In a shaded, peaceful residential district
near Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., nine Negro children
quietly laid out their best clothes for the next morning. It was the
eve of school integration in Little Rock. City police, who had checked
carefully and found no hint of trouble, followed routine patrols
through the quiet streets. Then, at 9 p.m.. Little Rock came awake with
a shock: a National Guard unit, 150 strong, with MIS, carbines and
billies, churned up to the darkened high school in trucks, halftracks
and jeeps. They unloaded tear-gas bombs, fixed bayonets, sealed off all
doors, and set up a perimeter defense around the grounds—while a
red-haired cigar-chomper named Sherman T. Clinger, in the uniform of an
Air National Guard major general, took over the principal's office as a
command post. What had happened? Little Rock soon got an answer—of sorts. At 10:05
p.m. Arkansas' Democratic Governor Orval Faubus, a backwoods politician
turned Dapper Dan , marched into the studio of station KTHV
for a television appearance he had scheduled within the hour. Cried
Faubus: “Now that a federal court has ruled that no further litigation
is possible before the forcible integration of Negroes and whites in
Central High School tomorrow, the evidence of discord, anger and
resentment has come to me from so many sources as to become a deluge!”
To hear Faubus tell it, Little Rock was indeed on the brink of riot:
outraged white mothers were prepared to march on the school at 6 a.m.;
caravans of indignant white citizens even then were converging on
Little Rock from all over Arkansas. And Little Rock stores', declared
the governor, were selling out of knives, “mostly to Negro youths.”
Announced Faubus: “Units of the National Guard have been, and are now
being, mobilized with the mission to maintain or restore the peace and
good order of this community.” The Faubus version of crisis in Little Rock was open to immediate doubt.
Arkansas does not have a record of racial violence: the state
university at Fayetteville was quietly integrated in 1948; during the
very week that Little Rock was supposed to explode, three other
Arkansas communities—Ozark, Fort Smith and Van Buren—integrated
without a murmur. Furthermore, bus integration is a statewide fact, and
Little Rock's white and Negro citizens have become accustomed to their
Negro policemen. And a Shaggy Dog. Looking toward school integration, the Little Rock
school board and Superintendent of Schools Virgil Blossom had set up a
gradual, carefully selective, seven-year plan specifically aimed at
“the least amount of integration spread over the longest period of
time.” As recently as last April, two new school-board members were
overwhelmingly elected with their support of the integration plan as
the chief issue. The Little Rock school board had selected the nine
Negro children carefully, considering intelligence, achievement,
conduct, health —even the shade of their skins.
