Fifties (110 page)

One thing few outsiders noticed was that the integration was scheduled for Little Rock Central, a school for working-class whites, while a new suburban high school, designed to serve the city’s upper middle class, was not involved. The city establishment, which came from the world of upper-middle-class Little Rock, was, of course, absolutely unaware that there was a double standard here and accepted all too readily that its right to make the decisions on matters like this. They did not understand that others, less powerful, less successful, and less influential, would have to live with their decisions and might resent them. Daisy Bates, the head of the local NAACP, was aware of the class tensions that ran through the crisis, the rage on the part of the poor whites because they had to bear the burden of integration while the upper-class whites would be largely unaffected by it. At one point Mrs. Bates, referring to the deep class tensions that lay just beneath the surface in the white community, told one of the town leaders, “You may deserve Orval Faubus, but by God I don’t!”

As the first day of school drew closer, Faubus’s political position began to change. He was no longer Faubus, friend of moderates. He became evasive in dealing with school-board officials and other civic leaders. Those who thought they could count on him at least to remain neutral found that they either could not reach him or that if they did, he was ambivalent, in the opinion of some, or out and out slippery, in the opinion of others. “Governor, just what
are
you going to do in regard to the Little Rock integration plan?” Blossom asked him. Faubus paused and then answered: “When you tell me what the federals are going to do, I will tell you what I am going to do.” Blossom thought that meant Faubus wanted the federal government to act decisively and thus remove any responsibility for integrating the schools from local officials, particularly from the governor. What was foremost in Orval Faubus’s mind at that moment was not the education of the nine black children or the 2,000 white children whom they would join at Central High but rather his own political future in a state where, in the three years since
Brown,
race was beginning to dominate local political discourse. In Arkansas, the governor had to run for reelection every two years, and Arkansas voters were notoriously ungenerous about handing out third terms. Faubus was not a lawyer, he had no family wealth to fall back on, and he did not look forward to going back to being a rural postmaster. Other governors, their term of office over, could make a lateral move to a powerful Little Rock law firm and earn more than they ever had while in office. But that was not true of Faubus.

As the day for Little Rock’s school integration approached, other politicians from the Deep South began applying pressure on Faubus to make him toe the line—to them he was the weak link in the chain of resistance. Mississippi senator James Eastland attacked him as being among the “weak-kneed politicians at the state capitols.... If the Southern states are picked off one by one under the damnable doctrine of gradualism I don’t know if we can hold out or not.” Faubus began to feel that he might, if he was not careful, become a politician who had obeyed the law only to find his political career ended overnight for his good deed. At the same time feelings were steadily becoming more raw, and Faubus could tell he was losing much of his room to maneuver. In the spring he had pushed a package of four segregationist bills through the Arkansas legislature. They had passed by votes of 81 to 1. That vote told him something. The governor knew the laws were pointless, that in a legal confrontation with the feds the state’s powers were invalid, but he
was beginning to respond to growing pressure around him and creating, if nothing else, a paper record. He was torn, as the deadline approached, between doing the right thing, and taking on the federal government to make himself a symbol of Southern white resistance.

Elsewhere in the Deep South segregationists were forming Citizens’ Councils, local committees of white leaders pledged to stop integration. Regarding Faubus as something of a major liability, they decided to hold a major rally in Little Rock on August 22 and to bring in Marvin Griffin, the racist Georgia governor, and Roy Harris, the overall head of the Citizens’ Councils, to speak at a ten-dollar-a-plate dinner. Faubus was not pleased by their visit; he knew they were trying to stoke the fires of racial resistance and to corner him. He complained about Griffin’s visit to Virgil Blossom. “Why don’t you telephone him and ask him to stay away?” Blossom suggested, somewhat innocently to the governor. “I’ll think about it,” Faubus answered. But Griffin and Harris came, stayed at the governor’s mansion, and had breakfast with Faubus. From then on, Blossom noted, it became extremely difficult to reach Faubus.

