- Bigger Than Little Rock? New Histories of the 1957 Central High Crisis
In September 1957, Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, became a national focal point in the struggle for school desegregation in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In what was regarded as a moderate Upper South city, the Little Rock school board was one of the first in the South to announce its intention to comply with Brown. However, the day before school desegregation was due to begin Governor Orval E. Faubus called out National Guard troops thereby preventing the entry of African American students into Central High. Over the following weeks, tense negotiations took place between the White House and the governor's mansion. State troops were finally withdrawn under court order. Yet when nine African American students subsequently attempted to [End Page 624] attend classes, an unruly white mob caused so much disruption that school officials withdrew the students for their own safety. The scenes of violence finally prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to intervene in the crisis by federalizing the National Guard and sending in federal troops to secure the safe passage of the nine students into Central High. Only then did the students complete their first day of classes under armed guard. The following year, Faubus closed all of the city's schools to prevent desegregation, and in a referendum Little Rock voters elected to keep schools closed rather than to integrate. Not until August 1959, after the dire economic consequences of events in the city became apparent, and under pressure from white, middle-class women who mobilized in the Women's Emergency Committee to Open our Schools (WEC), did the city's white business community oust segregationists from the school board and re-open city schools on a token integrated basis.
The Little Rock crisis has generated a voluminous literature and the fiftieth anniversary of events in 2007 inevitably saw a number of new additions. The crisis has been approached from a number of different levels and in a variety of different ways. From an international perspective, the crisis has been viewed as a public relations disaster for a country engaged in an effort to win hearts and minds in the Cold War. In one anecdotal example, jazz great Louis Armstrong, who had recently been described by the U.S. State Department as "perhaps the most effective un-official goodwill ambassador this country ever had," abandoned a planned government-sponsored trip to Moscow because of events in Little Rock. Armstrong told the press that "the way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell." He called Faubus "an uneducated plow-boy" and insisted that, if he had to choose, he would rather play in Moscow than in Arkansas, because Faubus "might hear a couple of notes—and he don't deserve that."1
Several historians have written about Little Rock's global impact, with the crisis featuring most prominently in the work of Azza Salama Layton and Mary Dudziak. Layton's work has examined the negative worldwide press coverage of events in the city and...