Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  Though thousands of blacks once again rode the buses daily, the streets of Montgomery had become a battleground of another sort. Snipers fired at buses, and a pregnant black woman was shot in the leg while riding a bus. Several weeks later, Rev. Abernathy’s home and church were bombed, as were four other black churches and the homes of two pastors. Citing the danger of snipers, the city commissioners suspended bus operations after 5 P.M. for a week. A few days after the regular bus schedules resumed, officials imposed a second week-long bus curfew. The white opposition had reason to smile—now they were making the blacks walk.

  Segregationists distributed fliers that they claimed were written by blacks. “Look Out,” said one leaflet. “Liver-lipped Luther [King] is getting us in more trouble every day … We get shot at while he hides. Wake up. Mess is his business. Run him out of town.”

  A group calling itself the Rebel Club sought a franchise to form a whites-only bus line. That was denied, but the bombings continued.

  As difficult as it proved for Montgomery to adjust to integrated buses, the city’s success fired the imagination of blacks throughout the country. Boycotts began in neighboring Birmingham and Mobile, and also in Tallahassee, Florida.

  An informal organization arose out of the network of southern churches that had supported the Montgomery bus boycott. On January 10 and 11, 1957, less than two months after the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the boycotters, a meeting was called in Atlanta, Georgia. Ministers from eleven southern states met at Martin Luther King, Sr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. For two days they discussed the success of the boycott, the new network of churches, the importance of nonviolence both as a tactic and as a morally right position, and plans for the future.

  The ministers decided that they needed to establish a formal organization to continue the struggle for civil rights. The Reverend T. J. Jemison, the leader of the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott and a founding member of the new organization, described how they eventually chose their name: “Since the NAACP was like waving a red flag in front of some southern whites, we decided that we needed an organization that would do the same thing and yet be called a Christian organization …. We chose ‘Southern Christian Leadership Conference,’ so they would say, ‘Well, that’s Baptist preachers,’ so they didn’t fear us.”

  The new organization then elected the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as its president. The articulate leadership of King and the founding of the SCLC were two important results of the Montgomery bus boycott. So too was the realization that black people, united for a just cause, could successfully stand up to segregation.

  As Martin Luther King wrote in his book Stride Toward Freedom, “The story of Montgomery is the story of 50,000 Negroes who were willing to substitute tired feet for tired souls and walk the streets of Montgomery until the walls of segregation were finally battered by the forces of justice!”

  Chapter Four

  Hall Monitors from the 101st

  The Little Rock Story

  “For a vast majority of southerners playing at politics, it has been not necessarily the democratic process in action, so much as a thoroughly delightful sport.”

  Thomas D. Clark in “Economic Basis of Southern Politics”

  The Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in its 1954 Brown decision, but only two southern states began desegregation that year—Texas integrated one school district; Arkansas, two. In the rest of the South, not a single classroom was racially mixed. Most school officials claimed they were waiting for the Supreme Court’s expected implementation decision before executing an integration plan. Five of the seven states closest to the North began desegregation in 1954. But even there, acceptance of the court’s ruling was slow.

  The law school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville voluntarily admitted blacks as early as 1948, and the university’s medical school in Little Rock did the same. In fact, nearly half the student body of that city’s University of Arkansas Graduate Center was black. This relatively progressive attitude toward race relations made Little Rock an unlikely stage for the crisis that developed there in 1957. But that crisis had as much to do with political grandstanding as with blacks and whites.

  From the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, blacks in Little Rock made dramatic gains. Some blacks had been allowed to join the police force, and in a few neighborhoods blacks and whites lived next door to one another. In contrast to their counterparts in most southern states, thirty-three percent of all eligible Arkansas blacks were registered to vote. The library, parks, and public buses had all been integrated, and in 1955 white schools seemed ready to open their doors to blacks.

  Daisy Bates, the president of the NAACP in Arkansas.

  The Little Rock school board was the first in the South to issue a statement of compliance after the Supreme Court’s ruling. “It is our responsibility,” the board announced just five days after the decision, “to comply with federal constitutional requirements, and we intend to do so when the Supreme Court of the United States outlines the methods to be followed.”

  Black leaders had high hopes for a smooth transition to integrated classrooms. In the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat, both white-run daily newspapers, Little Rock residents read words of support for desegregation. In 1954, Daisy Bates, head of the state NAACP, called Little Rock a “liberal southern city.”

  But despite the recent changes, Little Rock was still a highly segregated town. If there was little racial strife in the community of over 100,000, it was mainly because most everyone knew the rules of segregation and followed them.

  In the summer of 1954, Virgil T. Blossom, Little Rock’s superintendent of schools, drafted a scheme for implementing desegregation. He proposed to begin with two high schools then under construction; the schools were scheduled to open in the fall of 1956. Integration of the junior high schools would follow the next year, and finally the grade schools would be desegregated, at an unspecified date. In the fall of 1954, Blossom began explaining the plan to black and white members of the school district staff. On May 24, 1955 the school board adopted a much-diluted version of the Blossom Plan.

