Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 6 • December 2007-January 2008

Revisiting Little Rock: a victory won through the courage of women and children

by Megan Cornish

Sept. 4, 1957: The Arkansas National Guard bars African American high school students from entering Little Rock Central. Credit: Will Counts Collection/Indiana Univ. Archives

The "Battle of Little Rock" 50 years ago came three years after the famous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which mandated school integration. Yet few Southern schools had complied.

The Arkansas struggle involved court cases and mobilizations of state and federal troops. But it was won by the sheer nerve and determination of the six girls and three boys known as the Little Rock Nine and their brave parents and supporters.

Southern police state mobilizes. Ernest Green, the first African American to graduate from the city's Central High, wrote 40 years later that he was determined not to let the segregationists win, as were his mother and the Black community - "but it was hell."

It began quietly enough. One small school district in Arkansas had been the first in the South to integrate, with little controversy. Little Rock, the state capital, had desegregated its city bus system and some parks, and many expected integration to go smoothly.

But the new governor, Orval Faubus, elected on a segregation platform, intruded. The night before the new term, he called out the Arkansas National Guard, claiming that segregationists were massing and the only way to avoid bloodshed was to prevent the nine Black students from attending Central. This turned Little Rock into a magnet for bigots in the region.

One girl, Elizabeth Eckford, was threatened with lynching when she tried to enter school, saved by two white adults who risked their own safety to intervene.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People won a federal injunction barring the governor from using the National Guard to block integration. After it withdrew, a racist mob overwhelmed police to again force the Black students out of school. At night, vigilantes terrorized the Black community.

Awe-inspiring heroism. As the story of Little Rock gets told today, federal troops are often portrayed as saving the day. In fact, President Eisenhower sent the troops primarily in an attempt to head off armed Black self-defense (see sidebar). Credit for the victory rightly belongs to the brave and persevering Nine and their determined and savvy supporters.

The Nine faced constant physical and psychological assault from racist white schoolmates, while several of their parents lost jobs. Daisy Bates, the state president of the NAACP and a key organizer in the fight, also paid a high price, described in her fine book The Long Shadow of Little Rock.

Bates was a brilliant tactician in skirmishes with officials and a trusted confidant, advisor and defender of the youths, who used her home as their gathering place. She and her husband lost their newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, known for its exposés of police brutality and unequal criminal justice, as well as opposing segregation, through loss of advertising. They and the students faced periodic bombings and constant threats and intimidation. Having been denied federal protection, the Bateses organized armed community defense guards.

A month after the Black students started Central High, Daisy Bates and three other NAACP officials were arrested for violating a new city ordinance requiring "any organization" to turn over to the city membership and donor lists, along with financial records, for the public record. This would have put NAACP supporters in grave danger. Two NAACP landmark cases to defend constitutional privacy rights were successful on appeal to the Supreme Court, setting a precedent that has protected many movement groups, including the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), from harassment.

After the first year, in a vindictive final bid to stop integration, Gov. Faubus closed all schools in Little Rock, Black and white. Another NAACP court case finally reopened them a year later - as an integrated school system.

This saga of setbacks and achievements contains rich lessons for future civil rights struggles.

A movement with revolutionary potential. Through boycotts, freedom rides, voter registration campaigns, and lunch counter sit-ins, civil rights fighters demonstrated remarkable collective power and ended legal Jim Crow segregation. They won new federal civil rights legislation and anti-discrimination laws, and affirmative action in education and hiring.

FSP founders saw just such mass organizing by African Americans, supported actively by the left and labor movements, as the only means to make lasting gains. They recognized that Black freedom was key to the coming U.S. socialist revolution and that radicals must mobilize support for the Southern struggle in the North and West.

Beginning in the early 1960s, they put forward daring demands exposing the federal government's intrinsic ties to the Southern police state. Among these was a call to unseat Southern congressmen, whose regime was won and maintained by violence and disenfranchisement, and elect legitimate new representatives under the supervision of volunteer militias made up of supporters of the Constitution. Demands like these, early FSPers like Clara and Dick Fraser believed, could radicalize the civil rights movement.

However, the Communist and Socialist Workers parties, traumatized and conservatized by the McCarthy era, retreated from the struggle. Without their pressure, organized labor abstained, and the revolutionary potential of a Southern civil rights uprising remains to be realized.

Unfinished battle. The civil rights movement made historic gains, yet the Southern elite kept final control. Today the South is still a bastion of racism, anti-labor laws and conservatism exerting a rightward influence on the whole country.

The stark truth of this is evident from the persecution of Black high school students in Jena, La., to the ongoing post-Katrina effort by big business to permanently evict African Americans from New Orleans.

Schools are becoming more segregated: 73 percent of African American and 77 percent of Latina and Latino students attend schools where people of color predominate. Most whites go to schools where youth of color are less than one fifth of the student body.

To build on the legacy of Little Rock, workers of all races must cooperate to mount a movement for full civil rights. But such a mobilization also must take on the system that requires racism, and other bigotries, in order to keep a handful of rich in control of the wealth that we all create.