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

6. White Opposition to the Civil Rights Struggle— Massive Resistance and Minimum Compliance: The Origins of the 1957 Little Rock Crisis and the Failure of School Desegregation in the South

6 White Opposition to the Civil Rights Struggle Massive Resistance and Minimum Compliance: The Origins of the 1957 Little Rock Crisis and the Failure of School Desegregation in the South Two assertions are central to this avowedly revisionist essay, which uses the case study of white reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision in Little Rock, Arkansas, to suggest a new framework for understanding the emergence of white resistance to Brown in the South. The first assertion is that gradualism and tokenism employed under the banner of “minimum compliance” played a far greater role in the development of southern resistance to the Brown decision than has previously been acknowledged. With its defiant rhetoric and radical stance, massive resistance grabbed more headlines than minimum compliance, but it was precisely the latter’s low-key and surreptitious approach to school desegregation that made it far more effective in undermining the Brown decision in the long run. The dangers of gradualism and tokenism were not lost on civil rights movement participants, including Martin Luther King Jr., who in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” written almost nine years after Brown, noted that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate . . . who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. . . Lukewarm acceptance is 94 much more bewildering than outright rejection.”1 King also anticipates my second assertion in his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, when he notes that the Supreme Court’s 1955 implementation order for Brown, which became known as Brown II, was “a keystone in the structure that slowed school desegregation down to a crawl.”2 Although the Brown decision has received a great deal of attention from commentators and historians, far less had been written about the significance of Brown II. Yet it is my assertion that Brown II had a much greater impact on the development of white resistance to school desegregation than the first Brown ruling. In shifting the focus from massive resistance to minimum compliance , and from Brown to Brown II, this essay encourages a rethinking of the emergence of southern resistance to school desegregation and the long-term impact of that resistance. One important point to note at the outset is that this study focuses on an upper South city, which had a black population (about a quarter of Little Rock’s one hundred thousand residents were black) that was smaller than many lower South cities, and smaller than that of many southern rural areas as well. Different parts of the South offered different levels of resistance to school desegregation, and that resistance often developed quicker and more determinedly in places that had larger black populations, where whites felt more threatened by racial change. Nevertheless, upper South cities such as Little Rock played a pivotal role in the white southern reaction to Brown. When the Supreme Court handed down the two Brown decisions it very probably did not expect lower South states such as Mississippi and Alabama to rush to desegregate their school systems. It did, however, very probably expect upper South states such as Arkansas and North Carolina to set the pace for school desegregation, and thereby to place pressure on surrounding rural areas, and for those rural areas to in turn place pressure on neighboring lower South states. In practice, the court probably envisioned what might be described as a southern school desegregation domino effect. The fact that the process of school desegregation stalled at such an early point and so dramatically in a prime, progressive upper South city like Little Rock was catastrophic for the strategy of school desegregation that the Supreme Court embarked upon, and its reverberations reached far beyond Little Rock. The existing historical record of the 1957 Little Rock school crisis paints a picture of a moderate upper-South city hijacked by massive White Opposition to the Civil Rights Struggle 95 resistance. Little Rock appeared to be at the forefront of compliance with the Brown decision when the school board declared that it would work toward the peaceful desegregation of the city’s schools. However, the night before the all-white Central High School was due to accept nine black students in September 1957, Gov. Orval...