Understanding the Little Rock Crisis : An Exercise in Remembrance and Reconciliation

by Jacoway, Elizabeth; Williams, C. Fred

• ISBN13: 9781557285294
• ISBN10: 1557285292
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Arkansas Pr

Summary

In the fall of 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to prohibit nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School. In the fall of 1997, the "Little Rock Nine" returned to Central High, this time escorted by President Bill Clinton. In the forty years that had intervened, the United States witnessed substantial changes in American race relations, but the city of Little Rock had not overcome its legacy of strife. The two-year crisis, once over left behind confusion and misunderstand. Racial and classbased mistrust lingers in the city of Little Rock, and, nationally and internationally perceptions of Arkansas are still tied to the decades-old images of hatred and strife that marked the Little Rock crisis. In 1997, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock sponsored a gathering of scholars who traced the origins and addressed the legacy of the Central High crisis. Elizabeth Jacoway and C. Fred Williams commissioned a series of original and insightful papers that discussed economic, constitutional, historical, and personal aspects of the crisis and of segregation. Jacoway and Williams have collected the best of these papers, by such authors as Shelcon Hackney, Joel Williamson, and James Cobb and offer them here in the hope of enhancing understanding of, and creating a dialogue about, this defining moment in American history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	v
Introduction: Understanding the Past: The Challenge of Little Rock	1	(22)
Elizabeth Jacoway
Little Rock and the Promise of America	23	(6)
Sheldon Hackney
Segregation and Racism: Taking Up the Dream Again	29	(16)
David R. Goldfield
Growing Up Segregated	45	(12)
George C. Wright
Growing Up Integrated	57	(10)
Joel Williamson
Arkansas, the Brown Decision, and the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis: A Local Perspective	67	(16)
John A. Kirk
The White Reaction to Brown: Arkansas, the Southern Manifesto, and Massive Resistance	83	(16)
Anthony J. Badger
The Contest for the Soul of Orval Faubus	99	(8)
Roy Reed
The Lesson of Little Rock: Stability, Growth, and Change in the American South	107	(16)
James C. Cobb
The Constitutional Lessons of the Little Rock Crisis	123	(18)
Kermit L. Hall
The Past As Future: The Little Rock Crisis and the Constitution	141	(12)
Tony A. Freyer
The Documentary Heritage of the Central High Crisis: A Bibliographical Essay	153	(10)
Michael J. Dabrishus
Notes	163	(16)
Contributors	179	(2)
Index	181