The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  At 6 A.M. seventy little Rock policemen arrived swinging nightsticks and erected sawhorse barricades around the school. Three weeks earlier that would have been enough to keep the peace, but now the crisis had been building too long; Faubus’s prediction of trouble was about to become self-fulfilling, especially with Karam there to rally faint hearts. Afterward the mayor blamed what happened on “professional agitators” and an assistant police chief said that “half the troublemakers were from out of town.” Civic pride kept them from pointing out that many of the leaders were figures in Little Rock sports and therefore friends of the policemen. Some cops, sympathetic with them, were defensive about being here. “Do you think I like this?” one of them told spectators. “I’m just trying to do my job.”

  At 8:45 the Central High class bell sounded. In the next instant a yell went up: “Here come the niggers!” These blacks weren’t schoolchildren. They were four Negro newspapermen who had arrived together. Retreating, they were pursued by about twenty bullyboys, who cut them off and began systematically beating them. One cop climbed on a car to get a better look. Others moved in to stop the mayhem, and as they did Jimmy Karam cried angrily, “The niggers started it!” A powerfully built youth hurried up to him and said, “Get me five or six boys and get them over there where the nigger kids came in last time.” Karam rounded up five of the biggest and led them there. He was too late; while the mob had been watching the attack on the black reporters, the nine Negro children had arrived in two cars and walked into the school. Once there, they seemed safe. Most of the white students looked at them curiously. Some made friendly overtures. None appeared to be hostile.

  Nevertheless, the position of the newcomers was untenable. The scene outside was rapidly deteriorating. Radio and television descriptions of the melee had attracted toughs from surrounding towns. The throng doubled and redoubled, until nearly a thousand men were milling around, spoiling for a fight. The ineffectual police response to the assault on the Negro newsmen had taught them that hooliganism would go unpunished. Looking for new targets, they settled on white journalists. Three Life men were mauled. Every reporter without a southern accent was in danger. So were the policemen and the state troopers who had answered their appeals for help. In the turmoil the sawhorse barricades were demolished. Surging toward Central High, the crowd was at its very doors when, at 11:50 A.M., Mayor Mann capitulated and ordered the black children withdrawn from the school. The toughs dispersed, chortling. Jimmy Karam darted into the filling station booth and put through a call. Shortly afterward Governor Faubus called a press conference in Sea Island. “The trouble in Little Rock,” he said, “vindicates my good judgment.”

  ***

  President Eisenhower was in Washington that morning, speaking before the International Monetary Fund. All that week he had been depressed by the growing crisis in Arkansas. He told Sherman Adams that he was well aware that the Warren Court’s resolution of Brown v. Board of Education was “cutting into established customs and traditions in such communities as Little Rock,” and “You cannot change the hearts of people by law.” Later in the week he would tell four moderate southern governors, “I have never said what I thought about the Supreme Court decision—I have never told a soul.” He added, “But how I feel about it is immaterial. The fact is that it is the law, and as the President of the United States I have the responsibility of seeing to it that it is enforced.” He had been about to leave the Monetary Fund meeting after speaking when he received an urgent call from Brownell. The attorney general gave him a terse account of the disorders outside Central High. The President then approved a tough statement:

  The federal law and orders of a United States District Court… cannot be flouted with immunity by any individual or any mob of extremists. I will use the full power of the United States including whatever force may be necessary to prevent any obstruction of the law and to carry out the orders of the Federal Court.

  He was hoping to shake some sense into Faubus. But it was too late. He had barely returned to Newport when a second call from Brownell came in over the maximum-security telephone in his personal quarters. Reports from U.S. marshals in Arkansas disclosed that law enforcement had broken down on both the state and local levels. A mob had ruled at Central High. Moreover, Little Rock was asking Washington to intervene; School Superintendent Virgil Blossom had just called the Justice Department and said, “Mayor Mann wants to know who to call to get federal help.” He had been put through to Brownell, who, after hanging up, had drafted a proclamation setting forth the traditional authority and responsibility of the President, reaching back to 1795, to use troops to enforce the federal law. If approved by Eisenhower, it would open the way to sending in the Army. Ike listened to it over the phone. He said, “I want you to send up that proclamation. It looks like I will have to sign it, but I want to read it.”

