisis fit into a much larger struggle over race relations in the city and state. Even more important , these works, mostly written by and about whites, fail to present a thoroughgoing analysis of the black community and its contribution to the story of race relations in Arkansas. For over thirty years, the only black perspective 89 on the school crisis was the memoir of Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People State Conference of Branches (ASC). Significantly, the second work to emerge from the black community, written by Melba Pattillo Beals in 1994, from the perspective of one of the nine students who integrated Central High, adds little to Bates’s account. Like the works by whites, Bates’s and Beals’s books provide only snapshots of events, lacking a broader context to locate the drama of September 1957.4 For the white people, we do, at least, have a variety of perspectives . For blacks, we simply do not—and no secondary works have focused on the black community to address this gap in the existing literature. The Little Rock school crisis was, after all, about black civil rights—specifically, about the rights of blacks to have the same access to educational opportunities as whites. Yet where is the black population in the historiography of the school crisis? We know little of what the events of 1957 meant to black Arkansans or how they fit into their collective hopes and aspirations for racial change. The 1957 Little Rock school crisis had its roots in the growing militancy of black activism in Arkansas after World War II. Prior to the 1940s, the guiding philosophy for most black leaders in the state had been Booker T. Washington’s stance of “accommodation,” which stressed economic advancement within the boundaries of segregation, instead of head-on racial protest to challenge Jim Crow and disfranchisement. Yet, although accommodation remained the mainstay of the black elite in Arkansas, there had been several black activists who looked to extend the scope of black advancement beyond the world of business. In the vanguard of black political and legal struggles from the turn of the century was Scipio Africanus Jones, a lawyer based in Little Rock. In 1928, after a long, bitter, and hard-fought battle against lilywhite forces in the Arkansas Republican Party, who attempted to deny black participation in the party, Jones was elected as a state delegate to the Republican National Convention, forcing whites to acknowledge the legitimacy of black participation in the state organization.5 In the same year, Dr. John Marshall Robinson, a black physician from Little Rock, founded the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association (ANDA) and launched the first legal attack on the Democratic Party of Arkansas’s (DPA) exclusive white primary system.6 The number of successful black businesses that flourished in Little Rock, coupled with indigenous leaders and organizations working for black advancement , meant that before the 1940s, national civil rights organizations such as the NAACP failed to make significant progress in the state. Despite a successful defense of twelve black prisoners who were sentenced to death for their alleged role in the Elaine race riot in East Arkansas in 1919, which brought one of the national NAACP...

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