The Little Rock school crisis is never far from the American public consciousness. Its fiftieth anniversary in 2007 was the occasion for widespread media retrospectives and an outpouring of scholarship, including books by Tony Freyer, Elizabeth Jacoway and John Kirk. The invitation of the Little Rock Nine to the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January reminded the nation of their pioneering role in promoting racial equality. Most recently, the death of Jefferson Thomas, one of the African Americans who as a teenager integrated Little Rock Central High School, has led to renewed introspection about the longer-term impact of events half a century ago.
In what is therefore a crowded field, this study of the crisis stands out as the most sophisticated and penetrating analysis produced to date. What most distinguishes the book is the way Anderson weaves class and gender politics into her discussion of the racial conflict in Little Rock. Her examination of the segregationist Mothers' League of Central High School is especially compelling. Anderson demonstrates how its members simultaneously conformed to and dissented from southern gender norms. They drew on their roles as mothers concerned for the safety and welfare of children to take to the streets in angry public protest at odds with conventional notions of femininity. Yet the Mothers' League paradoxically used its public platform to reinforce traditional gender roles by calling on men to protect white schoolgirls from the feared sexual advances of black males.
The recent study of the crisis by Elizabeth Jacoway reconstructed historical events as a traditional morality tale with school superintendent Virgil T. Blossom cast in the role of lead villain. In contrast, Anderson demonstrates the deficiencies of even the most racially progressive members of the white citizenry in Little Rock. White elites dissociated themselves from racial violence that they blamed on irresponsible elements within the working class, conveniently overlooking the incitement of the mob by ministers, merchants and lawyers. The Women's Emergency Council, which opposed closure of public schools as a means to avert integration, was too accommodating to conservative business leaders to provide black activists with strong and sustained support. With acute perception, Anderson deduces that, in marginalizing black activists from their campaign to reopen the schools, moderates were as complicit as their segregationist opponents in seeing the race issue as a struggle between competing interests within the white community.
For all the raucousness of segregationist protest, Anderson concludes that African Americans, not white reactionaries, were prepared to make the greater sacrifices in support of their cause. This assessment has important implications not only for our understanding of the Little Rock crisis, but also for the broader civil rights struggle.
Karen Anderson has produced an outstanding study of Little Rock that is rigorously researched, analytically nuanced and boldly original. Inevitably, there are some issues left unexplored. It would have been interesting, for instance, to learn more of the international context within which the crisis occurred, including comparisons segregationists drew between the deployment of federal troops in Little Rock and the Soviet invasion of Hungary a year earlier. This is nonetheless an outstanding study that anyone interested in American race relations must read.
