Karen Anderson.  Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High
School.  Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America Series.
Princeton  Princeton University Press, 2010.  344 pp.  $39.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-09293-5.

Reviewed by Robert S. Smith (Associate Professor of History,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Published on H-Policy (February, 2013)
Commissioned by Douglas J. Forsyth

"The Canary in the Mine": 1950s Little Rock as the Testing Ground for
Orchestrated Resistance to School Desegregation

Much has been written about African Americans' efforts to force local
school boards and resistant politicians to honor the Supreme Court's
decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_ (1954) to desegregate
schools. Ample scholarship also chronicles the array of resistance
strategies deployed in opposition to African American demands for
school integration. These works have exposed segregationists'
willingness to use violence and various forms of harassment.
Grassroots resistance to desegregation was buttressed by leading
southern politicians, who encouraged outright defiance of the Supreme
Court ruling, as illustrated in the infamous Southern Manifesto of
1956. The struggle over school integration outside of the South has
also garnered much scholarly attention. School desegregation served
as the central battleground between those challenging segregation and
those hellbent on preserving the system, and with it the benefits
enjoyed by whites in a segregated society. The "Little Rock Crisis,"
as scholars of the city's desegregation battle have named it, became
"_the_ central symbolic event in the racial and sectional politics of
the 1950s" and one of the key symbolic events in school desegregation
(p. 4).

Indeed, Little Rock was "the testing ground for the South" (p. 192).
As Karen Anderson shows in _Little Rock_, resistance in the city
would shape resistance to school desegregation across the South, and
ultimately nationwide over the next half-century. The Little Rock
crisis provided a blueprint for subsequent strategies to resist
_Brown_, and served "as a site for the creation of a class-conscious
thinking about race that would inform 'color-blind' law in the South
and the nation long after the decision in _Brown v. Board of
Education_" (p. 8). Anderson documents the efforts of working-class
whites, predominately segregationists; the middle class,
predominately moderates; and business elites, respectively, to shape
a vision of school reform that best fit their class-based ideologies
and agendas. Anderson's contribution to the historiography of school
desegregation is timely, interesting, and rather disturbing, given
that she documents the emergence of a clear and purposeful blueprint
for undermining meaningful public school desegregation, while foes of
desegregation nominally accepted the changing legal climate.[1]
Anderson also explores the "gendered political rhetoric and
iconography" of the three classes into which she divides white
Arkansans (p. 15).

The _Brown_ decision elicited a variety of responses among whites in
Little Rock. Segregationists in the city, as was the case elsewhere
in the South, used tactics reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, notably,
violence and intimidation. White middle-class moderates accepted
token integration, so long as the preponderance of resources in the
system continued to be geared to the needs of white students.
Meanwhile, Little Rock's economic elite attempted to influence the
process from behind the scenes. Its "managerial masculinity" required
working-class and middle-class whites to fall in line behind its
leadership.

Anderson, while in no way de-emphasizing African American agency,
focuses in this study on the white reaction to black demands for
desegregation. Anderson places readers in the hallways and classrooms
of Central High School, where the Little Rock Nine endured nonstop
insults and tactical violence from white students, who committed
these acts with impunity. These young white teenagers were not always
hoodlums nor were they necessarily migrants from rural areas, the
group of southern whites most often blamed for racial violence and
intimidation. Some were shepherded to school by their mothers, who
used their access to civic leaders and the media to fight
desegregation in the halls of Central High School. While African
Americans demanded meaningful school desegregation, white moderates
sought successfully to limit concessions to tokenism. Little Rock
would become the standard for moderate whites across the South, and
ultimately across the nation, in accepting token integration while
preserving a large measure of de facto segregation.

