Five days later, on August 27, another unexpected volley was tossed at Bates and the NAACP. Governor Faubus had privately arranged for the Mothers’ League of Little Rock Central High, a newly formed segregationist group, to file for a temporary injunction in Pulaski County Chancery Court, arguing that Central High should remain white. Mrs. Clyde A. Thomason, head of the group, told the judge that black and white students were buying knives and guns in anticipation of gang warfare. The parents were afraid to send their children to the school, she said. Chancellor Murray O. Reed demanded evidence supporting Thomason’s contentions; she could produce none. Then a surprise witness took the stand—Governor Orval Faubus. The governor claimed that guns and knives had recently been confiscated from Little Rock students. This time the judge did not ask for evidence, and the governor went on to say that in the past three weeks, Arkansas residents had shifted their attitudes on desegregation. “People are coming to me and saying, ‘If Georgia doesn’t have to integrate, why does Arkansas have to?’” Faubus said.
Governor Faubus in front of the governor’s mansion with members of the Mothers’ League of Little Rock Central High.
The Little Rock Nine. Front row (left to right): Jefferson Thomas, Carlotta Walls, Gloria Ray, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed. Back row (left to right): Melba Pattillo, Terrance Roberts, Minniejean Brown, Ernest Green.
The governor had asked that same question during a mid-August telephone conversation with the U.S. Justice Department. A department official had traveled to Little Rock to gauge the threat of violence and the need for federal intervention. But the governor could provide no evidence of likely mayhem, and Little Rock police knew of no surge in local weapons sales. The Justice Department informed the governor that it would do nothing to delay desegregation.
Chancellor Reed, however, reached a different conclusion. He granted the temporary injunction, blocking desegregation of Central High School. “In view of the testimony,” he said, “and the show of the threat of violence, riots and bloodshed, and particularly the opinion of Governor Faubus, I feel I can only rule to grant the injunction.” The courtroom resounded with applause. Desegregation would be delayed again—this time indefinitely.
Daisy Bates couldn’t sleep that night. Rowdies kept driving by her house, honking their horns and shouting, “Daisy, Daisy, did you hear the news? The coons won’t be going to Central!”
On August 30, Wiley Branton and Thurgood Marshall asked the federal district court to nullify the injunction. Judge Ronald N. Davies ruled that, in the absence of concrete evidence that violence was likely, desegregation must proceed. “When the governor couldn’t block us in court,” said Branton, “he announced that he’d given the matter further consideration and was going to go on statewide television. So everybody thought he was going to say that he’d done his best, and that the law is the law and everybody ought to be patient and tolerant and cooperative and this, that, and the other …”
Branton was wrong. On September 2, the day before the schools were to open in Little Rock, Faubus went on statewide television and announced that he intended to surround Central High with National Guardsmen because of “evidence of disorder and threats of disorder.”
“[This decision] has been made after conferences with dozens of people …,” Faubus said. “The mission of the state militia is to maintain or restore order and to protect the lives and property of citizens. They will not act as segregationists or integrationists but as soldiers … it will not be possible to restore or to maintain order and protect the lives and property of the citizens if forcible integration is carried out tomorrow in the schools of this community. The inevitable conclusion, therefore, must be that schools in Pulaski County, for the time being, must be operated on the same [segregated] basis as they have been operated in the past …”
When Winthrop Rockefeller heard of the governor’s plan, he immediately went to the capitol to see Faubus. Rockefeller argued that using the national guard would scare off businessmen his Industrial Development Commission sought to attract. But Faubus told Rockefeller he had to stop the blacks. “I’m sorry, but I’m committed,” the governor said, according to a Rockefeller associate quoted in Time magazine. “I’m going to run for a third term, and if I don’t do this, Jim Johnson and Bruce Bennett [both segregationists] will tear me to shreds [in next year’s gubernatorial race].”
Daisy Bates was stunned, as was her husband, L. C. Bates, publisher of a black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. “His words electrified Little Rock,” Daisy Bates recounts. “By morning they shocked the United States. By noon the next day, his message horrified the world … From the chair of the highest office of the state of Arkansas, Governor Orval Eugene Faubus delivered the infamous words, ‘Blood will run in the streets’ if Negro pupils should attempt to enter Central High School.”
The next day, the first day of school, 250 National Guardsmen stood on the sidewalks outside Central High. “Little Rock arose … to gaze upon the incredible spectacle of an empty high school surrounded by the National Guard, troops called out by Gov. Faubus to protect life and property against a mob that never materialized,” wrote the Gazette.
As the parents of the nine black youngsters slated to enter Central conferred with NAACP officials and lawyers, the school board issued a written statement, saying that “although the federal court has ordered integration to proceed, Governor Faubus has said that the schools should continue as they have in the past and has stationed troops at Central High to maintain order … We ask that no Negro student attempt to attend Central or any white high school until this dilemma is legally resolved.” The board then sought guidance from Judge Ronald Davies, the magistrate who just days earlier had ordered integration to go forward. Judge Davies immediately ordered them to proceed with the integration plan, saying that he was aware of the segregationist sentiment in Little Rock but that “I have a constitutional duty and obligation from which I shall not shrink.”