  The board’s scheme, known as the Little Rock Phase Program, limited integration to just one school, Central High, and delayed implementation until September 1957. Only a limited number of black children would be allowed to join the student body, which consisted of about 2,000 white youngsters from a working-class neighborhood. The soon-to-be-completed Hall High School would, for an unspecified time, be attended only by the largely upper-middle-class white youngsters who lived on the city’s west side. The school district’s lower grades would be integrated over the next six years, but students would be allowed to transfer from a school where their race was in the minority. This final provision left little chance that any of the currently all-black schools would be integrated.

  The school board tried to justify its gradual approach by citing the danger of sudden change. “Since our school system has been segregated from its beginning until the present time,” the officials stated, “the time required in the process as outlined should not be construed as unnecessary delay but that which is justly needed with respect to the size and complexity of the job at hand … By starting integration at the senior high level, the process will begin where fewer teachers and students are involved. In the adoption of [this] plan of integration, [which starts with one school and with the oldest children in the school system] … we provide the opportunity to benefit from our own experience as we move through each phase of this plan, thus avoiding as many mistakes as possible.”

  Little Rock’s school superintendent Virgil T. Blossom, whose plan for gradual school desegregation was rejected by other members of the school committee. The school committee received criticism from the black community for moving too slowly on desegregation, and threats of violence from segregationists for moving too quickly.

  On May 31, the Supreme Court ruled that desegregation need only be implemented “with all deliber
ate speed.” In response, Arkansas segregationists called for a state constitutional amendment that would circumvent the Court’s orders. A young politician named James Johnson led the amendment campaign. His sudden gain in statewide popularity, based largely on his hard-line segregationist ideology, disturbed not only Arkansas blacks but the governor as well.

  Governor Orval Faubus, elected in 1954, was neither a moderate nor a reactionary on race issues; he was an old-fashioned southern politician who tried to tell the people what they wanted to hear. Because the governor’s term in Arkansas was only two years long, Faubus was always running for office. In the 1954 election, he won the support of central and northern Arkansas, and he knew that by directing funds toward local projects he could keep that support in the next election. His support was weakest in the southeastern part of the state, where large cotton plantations were run by whites and worked by black people. Although blacks in this Arkansas Delta could vote, their votes were controlled through economic intimidation by their white employers, who delivered the black vote to those whom they favored. Governor Faubus thought he would need their favor in the next election, and was unsettled by James Johnson’s growing popularity in that region.

  In Little Rock, white opposition to the Phase Program surfaced quickly. Robert Erving Brown, president of the segregationist Capital Citizens’ Council, a small but vociferous organization in the city, told reporters, “The Negroes have ample and fine schools here, and there is no need for this problem except to satisfy the aims of a few white and Negro revolutionaries in the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Another Council member, attorney Amis Guthridge, voiced his objections to the plan at a school board meeting on June 27. Along with the Reverend Wesley Pruden of the Broadmoor Baptist Church, Guthridge argued that school integration would have unintended consequences—for example, would blacks be allowed to dance with whites at school dances? A week later, the board offered a written reply. “Social functions which involve race mixing will not be held …” the board wrote. “Integration of the PTA is a matter to be decided within those organizations; all pupils will use restroom facilities regularly provided; teachers can and will avoid situations such as love scenes in class plays featuring students of different races …”

  NAACP attorneys Wiley Branton (left) and Thurgood Marshall.

  Late in January of 1956, Governor Faubus announced a poll indicating that eighty-five percent of Arkansans opposed integrating schools in their state. He proclaimed that he could not “be a party to any attempt to force acceptance of change to which the people are so overwhelmingly opposed.”

  The growing opposition to desegregation both locally and throughout the state began to alarm Little Rock’s blacks, many of whom were dissatisfied with the limited scope of the Phase Plan and its vague statement that integration “may start in 1957.” Seeking a stronger assurance that their children would at last be guaranteed their constitutional rights, they enlisted the aid of the state NAACP. In February, Wiley Branton, chairman of the NAACP Legal Redress Committee, and U. Simpson Tate, regional attorney for the NAACP, filed suit in federal district court hoping to force immediate and thorough integration of the schools. The suit charged that black children in Little Rock were being rejected from four schools there because of their skin color.

  “It became rather obvious to the NAACP that the Little Rock board really was not going to move forward unless they were forced to …” Branton recalls. “I filed that suit … on behalf of [thirty-three] Negro children and their parents, running through elementary, junior, and senior high school.”

  Leon Catlett, the school board’s attorney, tried to embarrass the NAACP by pointing out that the local branch of that organization had refused to file the suit because they felt that Little Rock had relatively few racial problems and that the school board did have a plan to desegregate, albeit an imperfect one. Catlett provoked further animosity by referring to the NAACP’s “nigger leaders” during the hearing and calling state NAACP president Daisy Bates by her first name.

