Last month marked the 51 st
year since the
desegregation struggles at Central
High, what is often referred to as the “crisis” of Little Rock. Much has changed in our thinking about these events, just as much has changed in the social, political and civil character of our nation. As we move into the next half century of remembering Little Rock in 1957, it is worth pausing to consider why this episode remains so prominent in the minds of people throughout the state and across this country. If I might take some liberty with the words of my own father, Ernest Green: after three majors wars, revolutions in political ideology, paradigm shifts in economic structure and fortunes, and transformations in social attitude, why are we still talking about high school ? I suggest three ways of explaining Little Rock ’ 57 ’s enduring significance in public memory and civil imagination. Each helps explain why Central High has been remembered, and why it will continue to be remembered.
Little Rock ’ 57 is remembered because it put a human face on the great struggles that attended the overthrow of segregated life in the U. S. South.
Veterans of the struggle to overcome educational segregation in Little Rock are quick to tell you that, inspiring though the events of 1957 were, the problem they sought to address still remains. Secondary effects of chronic residential segregation, coupled with achievement barriers, unequal distribution of educational resources (including access to AP slots ) make educational inequality an ongoing—and still troubling—challenge. The various elements that conspire to prevent true opening of schools in Little Rock and the nation to all can at times seem monumental in their complexity.
We often forget how true this was in 1957 also. The forces which informed the struggle over Central High—the collision of collective mores and traditions; the ambitions and egos of the leadership figures involved, and the enormous implications of that struggle to the future for the region and country—tested the best minds of that day.
What the Nine African-American students who first made their way through that school’s doors did was bring this complex story down to a basic human level—they made it comprehensible with the language of everyday hopes and fears. The small acts of making one’s way to and around school became the exemplar of civil rights, social freedom, and human dignity. We see this perhaps affirmed best by their compelling source for interviews, photographs and, yes, editorial comment within the nation’s newspapers, helping make Little Rock 1957 the second most prominent story in the 1957 American Press, after the launch of Sputnik.
One might even move beyond the Nine and speak about the efforts recently of white students at the schoolin some case students who were ardent segregationists—as its own search to tell this momentous story, years after the fact, in the language of everyday life. Contentious as it is to sometimes engage these voices, they are also trying to lend a human face to actions and motivations less easy to comfortably embrace. Nevertheless they show why the desire to tell the story of Little Rock remains powerful—and needed.
Little Rock ’ 57, though a struggle that unfolded in everyday spaces, was not a struggle that was solely or even primarily about everyday issues.
We know this most obviously because of the key terms of constitutional meaning—such as supremacy, interposition, state’s rights—the key concepts of social change and tradition—like gradualism or precedentand the clashing imperatives of racial supremacy and racial dignity that vied for attention within a dynamic arena of public policy and social action.
But one might go further and say that Little Rock ’ 57 helped animate two grand ideas of American public life that have profoundly shaped our own times:
The Movement premise of the inherent dignity of social change—The belief that a better and ultimately just society was best enacted by an activated community, identifying wrongs and seeking to correct them, is in many ways the central moral of civil rights history. Few events did more to inspire individuals—especially young individuals—to devote themselves to that change than the example of the first African-American students at Central High
The conservative story is of the inherent abusiveness of centralized governmental authority. We should not forget that when Jim Johnson drove to Virginia in 1957 to learn the doctrine of interposition under journalist James J. Kilpatrick, he was not only the only one in search of a rationale for resistance to federal power. The late William F. Buckley, voice and mind of conservatism’s revitalization in the twentieth century, was himself an avid student of Kilpatrick’s ideas, citing them in early issues of the National Review and championing, for a number of years, the cause of segregationist resistance in the South. According to this viewpoint, Little Rock was stark evidence of federal overreach, and the progeny of the original sin of judicial activism—the landmark Brown v. Board of Ed decision.
Little Rock ’ 57 affirms a fundamentally progressive understanding of this country. “Progressive” here corresponds to the classic premise that the United States comprises a republic and polity requiring perpetual growth and improvement so as to remain a viable experiment in political and human community. One way to better understand this is to consult the writing and thinking of that century’s pre-eminent citizen, Abraham Lincoln.
Though Lincoln was wary early in his career of advocating an elastic sphere of national citizenship, one can see how he grew more committed to expanding that sphere as president, through his affirming statements to European immigrants or his advocacy of measures such as the Homestead Act allowing a dramatic increase in property freeholds among the population. The outstanding example of Lincoln’s commitment to an expanding sphere of citizenship, of course, was his shift on the question of African-American citizenship—fitfully through his deliberations leading to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and more unequivocally in his proposed measures to enfranchise trial groups of freedmen toward the end of the Civil War and, tragically, his life.
Ultimately, this evolution on Lincoln’s part, as well as on the part of muchthough tellingly, not all—of the country represented a still broader affirmation of the nation’s claim to be the “last great hope for men on Earth.” Yet any such hope could not be sustained devoid of actions that established that this nation, and nations generally, had a duty to expand and not restrict the sphere of rights and liberty.
This sense of national mission has endured numerous tests in the intervening century and a half. Little Rock of course, represents one of the most poignant and instructive of those tests. And whatever is understood to constitute the defining struggle of our time or others, it is the charge to affirm this idea that constitutes the task for the ages in this land. Whether we join it in a spirit of expansive possibility, or with a sense of suspicion and fear, comprises our ongoing challenge. Little Rock ’ 57, and what sense we make of it, helps sort out where we all stand with regards to that crucial question.
Adam Green is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
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