Education: The Long Lockout

Some Little Rock citizens could very nearly persuade themselves last week that the days of bad conscience were at an end. The city’s four high schools were still shut, and their almost 3,700 students—2,974 white, 724 Negro—were still locked out. But by week’s end 60% of them had either transferred to schools out of the city (650 students are estimated to have left) or made arrangements to attend some sort of makeshift class. Most of the classes still lacked teachers, equipment and classrooms, and those that had got under way seemed better calculated to lull the old than inform the young. But makeshifts and promises have done their job well so far; even after seven weeks of locked schools, few Little Rock white students and their parents are complaining out loud.

White Only. The segregationists’ sun shone brightest last week on the porticoed facade of a hand-me-down structure built 50 years ago as a Methodist orphanage, later used as a graduate center for the University of Arkansas, now bought (by a wealthy Faubus backer, for $50,900) and relabeled: Senior High School—Little Rock Private School Corp. Newly titled School Superintendent W. C. Brashears (a former elementary school principal) announced a solid-sounding curriculum (“four years” of English, Arkansas and American history, applied mathematics, algebra, chemistry, physics, etc.), by week’s end had registered 241 seniors and 498 juniors and sophomores. Only trouble: there were just barely enough teachers and classrooms to start instruction for the seniors (juniors were promised classes this week in two hurriedly purchased warehouses, but there is no immediate prospect of school for sophomores). Teachers recruited by Brashears are as varied as a Foreign Legion battalion, range from competent to questionable. School financing is by private donations. Last week Attorney General Bruce Bennett promised that each student forced to transfer to an accredited public or private school could draw perhaps as much as $172.66 in state funds for tuition, but accreditation of Little Rock’s stopgap schools seems doubtful.

But it was Little Rock’s white Protestant churches that first stepped into the educational gap, and without them the city’s segregationists could make only a poor pretense of offering education to the schoolchildren. Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) began holding a small class—white only—in early September, now has 28 students in its Interim Academy. Reported one last week: the academy is “lots of fun,” has “excellent teachers and good accommodations; everyone raises hell in study hall, just like regular school.” At the Westover Hills Presbyterian Church, 35 white students are studying University of Arkansas correspondence courses under supervision; a similar program is on at Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church, and one is planned for Asbury Methodist Church. A bigger church project is planned by nearby Ouachita Baptist College: a 500-student high school with classes in the educational buildings of three large Little Rock Baptist churches. Tuition will be $20 a month, and Baptists will get preference, but other “innocent victims of a political struggle”—so long as they are white—will be admitted, said Ouachita President Ralph A. Phelps Jr. At last count, Baptist High had received applications from some 35 teachers, all but one of whom have college degrees.

The Rootless Ones. Three groups are especially rootless. The public high school teachers are under contract. and continue to draw their pay, do what substitute work is necessary in the city’s elementary schools, otherwise have few duties. The Central and Hall High School football teams still practice and play out their interscholastic schedules, but the Arkansas Athletic Association has warned them that they will be ineligible if they enroll in private schools. Most of the members take correspondence courses. No private schools for Negroes have been established; 211 Negroes have transferred to other schools; the rest have no classes.

Little Rock’s white students are utterly bored with stringing out the summer’s activities to fill the fall. Those who attend private classes are apt to be cynical about them (“It’s not quite like school”); two days after lessons began, almost 10% of the Private School Corp.’s seniors did not bother to show up. But if they feel strongly about the rights and wrongs of segregation, most of them swallow their opinions. Said one former honor student at Central High School: “You get so many stories from both sides that you don’t know what to think or believe.” Most bright seniors probably will be admitted to college next fall whether they learn anything in private classes or not. Admissions officers from both Little Rock University and the University of Arkansas said last week that better students from Central and Hall High Schools would have little difficulty with entrance examinations required of nongraduates.

As for the 40% of Little Rock’s displaced high school children who have not found private class space, it could be argued that they too are getting a kind of education. Said one girl last week, her voice full of admiration for the man who started the mess: “If Faubus can give up his honor as Governor of Arkansas, we can give up a year of school.”

Virginia’s Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr., who has locked out three times as many schoolchildren (some 13,000) as the redoubtable Faubus, laid it on thick to a state P.T.A. meeting in Richmond: “I say to you in profound and pleading reverence that I fight to preserve the public school system.” He got a whoop-and-holler ovation, but two days later, with the floor packed by late-arriving delegates from the state’s more moderate north, a resolution to support massive resistance drew a 557-557 tie, and this was chalked up as a defeat. Then a “local option” plan for integration won a squeaky 515-513 victory. The next day, for the seventh time in three troubled weeks, Almond dodged reporters, canceled his press conference.