Beyond Central, Toward Acceptance: A Collection of Oral Histories From Students of Little Rock Central High (review)

In Beyond Central, Toward Acceptance, Little Rock's Central High School students contribute reflections in essay form from oral history interviews they have conducted. The book, innovative and self-appraising from the beginning, is aware of its own shortcomings. Admittedly, this acknowledgement makes reviewing such a book difficult because it does not try to be anything it is not. Ultimately, this book is an interesting collection of stories that show the long-lasting personal effects of conducting oral histories. In this review, I will first describe the initiative from which the book arose and outline the structure of this edited volume. Next I will discuss the shortcomings of this book, which the student editorial team and its advisors readily acknowledge. From there I summarize the numerous achievements of this work. Finally, I will discuss this book's relevancy for the discipline of oral history.

Little Rock, Arkansas' Central High School is most infamously known for its prominent place in early civil rights movement struggles for desegregation. In this pivotal moment in the movement, the Little Rock Nine entered all-white Central High in September 1957. The nine African American teenagers walked through a hostile crowd to find that Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to ensure that the students could not enter the school. Like many other Southern cities whose image in the public memory is less than positive, Little Rock has undergone a process of recollection and reconciliation. One such example of this introspection is the Memory Project, part of the ninth-grade Civics curriculum at Central High School. Charged with the task of finding out information about their families and people in the community, these fifteen-year-old students interviewed individuals in their communities to collect stories of the past. After conducting their interviews, each student wrote an essay explicating what he/she learned, both in "fact" and in significance. Those student-written essays are what comprise Beyond Central, Toward Acceptance.

The content of the book reflects that this is an entirely student-edited work. Thus, the collection includes essays that, although not always of the greatest historical value to a professional, had the greatest impact on the youth. The book is organized into five chapters, beginning locally with experiences of former Central students then broadening to discuss stories of discrimination globally. Additionally, all proceeds from the book after covering production costs go to a fund that supports future undertakings of the Memory Project.

The teachers' preface acknowledges that the essays presented have several shortcomings. The first is that a student interviewer may miss a fleeting reference to a historical fact and not follow up on it. Second, they feared that the publication of such a book would make it vulnerable to historians with a special agenda. As a reviewer, the other shortcoming that I noticed in this work is that in attempting to keep an authentic voice, the students' grammatical errors and small spelling mistakes are not corrected. However, this does not distract from the overall efficacy of the stories being related. Additionally, there is very little first-person narrative. The majority of these essays are constructed as a recap of what the interviewee said and the student's personal opinions of this. Again although from a strict oral history perspective, the content of this book is somewhat limited for scholarly research, yet the importance of such an undertaking remains.

This project helps educators understand what is most salient to students today. By upending the canon of oft-recollected tales, this collection features the stories that did not make the headlines and dealt more often than not with individual day-to-day experiences. Ultimately, these were the stories that the students themselves expressed as more didactic. This book gave power to students to analyze and assign value to the historical events they found most...