  He studied it that evening on the sun porch of his living quarters and went to bed leaving it unsigned. The prospect appalled him, he told Adams; using U.S. soldiers against U.S. citizens would never be “a wise thing to do in this country.” But events in Little Rock had acquired a momentum of their own. It is doubtful that even Orval Faubus and Jimmy Karam could have controlled them now. Only strict obedience of the court order would keep the Army out, and a crowd which has successfully defied policemen obeys nobody. Walking to his Newport office just before eight o’clock the following morning, Ike squinted at the horizon and said, “There’s a cold wind blowing up.” It was an omen. In less than an hour Brownell was on the line again with bad news from Central High. The mob was even bigger today; pushing and shoving, it jeered cops who tried to break it up. The nine Negro students had stayed home. In the opinion of the U.S. marshals, only their absence had saved the school from an invasion. This time Mayor Mann had sent Washington a telegram formally requesting presidential intervention. Eisenhower hung up and signed the proclamation, and that evening he went on national television to explain: “The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms rests upon the certainty that the President and the executive branch of government will support and insure the carrying out of the decisions of the federal courts, even, when necessary, with all the means at the President’s command. Unless the President did so, anarchy would result.”

  That morning, responding to the proclamation, Secretary of Defense Wilson had placed the Arkansas National Guard in federal service, beyond the reach of Governor Faubus, and General Maxwell Taylor, the Army chief of staff, had assigned the 327th Battle Group of the 101st Airborne Division to bring peace to Central High. Eight C-130 and C-123 transport planes had carried the paratroopers from Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, to Arkansas. As Eisenhower spoke to the nation the first trucks drew up in front of the school. For the first time since Reconstruction days southern intransigence on the issue of race had brought Army rule.

  The difference between these troops and the militia was striking. Both wore the same uniform, but the resemblance ended there. The National Guard was made up of weekend soldiers, easygoing, casual in dress, and slow to obey. The 101st Airborne was a crack outfit, professional in all ways. While salty officers carrying swagger sticks barked commands, disciplined men spilled out of the trucks and formed ranks on the school grounds. Jeeps were parked just so, in a line. Immaculate tents, each the same distance from the others, rose in a field beyond Central High’s tennis courts. Field telephone wires were strung from oaks in the school yard, and before dawn walkie-talkies crackled with the code names of communications men: “Hello, Defiance, this is Crossroads Six. Come in, Roadblock Alpha.”4

  Roadblock Alpha was the scene of the day’s most dramatic incident. The barrier had been thrown up in an intersection a block east of Central High. There, in the first olive moments of Tuesday morning, ringleaders began organizing their men. A lanky, lantern-jawed major watched them from beside a sound truck. His voice rasped over the loudspeaker: “Please return to your homes or it will be necessary to disperse you.” They didn’t budge. “Nigger
lover,” one of them muttered, and another called, “Russian!” A man in a baggy brown suit shouted to the others, “They’re just bluffing. If you don’t want to move, you don’t have to.”

  The major ripped out a command. Twelve paratroopers with fixed bayonets formed a line and braced their rifle butts against their hips in the on-guard position for riot control; it brought each bayonet on a line with the crowd’s throats. Again the major snapped an order, and the soldiers moved forward. The mob retreated. The man in the brown suit held his ground until the last moment; then he broke and ran. He didn’t run far, however. The Army had won the first skirmish, but the showdown was yet to come. The black children hadn’t even reached the school.