Ironically, Faubus was not much of a racist. His roots were populist, but not racist populist. He was shrewd and earthy, from the Snopes school of politics, and was more intelligent and politically skilled than most of his critics suspected. His resentments were directed toward the upper class and business establishment of Little Rock, which he (rightly) suspected of looking down on him. His father, Sam Faubus, said later that Orval hated to be looked down on even as a little boy. There was, Harry Ashmore thought, something of a contradiction to Faubus’s attitude toward the elite of Little Rock—he liked to put them on by pretending to be nothing but a good old country boy, as if he were still wearing his first store-bought suit, but when they believed him in that role, he resented it. He was, Ashmore liked to say, like an Airedale dog—a lot smarter than he looked. Later, after Little Rock had been torn apart by Faubus’s decision to block integration, Ashmore noted that there had been plenty of earlier signs of which way he might go, since in the past whenever there had been any kind of crunch, Faubus had always followed his sense of what the preponderant feeling was among the poor whites, whom he knew so well and with whom he could so readily identify. His politics were the politics of class.

Faubus came from poor rural stock; he never even saw a black man until he was fully grown, when he went to Missouri to pick strawberries, his father later said. Sam Faubus was an old-fashioned, back-country radical who greatly admired Eugene Debs and was
later appalled by his son’s decision to block integration. (Sam Faubus was not a man to criticize his own flesh and blood openly, but he wrote a series of critical letters to the
Arkansas Gazette
under the pen name Jimmy Higgins.) Orval’s childhood was poor: The water came from a nearby spring, the house was made of unfinished sawmill lumber, and the kitchen was completely unfinished. Orval graduated from grammar school in a one-room schoolhouse at the age of eighteen. He then became one of fifty people taking an exam for a third grade teacher’s license, and he had gotten the highest marks. The certificate allowed him to teach school in Huntsville and attend high school at the same time. He got his high school diploma at the age of twenty-seven. By that time, he had been married for six years and he and his wife regularly spent their summers as migrant fruit-and-vegetable pickers. It was hard to find white people much poorer than they were and, Virgil Blossom noted, it was hard to find people that poor with so much ambition. In World War Two, he rose to the rank of major, came back, and bought a weekly paper in Huntsville; that brought him into the orbit of Sid McMath, the patrician liberal governor who was his first statewide sponsor and in whose cabinet he had served. (Later, McMath, appalled by the direction his protégé had taken, said, “I brought Orval down out of the hills and every night I pray for forgiveness.”) He had helped McMath with the poor white vote, and he intended to run himself.

In 1954 Faubus ran for governor; he was so much the outsider in Little Rock that when he wrote his check for the $1,500 qualifying fee, it was not accepted until a friend who was a former state legislator endorsed it on the back. Because of his connection to McMath, he did reasonably well with blacks and upper-middle-class whites; as for poor rural whites, he was one of them. The one thing he remembered about that race was that it was one of the hottest summers in Arkansas history and all the other major candidates were traveling around in air-conditioned cars, but he made it, stop after stop, in the brutal heat, without any air-conditioning. He won even though, ironically enough, he had been red-baited for having briefly attended a small college with radical roots. As governor he appointed more blacks to state positions than any predecessor. Later, the liberal-moderate camp, including such men as Blossom, Ashmore, and Brooks Hays, the well-connected Little Rock congressman, cited the visit of Griffin and Harris as the turning point, the moment when Faubus looked at his political future, saw no middle ground, and made his choice.

Monday, September 2, fell on Labor Day; school was scheduled
to start on Tuesday, September 3. By the beginning of the previous weekend, Faubus decided to call out the Arkansas National Guard—on the pretext of preventing violence, but in reality to block integration. Blossom found out about this only late on Monday night. According to Faubus, there were caravans of white racists heading for Central High. There would be bloodshed in the streets of Little Rock if the blacks tried to enter the school.

On the Sunday before school opening, Winthrop Rockefeller, the member of the famed Rockefeller family who had chosen to live in Arkansas, got wind of Faubus’s plan to call out the National Guard and he rushed to the statehouse. There Rockefeller, the leader in trying to bring industry to a state desperately short of good jobs, pleaded with Faubus not to block integration. The governor told him he was too late: “I’m sorry but I’m already committed. I’m going to run for a third term, and if I don’t do this, Jim Johnson and Bruce Bennett [the two leading Arkansas segregationists] will tear me to shreds.”

