Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked a Nation

As I write this, Little Rock is gearing up for the fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School, that nigh archetypal event which seemed to pitch the forces of progress against those of ignorance and Southern intransigence. Precisely because it is often viewed in such starkly Manichaean terms, the Central High crisis has become the focal point in yet another battle for memory, with some former students —white students —disparaging the attention paid to the Little Rock Nine, insisting that they, too, suffered during that tumultuous school year. Further, the only statewide newspaper in Arkansas is headed up by a former player in the crisis who routinely recasts Governor Orval Faubus as a peacemaker put upon by the federal government. An authoritative history of the event would well serve the state and the nation since it still divides people to this day.

Jacoway’s Turn Away Thy Son attempts to be that history, retelling the story of Central High with an eye toward the South’s fear of miscegenation, or “race mixing,” as the driving force behind resistance against desegregation, noting that “beneath all the rhetoric about states’ rights, constitutional government, and the lovely southern lady, lay the threat that people of color represented to white male control of their ‘bloodlines,’ or in other words, of white women ” (361). The book’s focus is primarily upon the elite players —government officials, segregationist leaders, and the media —who made headlines during the crisis, though it also analyzes broader class conflict in Little Rock, noting that the leader of the school board, Virgil Blossom, had no intention of desegregating Hall High in a more white-collar area and “did not consider the views of the blue-collar workers who lived around Central High School ” (57). Indeed, much of the book is a record of abject failure of understanding—the reader sees these figures locked into their assumptions rather like figures in a Greek tragedy.

Governor Orval Faubus, however, comes off as more of a Shakespearean figure, depicted as a well-meaning moderate backed into a corner between the segregationist masses he was elected to represent and a federal government that demanded desegregation from on high with nary a concern to the mechanics of its implementation. At times, this becomes tedious and begins to read like an apologia for this emblem of massive resistance, with the author presenting his later recollections as representative of what actually happened, sans motive. Jacoway takes particular umbrage with Harry Ashmore, editor of the Arkansas Gazette, whom she credits with creating the metanarrative of Faubus resisting desegregation solely for political gain and thus further cornering the beleaguered governor, claiming that if Ashmore “had not been so convinced that Faubus was operating strictly from political motives, the Little Rock situation might have ended very differently”—as if to exonerate Faubus of his own actions and legacy (113).

This retelling of the story through the eyes of the elite works to rob the African-American community of its agency, thus recreating one of the problems James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), has found in American history textbooks—the tendency to present civil rights as something white leaders negotiate rather than something the black population fights for. Indeed, while there is much analysis of the fears of race mixing that drove the average white resident of Little Rock to resist desegregation, and likewise the fears of bad publicity that drove much of the business community to seek some sort of reconciliation, there is no similar scrutiny taken of the city’s black populace. What were their hopes and fears? What were their attitudes toward the ever-worsening crisis? How did they try to advocate for a particular outcome? About these issues, we learn nothing. In fact, there is very little on the African-American community other than the Little Rock Nine and Daisy Bates, and even here there is some inconsistent characterization, with Jacoway presenting Bates in one instance as a veritable jihadist for civil rights, “prepared to sacrifice lives—her own or the children’s—in that cause ” (170), while elsewhere noting that her fear for their lives led her to keep them out of school many times.

This ties into Jacoway’s use of oral history sources. She is very good at drawing from a variety of such sources, especially personal interviews that she, other researchers, and even the FBI conducted. These she weaves with bits from published and unpublished memoirs, newspaper articles, and other popular and scholarly accounts into a seamless tapestry that really makes for good reading. But it may be that the limitations of her book are due to the limitations of sources, for with such personalities serving as the focal point of the crisis, there may simply not have been many interviews conducted with average members of the African-American community to discern their own views at the time, which is a right shame. However, Jacoway could have added a great deal of depth to her book by interviewing those African-Americans who lived through the Central High crisis and have remained in the community as witnesses to the changes the crisis has wrought upon the city. The white flight that soon transformed Central from a majority white to a majority black school, the growth of private and religious academies in Little Rock, and the attempt to defund now majority-black school districts through charter schools and other educational innovations — all these are the legacy of Central, and it is a legacy not well represented by a reliance upon the views of elites who have an agenda in their presentation of history as a smooth progression from inequality to equality. No pun intended, but Turn Away Thy Son lacks a viable minority report that would add real dimension to the narrative.

Jacoway’s thesis that a Southern fear of miscegenation drove much of the resistance to integration in Little Rock is on solid ground, however, backed up by numerous pieces of evidence she presents, and it is so obvious that one does wonder why this issue gets so little playtime in retrospectives. That said, though, the reader interested in this dynamic might be better served by previous academic works, such as Renee C. Romano’s Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2006) and Charles F. Robinson’s Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South (2003), which cover that particular Southern neurosis more thoroughly. Susan K. Cahn’s Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (2007) also provides a great deal of background on elite anxiety about womanhood, sex, and race.

In short, Turn Away Thy Son is the very definition of a mixed bag, a compelling read that breaks little new ground, beset by an obvious agenda of “fixing” the dominant metanarrative. But perhaps it will inspire other writers to fill in the holes left in our collective memory of the Little Rock crisis.