  Branton had advised NAACP attorney Tate to center his legal arguments on the school board’s delaying tactics, but instead Tate based his case on the unconstitutionality of school segregation—the same premise that had won the Brown case. But federal district court judge John E. Miller dismissed the suit, saying that the school board had devised its plan for gradual integration in “utmost good faith.” Thurgood Marshall, heading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, joined Branton in appealing the case to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. This time they argued that the board’s delays amounted to a sly dodge of the Supreme Court mandate. But on April 27, 1957, the appeals court ruled that the Little Rock plan complied with the Supreme Court’s “deliberate speed” prescription for enacting school desegregation. The judges insisted, however, that the school board allow no further delays, and they ordered the federal district court to retain jurisdiction over the case to prevent stalling.

  Governor Orval Faubus speaking at a press conference.

  Branton and Marshall were tempted to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, but they decided against that route. It was already the spring of 1957, and the high court would be in recess until that fall. By then, desegregation in Little Rock would be underway. Also, an unsuccessful Supreme Court appeal could have unwanted repercussions. As Branton later explained, “This would be the first case [of its kind] going to the Supreme Court … We thought [the school board’s scheme] was a pretty sloppy plan, and we didn’t want to run the risk of having the court adopt that one as a model plan for the nation.” So even though the NAACP Legal Defense Fund felt the Little Rock plan was too limited and too gradual, it reluctantly embraced the scheme after the court’s endorsement.

  Many Arkansas whites were angry that the NAACP had taken the school board to court at all. They felt that the city had been working its way quietly but steadily toward desegregation. In retaliation, lawmakers introduced four prosegregation bills in the state legislature. One bill allowed the school board to hire lawyers to contest suits calling for school integration; another made attendance at integrated schools voluntary; the third required organizations and individuals “challenging the authority” of local or state officials to register with the state and make regular reports of their budgets; and a fourth bill created a state sovereignty commission to “perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary to protect the sovereignty of Arkansas and other states from encroachments of the federal government.” The measures passed the Arkansas house by a vote of eighty-eight to one before going on to the state senate.

  One critic of the bills asserted that they were “more in harmony with the principles of communist and fascist governments” than with American democracy. And although Governor Faubus supported the bills, his appointee as head of Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, Winthrop Rockefeller, charged that creation of a sovereignty commission would be tantamount to setting up an “Arkansas Gestapo.” As a guardian of business interests in the state, Rockefeller worried that increasing racial strife would scare off the northern-based industry that agrarian Arkansas was then trying to lure to the state. But despite the opposition, all four bills passed the senate and became law early in 1957. The NAACP would now have to reveal its members’ names and its budget to the government, while the white Capital Citizens Council would be eligible for state support through the new Sovereignty Commission.

  As segregationist sentiment grew during the summer, the Little Rock school board launched a quiet campaign to pare down the number of black students eligible to attend Central High School. Branton recalls, “As the summer went by and Little Rock decided that, ‘Oh, my God, this thing is on us,’ they started putting up all kinds of barriers. They required black children who wanted to go to white schools to register … Approximately seventy-five black kids signed up to go to Central High School. And then as the opening of school approached, the Little Rock school board screened the sevent
y-five down to twenty-five.”

  Then the board tried to dissuade even those twenty-five from attending Central. According to Branton, they “began calling in parents of kids, saying, ‘If you really want your son to play football, you ought to stay over there at Horace Mann [the all-black high school],’ or, ‘Your daughter has a magnificent voice … but if she goes over to the white school, and being new, she could get lost in the shuffle and won’t get a chance to sing.’”

  In the end, only nine black students enrolled at Central. None of the thirty-three students whose parents had sued over the slowness of the desegregation plan were among them. “The nine of the twenty-five [were] selected by the school board because they were trying to get ‘good’ Negroes, and none of the ‘radicals’ who sued them …,” said Branton. “They became the Little Rock Nine and carved out a place in history.”

  In August 1957, less than two weeks before integration was scheduled to begin, Georgia governor Marvin Griffin visited Little Rock at the invitation of the Citizens Council. He told the 300 white guests at a ten-dollar-a-plate dinner that he had no intention of complying with the Supreme Court’s dictate. The only connection between the federal government and the Georgia public schools, he contended, was Uncle Sam’s financial contribution to school lunches. “If they try to tell us then to integrate the races,” he warned, “I will be compelled to tell them to get their black-eyed peas and soup pots out of Georgia.” The crowd stood and cheered. Governor Griffin then urged them to join him in rejecting the high court’s ruling. They could prevail, he said, through “the determined and cooperative efforts of a dedicated people, a steadfast general assembly and an administration committed unequivocally toward preservation of our cherished institutions …”

  That night, a rock was thrown through Daisy Bates’ living room window. “Instinctively, I threw myself to the floor,” Bates later recounted in her book The Long Shadow of Little Rock. “I was covered with shattered glass … I reached for the rock lying in the middle of the floor. A note was tied to it. I broke the string and unfolded a soiled piece of paper. Scrawled in bold print were the words: ‘Stone this time. Dynamite next.’”