THE NATION: The Meaning of Little Rock

“Some people say it’s like a dream—it can’t be happening here,” mused Presbyterian Minister Dunbar H. Ogden Jr., president of the Greater Little Rock Ministerial Association, as he contemplated the fate that had befallen his city. “But I haven’t felt like that. This is real.”

It was grimly real: a segregationist mob had ruled Little Rock for an ugly moment in U.S. history. Now the face of the law was that of a young U.S. Army paratrooper in battle gear outside Central High School. Little Rock was a name known wherever men could read newspapers and listen to radios, a symbol to be distorted in Moscow, misinterpreted in New Delhi, painfully explained in London. A great issue had been joined between law and anarchy—and as always, it was the innocents, the moderates, who suffered most.

More Drastic Talk. Arkansas’ Governor Orval Faubus was not one of these. He had drawn the battle lines. President Eisenhower had patiently tried to avoid direct conflict, but when forced to the issue, he had acted quickly and decisively (see below). Now, at week’s end Faubus —like Joe McCarthy before him—was trying to regain the initiative by even more drastic talk, slandering his political opponents, and musing about the possibility of calling a special session of the Arkansas legislature to abolish the public school system. And the President of the U.S. would return to Washington this week to confer with a delegation of five Southern governors.

The governors typified the dilemma in which Orval Faubus had placed the South. Only one, Georgia’s Marvin Griffin, was a rabble-rouser of the Faubus stripe. The four others, Florida’s LeRoy Collins, Tennessee’s Frank Clement, North Carolina’s Luther Hodges and Maryland’s Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, were moderates. But the emotional turmoil of the South had forced Collins, Clement and Hodges toward the side of Demagogue Faubus, even though most of them privately blamed him for the trouble. In Washington, they hoped to find a way to get federal troops out of Little Rock.

President Eisenhower was more than willing to listen to their arguments. But he made it clear in advance that he would not barter away his authority, under the Constitution and statutes of the U.S., to put down mob rule wherever it arose.

The Inevitable Governor. It was small wonder that many of the ordinary citizens of Little Rock thought of their situation as a dream—a nightmare—in which they had played no part. But Presbyterian Ogden pointed up the meaning for ordinary citizens and would-be extremists alike. “This had to happen someplace in the South,” said he. “It was inevitable that there was going to be a plan, worked out, approved and accepted, for gradual integration. It was inevitable that somewhere a governor, under pressure of extreme segregationists, was going to stop integration by calling out the National Guard.

“This may be looked back upon by future historians as the turning point—for good—of race relations in this country. If the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution can be made good in Little Rock, then it can be made good in Arkansas. If it can be made good in Arkansas, then eventually it can be made good throughout the South.”