Erin Krutko Devlin's Remember Little Rock is a welcome addition to the historiography of post-Brown white resistance and school litigation. Rather than recounting the Little Rock school desegregation crises of the late 1950s, Devlin's book concentrates on the shaping of public memory of these crises over the subsequent six decades. Despite two decades of revisionist scholarship on the “long civil rights movement,” and despite continued recognition of the persistence and ubiquity of educational inequity, Devlin asks why Little Rock remains a “symbol of the nation's commitment to eradicate this problem and its dedication to providing opportunity to all students regardless of color” (p. 1).
In order to trace the development of this triumphal narrative, Devlin sets out “to reveal its roots, the individuals and institutions that have promoted it, and the ends to which it has been deployed” (p. 4). Each of the book's five chapters centers around a particular moment over the past six decades when public memory of the school desegregation crisis opened for debate and contest. While one can wonder about Devlin's selection of moments to consider, the book makes a powerful argument that the struggle over the meaning and legacy of the 1957–1958 school year has had profound implications for educational policy and school desegregation jurisprudence in each decade since. Devlin is especially adept at tracing how the narratives of self-identified white “moderates” came to dominate public memory and form the foundation of contemporary postracial and colorblind ideology.
Chapter 1 compares how two central protagonists—Superintendent Virgil Blossom and Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates—used their respective memoirs to analyze the crisis and define successful integration. Devlin argues that Blossom's It HAS Happened Here (1959) and Bates's The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962) were “written with an eye toward constructing a public memory that would shape the trajectory of school desegregation litigation in the 1960s” (p. 15). Blossom's memoir defended the plan he originally proposed in the wake of Brown II that would have allowed a small number of Black students to transfer to historically white schools. He contended that the “Blossom Plan,” a mix of new attendance zones, new school construction, and voluntary transfer programs, was a far superior strategy than massive resistance and could be a model for other southern districts to demonstrate compliance with the court and stave off federal intervention. Not surprisingly, Bates's memoir, published three years later, rejected Blossom's celebration of gradualism. Instead, she portrayed the superintendent as stoking white resistance by designing a desegregation plan that catered to white school patrons’ racial fears and by continually portraying “white moderates” as the victims of both segregationists and federal officials. Bates also maintained that Blossom's focus on white tolerance of a gradualist plan ignored a “new spirit of resistance” among Black communities in the South that would no longer accept anything less than “full and complete citizenship rights” (pp. 37–38).
By 1968, the Supreme Court essentially sided with Bates and the NAACP in its Green v. New Kent County decision requiring southern school districts to eliminate school segregation “root and branch.” Chapter 2 examines how the Little Rock desegregation crisis became memorialized in the decade after Green, when school districts across the South, North, and West debated the cause of—and solution to—residential and school segregation. Particularly striking to Devlin is the portrayal of 1957 Little Rock by both the opponents and proponents of school busing. To opponents of busing, especially among white families and politicians in northern locales like Boston, the cause of school segregation in Little Rock was a uniquely southern form of racism that just did not exist above the Mason-Dixon line; Boston was “not Little Rock” (p. 53). To proponents, especially among Black families and civil rights activists, the Black students riding buses to desegregate schools throughout the country linked them to the original Little Rock Nine and to a history of “blacks committed to freedom and justice” (p. 53). When President Nixon proposed a federal moratorium on busing in 1972, for example, regional NAACP leaders gathered on the steps of Central High School and used the iconic backdrop to make a clear link between 1957 and the present, with speakers highlighting the fact that the school's integrated student body was only recently secured through Little Rock's own busing program.
In Chapter 3, Devlin uses several cultural productions of the 1980s as an evidentiary base to show how “white moderates” once again elevated themselves as the true champions of a quality educational system with a practicable desegregation plan. Devlin rightly argues that the narratives of “white moderation” in the late 1950s—including a documentary of an Arkansas congressman and the memoir and Time Life docudrama of Central High's vice principal—intentionally reemerged at a moment when school officials feared that “white flight” to suburbs and private schools would result in a predominantly Black district with few desegregation options. Perhaps elevating the public memories of the “moderate” strategies of the late 1950s, which aimed to satisfy the desires of white school patrons, could be useful as policymakers and the courts considered consolidation, interdistrict transfer, and magnet programs.
In 1997, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee announced that the fortieth anniversary of the crisis would be cause for a “year of reconciliation” in Little Rock and throughout the country. As Devlin notes in Chapter 4, the 1990s was a particularly active decade throughout the South for memorializing the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s through civic celebrations and museum construction. Indeed, Little Rock boosters had hoped that a museum in the vicinity of Central High would be open in time for the fortieth anniversary, as local, state, and national figures (including President Bill Clinton) descended on the city. Devlin takes readers inside the museum planning meetings and shows the tensions that arose between professional historians, local Black activists, members of the Little Rock Nine, and white Central High alumni about how the story should be told. Again, “white moderates” won the day, with the final exhibit script reflecting the wishes of the white alumni to portray themselves as distinct from a small minority of students who regularly terrorized the Nine. Devlin ends the chapter with a striking contrast: just one day after the fortieth anniversary commemoration at Central High, the Little Rock School District submitted a revised desegregation plan in federal court that reduced busing and returned every school except Central High to neighborhood-based assignment.
Chapter 5 is a conclusion of sorts, offering arguments about the power of public historical memory. Devlin claims that the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that all but eliminated a school district's ability to use race in school assignment should not have come as a great surprise. In the six decades since the Brown decision, public memory had been carefully crafted to venerate educational policies of white moderation while dismissing the realities of American institutional and socioeconomic roots in white supremacy. The decision of Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court's plurality simply reflected this carefully crafted historical ignorance. Yet Devlin does not consider the memory of Little Rock to be closed. Quoting public statements of Little Rock Nine members and several of their memoirs published in the 2000s, Devlin believes that it is still possible to “resist historical erasure” and trace how contemporary educational inequities are symptoms of so-called white moderates’ minimal compliance to principles of justice.
Devlin's selection of moments works well to forward her argument, though it seems odd that she does not interrogate what would seem to be two of the more significant cultural productions that have helped shape American public memory of Little Rock: the 1987 broadcast and continued circulation of the Eyes on the Prize documentary and Oprah Winfrey's notable attempt in 1999 to showcase the unlikely friendship of Hazel Bryan and Elizabeth Eckford on the Oprah Winfrey Show. How do these narratives—constructed at least in part by Black producers—add to or complicate Devlin's argument, which often portrays a monolithic Black memory of desegregation in Little Rock?
Devlin has provided a useful tool for extending conversations of Brown and Little Rock. She provides a forceful argument that many historians of education will embrace: memories of education's past matter to how we understand educational issues and actors in the present.
