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The Cold Blooded Murder of Irony: Arkansas Dumping AP African American History [1]

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Date: 2023-08-24  

As an author and historian — I’m gobsmacked by Huckabee Sanders defense of Arkansas dropping AP African American History. ARKANSAS — this isn’t a lack of understanding of the nuances of irony. Doing away with this course in the home state of the Little Rock Nine is the cold blooded murder of irony.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a book about the middle class and how it invented itself. Much of it, on the backs of brave young people like the Little Rock Nine. Desegregation and a thirst for equality were two of the agents of change. As Huckabee Sanders and her ilk work toward regression — they aim to move entry of the middle class further out of reach for our BIPOC brothers and sisters.

If you don’t know the story of the Little Rock Nine, here is the chapter from my book that explains it. My publisher, the Charles Bruce Foundation, is giving it to me to share with you — for free. Please share it with friends, neighbors, acquaintances who may not know the story. Oh, and if you are so inclined, please email a copy to the Arkansas Governor. Maybe a refresher will help her to do a better job.

Chapter 16 Little Rock Nine

The U.S. Department of the Interior has a museum diagonally across the street from Central High School. The museum – like the events that took place there in 1957 – should be overkill. Really, nine Black kids went to an all white school, should that really be national park worthy? How could the task of desegregating one measly southern high school have been so noteworthy? But once you learn how powerful the anti-Black sentiment was in Little Rock at that time, it all starts to make sense. Perspective is pretty important when it comes to understanding the “Little Rock Nine.”

The civil war may have freed enslaved Blacks but it did nothing to make them equal to their white captors. In 1892 Homer Plessy broke Louisiana law by not surrendering his seat on a train to a white man. Plessy claimed that the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law nullified the Louisiana law requiring him to move. In 1896, the United States Supreme Court voted 8 to 1 against Plessy.

Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote in Plessy v. Ferguson, “The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the equality of two races before the law.” However, Brown wrote that the court also determined, “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”

So they ruled that all races were entitled to the same things legally, but socially they could still be separated. And from that came the concept of separate but equal. Separate lunch counters, separate bathrooms, separate movie houses, and of course, separate schools.

In the early 1950’s five cases challenging educational segregation were brought before the Supreme Court. The Justices consolidated them under one name: Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka. May 14, 1954 the court unanimously changed their opinion, “We believe that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

With appalling deference to racist state governments, the Supreme Court waited a year before demanding desegregation. During that year, the Attorneys General from segregationist states were asked to suggest methods of desegregation that would be less jarring to the general public. Finally, on May 31, 1955 the Justices decreed that public school departments use “all deliberate speed” to desegregate.

Regardless of that mandate, complete desegregation did not occur until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, a federal court ordered the schools to integrate immediately. The school department had 4 high schools. The showpiece of these schools was the all white Central High School. When school began in September, nine Black children were enrolled and expected to attend.

I often wondered why only nine teens got the chance to move over from their Blacks-only school to the infamous Central High. When we got to the museum, I asked one of the park rangers. It turned out that 200 students had initially volunteered to go to Central High but only nine made the cut.

Once kids elected to go to Central, they had to agree to certain conditions. The school department had been ordered to give Black youth the same education as white youth, and that’s where the school department intended to leave it. No Black student in Central High would be allowed to play sports or participate in extra curricular activities. And no matter how they might be taunted, bullied, pushed, pulled, spat upon, or ridiculed, the Black kids had to promise they would not defend themselves. The Little Rock Nine promised they wouldn’t talk back or act out in any way toward an abuser.

Only nine young Black students were willing to sacrifice every other aspect of their high school careers to get what they believed would be a better education. They went to counseling over the summer leading up to their transfer, but it is doubtful that they fully understood how much courage they’d need before they were through.

Resistance to the Little Rock Nine was pervasive. From the Governor on down, these kids were resented far worse than even they imagined they would be. Melba Pattillo explained, “After three full days inside Central, I know that integration is a much bigger word than I thought.”

September 2nd, Governor Orval Faubus got on TV and explained to the state that he would be dispatching the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School. The National Guard would stand sentry and bar the Black kids from the school. He said that he wanted to “prevent violence.”