What he did was very simple: He announced that he was unable to maintain the peace (thereby encouraging a mob to go into the streets), and then he placed the Arkansas National Guard on the side of the mob: Its orders, despite the specific mandate of the district court, were to keep the blacks out of the schools. The Guard encircled the school; meanwhile, the mob grew larger. The police force of the city was inadequate to deal with the mob, and the fire chief refused to permit the hoses of his fire wagons to be used against it. The black children were suddenly very much at risk. Daisy Bates, the leader of the local NAACP, asked black and white ministers to accompany them on Wednesday, September 4. She arranged for a police car to protect them. But as they approached the school, they were abused and threatened; when they finally reached the school, they were turned away by a National Guard captain, who said he was acting under the orders of Governor Faubus. What are your orders? someone asked one of the soldiers. “Keep the niggers out!” he answered. The confidence of the mob grew greater by the minute as it found that the law-enforcement forces were on its side. Sensing this, the ministers and children quickly retreated.

They were the lucky ones. One child, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, had not gotten the message the night before about how they were to assemble together. Her father was a railroad-car maintenance worker who worked nights; her mother taught at a school for black children who were deaf or blind. The family did not have a phone. In the morning, an exhausted Daisy Bates completely forgot
that she had not advised Elizabeth about the new arrangements. Elizabeth, like most of the other children involved in the early integration cases, had made the decision to go to Central very much on her own. Elizabeth wanted to be a lawyer, and she had heard that Central offered a speech course that might help her prepare for law school, while Horace Man did not. Her mother, Birdie Eckford, was unhappy about her choice, and when Elizabeth had suggested during the summer that they go to the school board office and get the requisite transfer forms for Central, Mrs. Eckford gently and vaguely agreed to do it some other time, hoping Elizabeth would forget about it. Two weeks later Elizabeth brought it up again. Again her mother tried to delay. Finally, near the end of August, Elizabeth demanded that her mother take her that very day to get the transfer. With that it was obtained. That first day of school she got up early and pressed her new black-and-white dress, one she had made herself to wear for her new experience in an integrated school. At breakfast the family television set was on and some commentator was talking about the size of the mob gathering in front of the school and wondering aloud whether the black children would show up. “Turn that TV off!” said Mrs. Eckford. Birdie was so nervous that Elizabeth tried to comfort her mother by saying that everything would be all right. Her father, she noted, was just as nervous, holding a cigar in one hand and a pipe in his mouth, neither of them lit. Before Elizabeth left, her mother called the family together and they all prayed.

Alone and unprotected, Elizabeth approached the school, and the crowd started to scream at her: “Here she comes! Here comes one of the niggers!” But she saw the National Guard troopers and was not scared, because she thought the soldiers would protect her. She tried to walk into the school, but a guard thrust his rifle at her and blocked her way. She walked a few feet further down to get by the guard but was blocked again by two other soldiers. Some white students were being let in at the same time, she noticed. Other soldiers moved toward her and raised their bayonets to make the barrier more complete. She was terrified now, blocked in her attempt to get to the school, aware that the mob was closing in behind her. Someone was yelling, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” Someone else yelled: “Go home, you bastard of a black bitch!” She tried to steady her legs as she turned away, the school now at her back. The mob pressed closer. “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school!” someone shouted. She was blocked in all directions. She looked down the street and saw a bench by a bus stop. If she could just make it to the
bench, she thought. When she finally got there, she felt she would collapse.

A man she had never known, Ben Fine, the education reporter for
The New York Times,
who was there to write his story on how Little Rock had stayed so calm, came over and put his arm around her and tried to comfort her. “Don’t let them see you cry,” he said. An elderly white woman (the wife of a white professor at a black college) came over and also offered her solace and tried to face the crowd down. The woman, despite the howls of the mob, managed to get Elizabeth on a bus and out of the combat zone.