Rebuffed by the court, the school board advised the nine black students to attend school the next day, September 4. Although Superintendent Blossom promised that the children would be protected, their parents were afraid. Because the board had asked the parents not to accompany their youngsters to school, explaining that the presence of the black parents might incite a mob, Daisy Bates made preparations to take the children to school. She telephoned eight sets of parents with instructions to have the children meet her at 12th Street and Park Avenue at 8:30 A.M., where two police cars would be waiting to drive them to school. But she failed to reach the Eckfords, parents of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth. They had no telephone, and Bates forgot to send a message.
As Elizabeth prepared for school the next morning, she heard the newscaster on the television wondering aloud whether the black children would dare to show up at the school. Birdee Eckford told her daughter to turn off the set. “She was so upset and worried,” Elizabeth recalls. “I wanted to comfort her, so I said, ‘Mother, don’t worry.’” Her father paced the floor with a cigar in one hand and a pipe in the other—both unlit. The family prayed together, then Elizabeth set off for school in the crisply pressed black-and-white dress that she and her mother had made especially for this day. She walked to the public bus stop and rode off toward her new high school.
Getting off the bus near Central High, Eckford saw a throng of white people and hundreds of armed soldiers. But the presence of the guardsmen reassured her. The superintendent had told the black students to come in through the main entrance at the front of the school, so Elizabeth headed in that direction. “I looked at all the people and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be safe if I walk down the block to the front entrance behind the guards,’” she remembers. “At the corner I tried to pass through the long lines of guards around the school so as to enter the grounds behind them. One [soldier] pointed across the street … so I walked across the street conscious of the crowd that stood there, but they moved away from me … [Then] the crowd began to follow me, calling me nam
es. I still wasn’t afraid—just a little bit nervous. Then my knees started to shake all of a sudden and I wondered whether I could make it to the center entrance a block away. It was the longest block I ever walked in my whole life. Even so, I wasn’t too scared, because all the time I kept thinking the [guards] would protect me.
Elizabeth Eckford was met with shouts of hatred when she tried to attend Central High on the first day of classes.
“When I got in front of the school, I went up to a guard again,” she continues. “He just looked straight ahead and didn’t move to let me pass. I didn’t know what to do … Just then the guards let some white students through … I walked up to the guard who had let [them] in. He too didn’t move. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet, and then the other guards moved in and raised their bayonets … Somebody started yelling, ‘Lynch her! Lynch her!’”
As Daisy and L. C. Bates drove toward the appointed meeting place at 12th Street and Park Avenue, they heard a news bulletin over the car radio. “A Negro girl is being mobbed at Central High …,” the announcer said. L. C. jumped out of the car and ran as fast as he could to the school.
“I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob …,” Elizabeth recalls. “I looked into the face of an old woman, and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”
The young woman heard someone snarl, “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school. Get out of here.” The guards looked on impassively; Eckford was on her own. “I looked down the block and saw a bench at the bus stop. Then I thought, ‘If I can only get there, I will be safe.’” She ran to the bench and sat down, but a cluster of ruffians had followed her. “Drag her over to the tree,” said one of them, calling for a lynching.
Then Benjamin Fine, an education writer for the New York Times, put his arm around Elizabeth. “He raised my chin and said, ‘Don’t let them see you cry,’” she recalls. Finally a white woman named Grace Lorch, whose husband taught at a local black college, guided Elizabeth away from the mob. The two tried to enter a nearby drugstore to call a cab, but someone slammed the door in their faces. Then they spotted a bus coming and quickly boarded it. Lorch accompanied Elizabeth home safely, but the experience had left its mark. Afterwards, the fifteen-year-old sometimes woke in the night, terrified, screaming about the mob.
Eckford sits at a bus stop near Central High, surrounded by a hostile mob. Benjamin Fine, New York Times education editor, is visible directly behind Eckford, and Grace Lorch stands at right.
The other black students did not have to face the mob alone, but they, too, failed to get past the Arkansas National Guardsmen and into Central High. The next day, Judge Davies asked the Justice Department to investigate the disruptions in the integration plan. Governor Faubus, triumphant in defying the federal courts, was nonetheless nervous about how the administration might respond. He sent a telegram to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying that he had been “reliably informed” that United States officials were planning to arrest him. “I have reason to believe,” he went on, “that the telephone lines to the Arkansas executive mansion have been tapped—I suspect federal agents.” The governor also asked Eisenhower to “use your good office to modify the extreme stand” of the federal courts.