When the Little Rock Nine tried to go to class on September 4th, the guardsmen obediently turned them away. When you watch the video of them trying to get into school, it’s alarming how many angry, yelling, white women you see in each frame. The face of racism is often assumed to be male, but the newsreels at the museum tell a very ugly tale of racist women in America.

Turned away by the National Guard, condemned by the governor, and bullied by the crowd, the Little Rock Nine all but gave up on attending Central High.

The federal courts were committed to desegregation and on September 20th, Judge Ronald Davies ordered the Governor to stop using the National Guard to abrogate the kids’ constitutional rights. The Governor complied and withdrew the National Guard. But once the kids got back to school, riots broke out and the Little Rock Nine were chased from the building. It wasn’t until Pres. Dwight Eisenhower intervened that the kids actually got a chance to learn in Central High School classrooms.

Appalled by the rioting, Pres. Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne Division and – adding insult to Gov. Faubus’ injury – he federalized the National Guard sending them back to Central High, but this time to make sure the kids went to school.

The military stayed in Little Rock for the entire school year. After one of the kids was attacked in class, they each received an individual military escort every day, all day. It wasn’t easy to put up with the consistently overt racism and disdain, but Minnijean Brown was the only one who lost her temper and finally fought back. The administration expelled Minnijean Brown from Central High. Brown moved to New York and finished her schooling there.

I don’t know how indicative my personal education is of the rest of the country, but from what I learned about Central High, I thought that was the end of the story. I thought the racist governor learned his lesson and integrated life went on as it should have all along. But I was wrong. Racist Gov. Faubus refused to give up.

See, Gov. Faubus was furious that Black children had sullied the once pristine Central High, and rather than have more Black children at the school the next year, Gov. Faubus shut down all the Little Rock High Schools. Rather than integrate, Faubus denied 3600 students – Black and white – an education. The race struggle became a labor dispute as the teachers and staff of all four high schools were idled by Gov. Faubus’ decision.

I mentioned the videos of racist women, yelling taunting and tormenting the Little Rock Nine. One of the Black girls, Elizabeth Eckford, described her surprise at the intolerance back when the riots broke out, “I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob – someone who maybe would help. 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.”

In reality, racism has no gender but the source of resolution to this conflict did.

After the governor closed the schools – in a move eerily similar to how malicious governors all across the nation rejected federal 2013 Medicaid money for the poor in their states – the schools remained closed for an entire academic year.

In 1958 the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools – which became better known as WEC – decided to get the schools back in business. According to the Department of the Interior, “Infuriated by the lack of response from business and community leaders, they [WEC] formed the first organization to publicly condemn the school-closing action and to support reopening the schools under the Little Rock School District’s desegregation plan.”

The women published flyers reminding their fellow citizens, “Wake up Little Rock, your public school system is being destroyed.” The women forced a city wide recall of all anti-integration school board members and the schools reopened in August of 1959.

I’d always known that racism, hatred and fear allowed for the abuse of Black children all across the country. It still does. But I had no idea until I visited Little Rock High School that racism, hatred and fear actually closed off educational opportunities to every high school student in the city. Was Little Rock indicative of social problems plaguing all of America? It must have been. It became the flash point because, with a racist and arrogant governor leading the way – 92 years after the civil war ended – prejudice had a home in the Arkansas state house.

Smaller fights were waged all across the nation, for which the Little Rock Nine would become the poster children. As Daisy Bates, director of the Arkansas NAACP, put it, “Any time it takes eleven thousand five hundred soldiers to assure nine Negro children their constitutional rights in a democratic society, I can’t be happy.”

The kicker is, a year later, it took an entire recall election to grant 3600 children their right to an education — all because Pres. Eisenhower had the intestinal fortitude to commit those troops to defend the Little Rock Nine.

(By the way, Eisenhower was a republican. And not a huge fan of integration, but a big fan of the constitution and the law. Meanwhile — Huckabee Sanders hopes to lead the party of Eisenhower away from the truth, an insult to his name. Huckabee Sanders racist behavior indicates that that state’s first female governor has her eye on being Arkansas’s next Governor Faubus).

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/24/2189456/-Ironic-s-an-Understatement-Arkansas-Dumping-AP-African-American-History

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