Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas From Slavery to the Present

18. The Seventies: No Rest for Those Weary of Race

C H A P T E R 1 8 The Seventies: No Rest for Those Weary of Race Before discussing the changes that began to occur in the racial demographics of Arkansas during the 1970s, it is appropriate here to note perhaps the most important statistic that has affected race relations in the state of Arkansas. Donald Holley, author of The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South writes that reliable estimates suggest that Arkansas lost over 1.2 million people between 1920 and 1970. . . . The migrants were predominantly white, totaling one in five white residents between 1940 and 1960; but black migration was proportionately heavier, consisting of as much as a third of the statewide black population in the 1940s and 1950s, and almost as much again in the 1960s. These numbers are staggering. If those people had remained in the state, Arkansas’s population might be as high as 3.9 million today instead of the 2.7 million counted in 2000.1 One can only speculate about the talent that left Arkansas for greener pastures. While lack of opportunities for both whites and blacks were apparently responsible for migration to other states before the end of the decade, beginning in the 1970s pressure from the federal government to integrate public schools began to have an impact on where white and black Arkansans chose to live within the state. The political mileage 391 3STOCKLEY_pages_251-536.qxd 10/7/08 12:38 AM Page 391 to be gained by attempting to defy the federal government on the issue of school integration by politicians produced fewer and fewer dividends. Thus, after 1968 when the Supreme Court announced it would no longer tolerate delays by school districts in converting to unitary systems, “freedom of choice” candidates in Arkansas were still being elected but in fewer numbers. The most notorious example was the Watson Chapel School District in Jefferson County whose school board fired its lawyer and hired John Norman Warnock from Camden whose counsel was to defy the orders of federal district judge Oren Harris. A head-on collision was avoided after the Court told the board members they faced heavy fines if they did not comply with his order to create a unitary school system. Additionally, the judge in effect imposed a gag order on Warnock. After a great deal of publicity which further inflamed passions in the community, the board complied.2 Integrating the Little Rock School District As set out in Chapter 11, whites in authority in Pulaski County before the 1960s had no trouble implementing policies of racial apartheid. Blacks lived in certain areas and sent their children to schools according to plans that were acceptable to whites. There was little blacks could do but accept the situation. By the late 1960s, however, the Supreme Court signaled that it would no longer tolerate the subterfuges to avoid meaningful integration employed by school districts since Brown I and II. With its decision in Green v. New Kent County in 1968 the Supreme Court decreed that school segregation now had to be “eliminated, root and branch.” In Swann v. Charlotte–Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971, the Supreme Court specified the methods by which school integration could be accomplished, including busing of students to obtain a racial balance. Though busing would be deemed a failure, according to historian Frye Gaillard, for a number of years it proved successful in Charlotte, North Carolina, because of the community efforts to make it work. Gaillard writes, “For a decade or more, Charlotte was fundamentally 392 THE SEVENTIES 3STOCKLEY_pages_251-536.qxd 10/7/08 12:38 AM Page 392 changed. By almost any measure, the schools were working well. Test scores rose; white flight was minor; parental involvement was high.”3 Though in 1957 the city of Little Rock had epitomized racial hatred because of Central High, despite all its substantial difficulties, controversies, and endless litigation, the Little Rock School District beginning in the 1970s became the poster child for public school integration in the state of Arkansas. With the steady support of the Arkansas Gazette, the Little Rock School Board began to embrace policies that signaled a commitment to school integration that was unmatched in the state of Arkansas by school districts that had a significant minority population. Cross-town busing and pairing of schools became the order of the day. However, from the beginning...