  That moment arrived in a crisp, swiftly executed maneuver. Central High’s 8:45 bell rang. Simultaneously the barricade at Park Avenue and Sixteenth Street opened to admit a lead jeep, an Army station wagon, and a rear guard jeep. They braked together in front of the school, and the Negro children emerged from the station wagon as three platoons of paratroopers ran up on the double with rifles at port arms and formed a semicircle, shielding the children with a hedge of bayonets. A fourth platoon, lining up on either side of the black students, escorted them up the steps. The crowd watched in stunned silence. Then a woman cried brokenly, “Oh my God! The niggers are inside!” Others shouted, “They’re in! They’re in!” Another woman screamed and tore at her hair. The crowd shifted, tilting forward.

  At Roadblock Alpha the throng had thickened. Again the major said harshly, “Let’s clear this area right now. This is the living end! I’ll tell you, we’re not going to do it on a slow walk this time.” Nothing happened, and he ordered the paratroopers to resume their advance. As they came on, the crowd recoiled, hopping, to the front lawn and then to the veranda of a private home, all the time yelling that this was private property, that the troopers had no right to come after them on it. The soldiers didn’t miss a step. Up on the porch they came, and then across it as the mob scrambled backward from the bayonets.

  Those who hesitated were being methodically pushed off the piazza when one of them struck back. He was C. E. Blake, a Missouri-Pacific switchman who had been among the most active agitators during the past two days. Blake seized a soldier’s rifle barrel and dragged him down. As they sprawled together another paratrooper reversed his M-1 and clouted the switchman’s head with the steel butt. Blood streaming from his scalp, he crawled away on all fours shouting at photographers, “Who knows the name of that lowlife son of a bitch who hit me?” Without a glance in his direction the troopers continued to move out while a stony-eyed sergeant called, “Keep those bayonets high—right at the base of the neck.”

  Back from Sea Island, Orval Faubus joked with the press (“I feel like MacArthur. I’ve been relieved of my job”) and asked the networks for equal time to answer President Eisenhower. ABC-TV gave it to him; the other two turned him down because he refused to answer questions afterward. In the Faubus version of what had happened, Blake had been “a guest in a home.” Troopers had run wild with “wholesale arrests.” High school girls had been “taken by the FBI and held incommunicado for hours of questioning while their frantic parents knew nothing of their whereabouts.” Young white southern womanhood was very much on the governor’s mind; he held up a photograph for just a moment and said, “Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in these unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls.” Again, he cried that he had returned from Georgia to find paratroopers “bludgeoning innocent bystanders, with bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls, and the warm, red blood of patriotic Americans staining the cold, naked, unsheathed knives.” At the end he cried: “In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty which we hold so dear, which we all cherish, what is happening in America?”

  What was happening in Little Rock bore little relationship to his speech. Blake, of course, had been no one’s guest. Only eight arrests had been made; four of the men had been fined for loitering, and the other four had been released at the police station. The FBI hadn’t questioned anyone; J. Edgar Hoover said the governor was “disseminating falsehoods.” As for the bayonets in girls’ backs, the picture, which Faubus had quickly whipped out of sight, was of girls walking—and giggling—past a group of soldiers.

  Those were the facts, and they testified to the good judgment of the troops from Fort Campbell. It continued to go unrecognized by Faubus. Two weeks later he descended to what the Washington Post and Times Herald called “the lavatory level,” charging that troopers were entering the girls’ locker room at Central High and staying to leer at their nudity. Reporters asked Faubus for eyewitness accounts or documentary proof. He replied, “I do not choose to release them at this time.” Actually he never produced evidence to support any of his accusations. In November the Army withdrew all but a token force from the school, and the black children began attending Central High unescorted. By the following May the incident belonged to history. It had been a skillful if expensive use of force; keeping the nine Negro students in school had cost the federal government $4,051,000.

