THE SOUTH: Making a Crisis in Arkansas

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 (see box), 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.

When the dawn of integration day came, the Faubus fabric was even more tattered. His early-morning “March of the Mothers” at Central High found only 15 curious bystanders—and one shaggy dog. A check of 21 Little Rock stores disclosed no run whatever on knives or pistols. And the only “caravans” converging on Little Rock were those of National Guard reinforcements called in by Orval Faubus.

The scene outside Central High School was anything but violent. After a classic tradition, high-school boys stood around ogling high-school girls—who were, in turn, ogling the young National Guardsmen. A handful of women began singing Dixie, faded dismally out before finishing. At top count, about 400 people appeared and. as one Arkansan told newsmen, “Before you boys get the wrong idea, remember there’s no.ooo Little Rock people that ain’t here.” The nine previously accepted Negro students did not show up; they had been asked by the stunned school board to stay at home until the

Faubus-fashioned crisis could be straightened out.

“Integration Must Begin.” The first straightening was done by a tiny (5 ft. i in., 140 Ibs.) U.S. district judge named Ronald Davies, who had arrived in Little Rock from Fargo, N. Dak. only nine days before to take the bench of a judge who had retired. Curt, cool Judge Davies, 52, son of a small-town North Dakota’ newspaper editor, got his law at Georgetown University, and practiced in Grand Forks (pop. 32,500) until President Eisenhower appointed him to the bench in 1955. Davies took just six minutes to order the school board to go ahead with its plans despite Governor Faubus. Said he: “Integration must begin forthwith!”

Fewer than 100 people (not counting reporters, pjipils and militiamen) were outside Central High when the test came. Most of the Negro children came in a group, accompanied by adults, and left quietly when told by a National Guardsman that “Governor Faubus has placed this school off limits to Negroes.” But little Elizabeth Eckford, 15, stepped alone from a bus at the corner of 14th and Park Streets. In a neat cotton dress, bobby-sox and ballet slippers, she walked straight to the National Guard line on the sidewalk. The Guardsmen raised their rifles, keeping her out.

Elizabeth, clutching tight at her notebook, began a long, slow walk down the two blocks fronting the school. She turned once to try the line again—and again the rifles came up. A militia major shielded her from the crowd, escorted her to a bus-stop bench, left her. “Go home, you burr head,” rasped an adult voice. Elizabeth sat dazed as the crowd moved in. Then Mrs. Grace Lorch, wife of a Little Rock schoolteacher, sat down on the bench and slipped her arm around the child’s shoulders. “This is just a little girl,” she cried at the crowd. “Next week you’ll all be ashamed of yourselves.”

After 35 minutes a bus finally pulled up. Mrs. Lorch took Elizabeth’s arm and shoved through the crowd. “I’m just waiting for one of you to touch me,” said she. “I’m just aching to punch somebody in the nose.” The crowd gave way before the white-haired woman and the little girl—and that was about as close as Little Rock came all week to Orval Faubus’ manufactured “violence.”

An Anemic Case. From then on the controversy swirled off into a storm of legal maneuvers, press conferences and telegrams (the National Guardsmen got so bored doing nothing that they finally turned to threatening Northern newsmen with arrest for “inciting to violence,” i.e., reporting the story). Orval Faubus fired off a wild-eyed message to the President of the U.S.: he thought his telephone lines were being tapped: he was sure that Federal authorities were plotting to arrest him; the situation in Little Rock “grows more explosive by the hour.” To ward off all invaders, Orval Faubus de ployed his militia around his white-pillared executive mansion, disappeared from public view like a feudal baron under siege.

All the while, hard-bitten little Judge Davies was steering a carefully legal course and refusing to back water by so much as an inch. Clearing the way for possible future Government action against Faubus (see The Law), Davies ordered U.S. enforcement agencies to start collecting the facts behind Faubus’ defiance. At a weekend hearing Davies flicked aside a new petition for delay by the Little Rock school authorities. Said he, coldly: “The testimony and arguments this morning were, in my judgment, as anemic as the petition itself … In an organized society there can be nothing but ultimate confusion and chaos if court decrees are flouted, whatever the pretext.” His reaffirmed order to Little Rock: integrate.

The Preservator. Why had Orval Faubus created the crisis? For one thing, Faubus recently began talking about running for a third term in a state that traditionally frowns on three terms for a governor. He needed a dramatic issue, and he needed the red-neck votes of segregationist eastern Arkansas. Beyond that, there were indications that Faubus was being used by segregationist politicians in the South. From Georgia’s raucous Governor Marvin Griffin, who spoke at a Little Rock dinner last month, came loud praise for the Arkansas “preservator of the peace.”-At almost the very moment that Griffin used that pretentious solecism, Faubus was using exactly the same word to describe himself.

But in Orval Faubus’ own state he was far from being acclaimed. For the first time in years, Little Rock’s rival newspapers agreed in denouncing Faubus’ folly. Arkansas’ conservative Senator John McClellan was carefully noncommittal about the wisdom of Faubus’ action. Arkansas’ liberal Senator William Fulbright, a wholehearted Faubus supporter in the past, refused to answer his phone, packed up his bags and took off for London and a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The officers of adopted Arkansan Winthrop Rockefeller’s industry-seeking Arkansas Industrial Development Commission said priva;te-ly that Faubus had seriously hurt their cause. Said Little Rock’s Mayor Wood-row Wilson Mann: “The only effect of his action is to create tensions where none existed.”

By week’s end kids at Central High School, who were ready to accept integration until they were goaded by rabble-rousers, were getting tired of the foolishness. “We don’t need troops here,” said a Central sophomore. “They are supposed to keep the peace, but they push us around too much. If you want to stand on the sidewalk and look at somebody, the guards push us back.” Cried a grey-haired woman: “Hey, kid, why don’t you keep quiet?” Replied the boy: “Because I don’t want to. It’s a free country, lady.”

-“Preservator” is a modish term in Ku Klux Klan meetings in some parts of the South, generally relating to something Christlike.