Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis (review)

Please pardon an oral historian from reverting to memory in a review such as this. When I read John Kirk's first essay in Beyond Little Rock, which provides a capsule summary of events surrounding his subject and offers an excellent overview of the historiography attendant to it, I was struck by how the "Little Rock incident" was one of the defining political and social moments of my youth. My thoughts raced back to when, while in college, I helped set up a table on Columbia University's College Walk with petitions protesting the actions of Arkansas Governor Orville E. Faubus in calling out the National Guard to prevent desegregation at Central High School. The next summer, as a pollster working with the journalist Samuel Lubell, I traveled to Little Rock to interview (sans tape recorder) about the possibility of continued school closing and the broader issue of race in America. I remember bunking at the old Marion Hotel, whose lobby filled with legislators wearing summer cottons, pants held up by suspenders, and straw hats atop of their heads. This big city boy thought he was in another country. And, in 1958, it might have been.

However, the federal government demonstrated America was one nation despite President Dwight D. Eisenhower's weak support of the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision and his initial reluctance to send troops to Little Rock. Through the eight essays, most of which were previously published, that comprise the chapters of this book, Kirk effectively informs us about the origins and legacies of the racial crisis that rocked mid-twentieth century America. He considers antecedents in the state's black Civilian Conservation Corps camps, in Dr. John Marshall Robinson and the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association, and in W. H. Flowers and the Committee on Negro Organizations. One chapter takes a gendered view of the incident; another considers white opposition, while another explores white support; and a final one frames the matter within the context of city planning and urban development. To this reader, the chapter on gender, which primarily is based on an analysis of Arkansas NAACP leader Daisy Bates ' memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962), seems more like a psychological analysis than a gendered one. The final chapter on city planning and the civil rights struggle borrows from urban history and places the Little Rock situation within the context of a "long civil rights movement" rather than the Martin Luther King, Jr.-centric "Montgomery-to Memphis" narrative. As in other cities, disputes over urban planning and redevelopment foreshadowed the tension brought forth by the school crisis. Kirk is on target when he writes, "Without doubt, city planning policy shaped race relations more fundamentally over the long-term than the short-term effects of the school crisis. Indeed, the events of the school crisis unfolded within the already changing urban context" (156).

In his Preface, the author points out that "Integral to my research are a number of oral histories that have helped to illuminate the written record" (xiii). Each chapter is richly documented with primary and secondary written sources, and while Kirk states that the interviews are integral to his research, they seem to have made no major impact on the book, which is built upon the written materials. If my reading of the Preface is correct, this might result from the fact that the tapes, deposited at the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville, were in the process of being transcribed after the author completed the book. Oral history is less valuable for such research as Kirk's when snippets of tapes have to be found and listened to rather than the researcher having a completed transcript to read and contemplate.

As a consequence, while Beyond Little Rock offers no breakthroughs regarding the practice and theory of oral history, it...