  But the country paid another, far higher price for the events that autumn in Arkansas. The real significance of Little Rock lay in its impact on the white South. Deep in the southern consciousness lay tales of the Civil War and its aftermath, told to them in childhood by their grandparents, and the trouble at Central High evoked the martyred ghosts of that terrible era. On this subject they were beyond the reach of reason. Their reaction was compounded of the Stars and Bars, the strains of “Dixie,” Jackson at Bull Run, Lee at Appomattox, and the dead on the field at Antietam. It rendered them blind to Faubus’s clumsy lies. Northern soldiers on southern soil meant just one thing to them—an evil, loathsome presence to be attacked in righteous wrath, sounding a rebel yell that drowned out voices of sanity. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia accused Eisenhower of “applying tactics that must have been copied from the manual issued to the officers of Hitler’s storm troopers.”5 Senator Olin Johnson of South Carolina said, “If I were Governor Faubus, I’d proclaim an insurrection down there, and I’d call out the National Guard, and I’d then find out who’s going to run things in my state.” Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi charged, “Eisenhower has lit the fires of hate,” and Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia said, “We still mourn the destruction of Hungary. Now the South is threatened by the President of the United States using tanks [sic] and troops in the streets of Little Rock. I wish I could cast one vote for impeachment right now.” Alabama’s Governor James E. “Kissin’ Jim” Folsom promised that he would disband his state’s National Guard before he would let Eisenhower federalize it, and Governor James Bell Timmerman of South Carolina resigned his U.S. Navy reserve commission so he could not be called into service.

  They were the leaders. In a thousand ways private southerners made it known that they regarded Faubus as their hero and the President as their enemy. Gallup found that while only 10 percent of the people in northern and western states thought Eisenhower had been wrong in sending the troopers to Central High, only a third of the southerners thought he had been right. In Jacksonville, Florida, an Air Corps veteran mailed his four Air Medals and six battle stars to the White House for distribution among the paratroopers. In Marshall, Texas, a speaker at a Kiwanian luncheon said, “This is the darkest day in Southern history since the reconstruction”; the Kiwanians then refused to pledge their allegiance to the flag. Near Dover, Delaware, two Negroes in business suits were ordered to leave a Howard Johnson restaurant by a waitress who said, “Colored people are not allowed to eat in here,” thereby embarrassing the State Department; one of the men was the finance minister of Ghana, who had entertained Richard Nixon in his home, and the other was his secretary. As always in the South, the raising of the racial issue was accompanied by intimations of terror. In Albany, Georgia, night riders put a college for Negroes to the torch, and at the height of the Little Rock crisis six Alabamans trapped a black name
d Judge Aaron on a lonely country road, took him to a deserted shack, castrated him with a razor blade, and poured turpentine into the wound. None of them had known Aaron; one of them said afterward, “We just wanted some nigger at random.”

  The subsequent career of Orval Faubus was a measure of southern feeling. The governor had played his role in full view of Arkansas voters. Elsewhere biased reporting may have clouded the judgment of readers, but not in Faubus’s home state; one of the bravest chapters in American journalism was written by Harry Scott Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his superb coverage of the turmoil at Central High. Not all of his subscribers were appreciative. Ashmore’s phone rang around the clock with threatening calls; Faubus denounced him as “an ardent integrationist”; Little Rock’s racist Capital Citizens Council called him the state’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” and a statewide boycott cost the Gazette 3,000 subscriptions. He continued to print the truth, whereupon the people of Arkansas swept Faubus back into the statehouse in 1958 for a third term—he received 255,086 votes; the man who ran second got 56,966—and continued to reelect him by massive majorities in subsequent elections. In 1967, after twelve years in the executive mansion, he retired.

  Outside the South, and indeed beyond the United States, was another matter. The struggle to put the nine black children in Central High had global ramifications. Little Rock, an editor wrote at the time, had become “a name known wherever men could read newspapers and listen to radios, a symbol to be distorted in Moscow, misinterpreted in New Delhi,” and “painfully explained in London.” Americans solicitous of good opinion in foreign capitals were chagrined. They recognized the principles at stake in Arkansas, and saw them being flouted; and they felt shame.