Eisenhower’s return telegram assured Faubus that the federal government did not plan to jail the governor and that his phone was not tapped. The president also wired that the Justice Department, at Judge Davies’ request, was “collecting facts as to interference with or failure to comply with the district court’s order.” The president reminded Faubus that, as governor, he should fully cooperate with the United States district court.
But Faubus remained intransigent and kept the Arkansas National Guard posted around the school. The school board again requested that the federal court suspend the desegregation plan, and the court again refused.
Increasingly, observers were laying some of the blame for the crisis at Eisenhower’s door. In Little Rock, Thurgood Marshall told a reporter that the president would have to move soon. When asked if he saw Little Rock as a conflict of authority between the state and federal governments, Marshall replied, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”
But Eisenhower was reluctant to clash with Faubus. He did not want to take sides in the desegregation battle. In July the president had said in a news conference that he could not “imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops … to enforce the orders of a federal court, because I believe the common sense of Americans will never require it.”
“President Eisenhower’s position,” recalls his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, “was that he was president of all the people. He felt that his role was to stay in a position where, when the showdown came for enforcement, he would be able to talk to both sides and persuade them.”
On September 9, the Justice Department concluded that Governor Faubus had had no concrete evidence that trouble would erupt at Central High if blacks were allowed to enroll; the governor had acted solely as a segregationist—trying to keep blacks out of a white school—when he called out the National Guard. On September 10, at Judge Davies’ request, the Justice Department filed a petition for an injunction against Faubus to force his immediate compliance with the desegregation order. The injunction would also require the removal of the National Guard from Central High at once. The hearing on the injunction request would take place on September 20. Meanwhile, Faubus refused to remove the soldiers who were still preventing the black students from entering the school. Faubus later defended his stand, calling federal officials “a bunch of goddamn cowards for not coming in from the beginning and saying, ‘Here is a federal court order.’”
On September 14, President Eisenhower met with Governor Faubus in Newport, Rhode Island, to discuss the crisis in Little Rock.
On September 14, Faubus met with Eisenhower at the president’s summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. Eisenhower told the governor that he did not object to the presence of the Arkansas National Guard at the school, but that they should have been assigned to protect the nine black children, not to scare them away at gunpoint. Faubus appeared amenable to Eisenhower’s comments, but then suggested that the president defy the courts by ordering a one-year delay in the desegregation process, ostensibly to allow the governor time to mollify the agitated community. Eisenhower refused, saying that the courts must be obeyed. Faubus seemed to understand, and the president thought he had persuaded the man to allow the youngsters into Central High.
Faubus and the Press
Throughout the Little Rock school crisis, the Arkansas Gazette wrote a series of editorials criticizing the actions of Governor Faubus and urging gradual implementation of desegregation under the terms spelled out by the federal courts. The Gazette became a target for the governor and the object of an economic boycott run by Faubus’ supporters. Despite such opposition, the newspaper received a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for public service. The newspaper’s executive editor, Harry S. Ashmore, won a second Pulitzer for distinguished editorial writing. This editorial originally appeared on October 10, 1957.
Mr. Faubus Is Where He Was
Governor Faubus said at his press conference yesterday that the Little Rock crisis now hinges upon the withdrawal of the nine Negro children who are presently peacefully attending Central High School under federal court order and federal military protection.
This, of course, is one answer.
It happens to be the answer the Citizens Councils have been offering ever since the United States Supreme Court ruled that Negroes could no longer be barred from any school solely on the basis of race. If the Negroes voluntarily choose not to attend white schools then there is no problem. And if they do not voluntarily so choose, but can be coerced or intimidated into withdrawing, there is no problem.
But the federal government has said that these nine children cannot be so coerced or intimidated, and has used the full weight of both the judicial
and executive departments to guarantee that they shall not be.
So what Mr. Faubus is saying is that the federal government must abandon its position and let him have his way on his own terms. There is no indication that the federal government will do so.
But still, with all this, the governor contends that all he wants is delay. He says that Negroes cannot attend Central High School peaceably now, but he suggests that they can at some indefinite future date. At one point or another he has suggested that this might be possible next semester or next fall—the last date being, in our judgment, the significant one since it comes after the next gubernatorial election.
But what the governor never explains is why he thinks it will be any easier to carry out the court order then than it was this time around—or any easier, that is, than it would have been had he not recklessly chosen to disrupt the patient and careful work of the responsible local school officials who had every reason to believe that their limited and gradual plan was acceptable to a vast majority of the people.
Could the governor guarantee that no mob would form next semester, or next fall, if the Negro children again presented themselves under court order? He probably could, as a matter of fact, but he has repeatedly indicated that he will not do so—as indeed he cannot do without sacrificing the temporary political advantages he has gained. And so there is no valid reason to assume that delay will resolve the impasse which Mr. Faubus has made.
We doubt that Mr. Faubus can simply wear the federals out—although he is doing a pretty good job of wearing out his own people.
Eyes on the Prize Page 13