_Little Rock_ is strongest in the middle chapters, where Anderson
explores the role of segregationist women engaged in resisting
integration and the role of moderate white women working to preserve
public education while accepting token integration. The Mother's
League of Central High School was a group of working-class women who
orchestrated opposition to the school's integration by stoking racial
fears and by encouraging the physical and verbal harassment of the
Little Rock Nine during the 1957-58 school year. The Mother's League
then turned its energies to political organizing in the form of
recalling nonsegregationist school board members and supporting a
States Rights Amendment in the legislature. Anderson makes it clear
that the Mother's League received support from the elite Capital
Citizen's Council. When Arkansas closed its public high schools in
1958, the Women's Emergency Council to Open Our Schools (WEC), "a
group of indignant middle-class white women," worked to reopen the
schools and to end segregation, though they aspired to do so without
significant changes to the racial status quo (p. 13). Anderson
matches her discussion of white women with an exploration of the role
of white upper-class and middle-class men. In her view, middle-class
white men, in particular, were divided between those inclined to
accept some change in racial politics, and those with more
conservative leanings. The business elite was dedicated to preserving
segregation and thus white male domination. Anderson's consideration
of gender dynamics helps to highlight and explain the sociocultural
values, and the constraints placed on middle-class actors in Little
Rock's drama.

Anderson is by no means alone in offering a class-based analysis of
the white response to black demands for desegregation.[2] However,
her analytical model leaves readers unconvinced of hard class
distinctions. For example, segregationists included members of the
middle class among their ranks, and some of the latter did not shrink
from using violence. Segregationists also enjoyed the support of
elite whites. Members of the Mother's League mobilized their children
to harass and intimidate the Little Rock Nine to the point where the
schools had to be closed. This suggests a community of whites with
access to institutions and structures not commonly associated with
the working class. While African Americans were the targets of
outright violence, whites supporting desegregation faced harassment
as well. Anderson informs us that firings and workplace harassment
were common. Moderates condemned rabid expressions of racism while
working to ensure that de jure desegregation resulted in little
actual interaction among black and white students in the public
school system. Moderates' views of appropriate race relations were
not fundamentally different from those of outspoken segregationists.
The white children of Little Rock continued to receive a superior
education to that offered black children even after de jure
integration. While drawing class distinctions among whites is useful
to a point, the reader comes away from this study convinced that
there was little willingness anywhere in the white community to
accept de facto integration of the public schools.

The accumulation of research on school desegregation has tended to
confirm the importance of Little Rock in setting a pattern. As
Anderson's study illustrates, the crystallization of a southern
strategy to oppose school desegregation and the political ideology
and rhetoric that would come to dominate political conservatism in
succeeding decades, under the mantras of race neutrality and
colorblindness, emerges here first. For scholars interested in
resistance to court-ordered school busing, the Little Rock Crisis
indeed served as the testing ground. Yet emerging political
resistance to the desegregation of neighborhoods and workplaces, and
the associated colorblind rhetoric that buttressed such resistance,
also gained structure and momentum from the Little Rock affair.

A valuable contribution to civil rights scholarship, Anderson's
_Little Rock_ is dense, disturbing at times, and insightful. It is
particularly useful as an explication for how outward compliance with
court-ordered desegregation could be accomplished, without bringing
about much change in the classroom or much redistribution in per
capita spending on black and white children, respectively. We see
here how a strategy emerged in Little Rock that successfully
minimized the impact of Supreme Court decisions and congressional
legislation in the fifties and sixties mandating desegregation. The
persistence of de facto residential and school segregation today is
in part a consequence of the events Anderson describes here.

Notes

[1]. See Alexander Frazier, "How to 'Keep Them in Their Place,'" _The
School Review_ 55, no. 6 (June 1947): 339-344.

[2]. For example, see Anders Walker, _The Ghosts of Jim Crow: How
Southern Moderates Used _Brown v. Board of Education_ to Stall Civil
Rights_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Citation: Robert S. Smith. Review of Anderson, Karen, _Little Rock:
Race and Resistance at Central High School_. H-Policy, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2013.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38211

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

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