Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed Its Public Schools

3. Where Shall We Go?

Rock.” Russ did not remain in her aunt’s home long, because she missed her family terribly. “I cannot do this, I need to be at home,” she recalled saying. “I just figured out a way myself. I got a city bus schedule, I moved back home, I wanted to be at home.” Russ caught a city bus at six A.M. and rode to the end of the bus line at Protho Junction, on the outskirts of North Little Rock. There she caught the Pulaski County school bus and reached her new school home. She recalled that, academically, her school year was disappointing: “I lost interest. In the ninth grade I had been on the honor roll, in the honor society, but that year is like—I don’t know what it did to me. I didn’t have the drive.”71 The referendum vote on closed public schools came on Saturday, September 27. The ballot was worded, as the recent Act 4 required, with a choice between complete integration and complete segregation of all Little Rock Schools—a choice that Little Rock had not before been asked to make. The ballot made no mention of closed or open high schools.72 On the Saturday of the referendum, Elizabeth Huckaby drove to Scott Street to take her father to vote. She tried to get a ballot for her mother. She wrote: “Tried County Clerk’s office again. To be closed all day! No voting for invalids.” She was also beginning to realize that enough people would be coming to vote to meet the requirement of eligible voters: “People seemed to be coming out of the gutters to vote. Rabble-rousing old sister on the corner getting signatures to School Board recall petition.” Then she drove to her precinct to vote before going to the grocery store and back home.73 Sunday morning’s headline revealed that school integration had been rejected by a vote of 19,470 to 7,561, a vote that Huckaby labeled in her diary as “a rout—3 to 1 for segregation.”74 The number of voters far exceeded the average turnout for a school election by 20,000 votes, but Little Rock patrons—strongly influenced by the wording on the ballot and more importantly by the promise made by their governor and the new private school group—had voted just as the wily Faubus expected. As historian Numan Bartley argued in 1969, “The fact that Governor Faubus and the segregationists assured the voters that private segregated schools would promptly replace the public schools prevented this vote from being a true referendum on school closing.”75 Instead, the wording of the ballot made the issue one regarding race. Little Rock voters, some of whom had willingly accepted minimum compliance with token desegregation in 1957, were now being asked to accept wholesale integration—and they found it as unpalatable as Faubus expected in his trickery of syntax. An analysis of the vote count demonstrates that the predominantly black precincts supported the opening 50 ■ NOTHING BUT CONFUSION of fully integrated high schools. The upper-class white districts at this time did not, although the margins were much closer in those white precincts than in the overall city vote, of 3 to 1. Of the 7,561 “yes” votes, only 2,378 came from predominantly black precincts, leaving 5,183 predominantly white voters who did, in fact, support open and fully integrated schools. Despite the fact that the WEC campaign had stressed that a vote for integration was a vote for open schools, this was not enough.76 In previous Little Rock votes stretching back to 1950, upper-class white and black precincts had voted together—making this particular vote a statistical “outlier.”77 Public schools would now remain closed with what was interpreted as the consent of the voters. What was to be done with 3,665 students? What was to happen to the children, to education, to the community identity of Arkansas’s capital city? For every displaced student, the closed schools also affected parents, siblings, and households. Huckaby wrote to her brother: “Of course it is the kids and their families I feel sorriest for. The financial and emotional disruption of local homes will never be assessed.”78 The referendum closed the doors on public schools, but it brought no solution in itself. For weeks, Little Rock Private School Corporation leaders and Governor Faubus had stressed that should local voters use their franchise to...