Arkansas Blog

What I find disturbing in Jacoway's comments (and also those of Jim Johnson) is the premise that there was a theme of sexual fear driving a lot of the hatred and actions. Where is her evidence for such a claim? Does it really fit in with the actions taken by the key players in the crisis?

Jacoway's extraordinary leaps of logic make her conclusions quite questionable. She wants us to believe that Faubus was the "victim" and that he was misunderstood (especially by Ashmore and the Arkansas Gazette!). Brummett and others have exposed this flaw in her reasoning and need to be thanked for making the public aware of this "white"-wash. Jacoway's opus, rather than cleansing the event, has made the stain more prominent and revealing.

Governor Beebe made a telling remark in his speech today about "those who are still trying to revise history", without naming names or newspapers.

I have no desire to defend Faubus, a man of his times. But he has become the white Jesus on the cross for many people who can remember 1957. It is as incorrect to blame our racist moment in the sun on Faubus only, as it is for Ms Jacoway to imply Orval had no choice.

Either deep inside or for political purposes, Orval Faubus resisted integration just as most white Arkansans wanted him to do. The majority of white people in the state, in the South in 1957 did not want their kids to go to school with "colored kids." Yet today we'd be lucky to find 5% of older whites in Arkansas who'd say they held the same views as Faubus back then. They're letting Orval hang on the cross for their sins.

I want people to be ashamed of Orval's actions as governor, but I also want people to understand his actions were directly in line with what the majority of white people in this state wanted. He would have been pulled out of the Mansion by his petard and beaten if he had welcomed the Little Rock 9 into that school in the 50s. We're a big enough people to handle the complexities of assigning blame to many....the living, who should be made to feel guilty at this late date for the racism they had in their heart 50 years ago. Faubus can do no more evil, but not so for the closet-racists who live among us today.

Orval Faubus will be dead and buried once and for all the day black Arkansans truly share the respect, rights and privileges the whites have always had. We need to fight the Orval in ourselves.

I seldom find reason to quibble with Brummett's logic or conclusions, but occasionally he reaches for an analogy and, in his haste, grabs the wrong thing. "Found himself" is not a passive construction, it is active but also reflexive, so the whole active/passive thing misses the point. I think he's right, though, that the construction was deliberately chosen by Jacoway to try to mitigate Faubus' responsibility for his actions. It makes him sound like Gregor Samsa, who woke up one day and found himself a cockroach.

The events of 1957 touched many of us outside of Arkansas in surprising ways. In my final year at the U of Iowa, my fellow students refused to apply for jobs in Arkansas or Mississippi. The oft-heard reason was hatred of the "racist dictator" Faubus.

Some of my Iowa grad-student classmates had been Arkansas teachers and students. They fled, moving north to Iowa. Jobless, many applied for graduate admission. From them, I heard about Arkansas' low pay, poor facilities, and low accreditation standards. And Faubus was a symbol of everything that was wrong with every place in The South.

Despite all the negativity, I took a job in Arkansas for various reasons, one of which was to cast votes proudly against Faubus.

Before we heap on too much self flagellation let's recall the race riots of the 1970s when Boston neighborhoods were forced to integrate. There were similar riots in middle America in the 60s and 1970s as we discovered 'little Orvals' from sea to shining sea . There was systemic racism in California as the Black Panthers found barriers intolerable and shot their way thru some of them.

In his book, My Brother Bill, John Faulkner provides a glimpse of what William Faulkner thought about book critics like John Brummett and Jerry McConnell:

"Since I now had a book to my credit and had had several stories published in Collier's, Bill used to talk to me about writing every now and then. It was at one of these times that he told me never to pay any attention to anything a critic wrote. He said most of them were people who tried to write and couldn't, so they were taking a sort of revenge on anyone who could.

"If they could run down someone's writing that had been published, it would prove they knew more about it than the fellow that wrote it did. If they knew more about writing than a writer, it would prove that their stories had actually been good enough to sell and it was the publisher's fault for turning them down. Bill claimed he never read reviews, and I don't think he did, or letters, for that matter."

Bill Faulkner's take on book critics (or theater and movie critics for that matter) is very close to my own.

Of course, unlike Jerry McConnell, Brummett did write a poor selling and long forgotten book about Bill Clinton that he called, High Wire. It would serve him well if, like Faulkner, he didn't read his critics. Just a few lines from one them, if you will:

(1) "'Highwire,'" by John Brummett, a newspaper columnist for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, is a chatty, anecdotal meditation on Mr. Clinton's rise to power, which provides a . . . highly subjective portrait of the President and his circle." (2) "When Mr. Brummett turns to the broader political landscape, however, his observations can seem shockingly naive and obtuse." (3) "While Mr. Brummett's penchant for free-association results in a sloppy, incoherent narrative, he does demonstrate a knack for using colorful anecdotes to illustrate his points."

Well, none of what this critic had to say mattered to me. I bought Brummett's book, read it, and arrived at my own conclusion about Brummett's "highly subjective and "shockingly naïve and obtuse" observations.

What is disturbing to me is the number of well-educated people who don't' trouble themselves to read an author's work, but who instead take the easy way out by reading a critic's opinion and then adopting the critic's opinion as their own. Nothing like letting somebody else do your thinking for you.

"Nothing like letting somebody else do your thinking for you."

Not really much of a rebuttal durango. You just lash out at the critics rather than the criticism. Your closing line could just as well be said about you. Are you letting Jacoway do your thinking for you?

McConnell cites Jacoway frequently, both in praise and in criticism. He cites other sources that agreee with her or are in disagreement with her. In a sense, he is not hiding her work from us. My son read the book and came to the same conclusion as McConnell. He is a Central High graduate and is a college professor. Putting his views together with those of the critics and readings from excerpted sections of her book, I still get the same message: Jacoway has been painstaking in finding the dots on the historical page; much less so in connecting them.

You've apparently have chosen to let Jacoway do some of your thinking, as you put it, and you take the least effective argument to counter those in disagreement with her conclusions (or illusions according to some). Nothing you've said contradicts the statements made by these men about Jacoway. You've built up straw men to destroy with some randomly selected quotes pertaining to critics in general while the real targets remain unmolested and unharmed.

Did you learn this from Jacoway perhaps?

Why, Jake! You must have deduced that I was talking about you. How presumptuous. But as the inimitable Max Brantley might say, "Stuck pig?"

On this rare occasion in which I disagree with Deathbyinches, I thought I would take a moment to post my first message. While I agree that the white majority at the time was complicit in the events surrounding the Central High crisis, I firmly believe that had Faubus shown integrity and leadership, the worst of the crisis could have been averted.

I don't believe history supports DBI's assertion that Faubus "would have been pulled out of the Mansion by his petard and beaten" had he welcomed the black students. Charleston, Hoxie, and Fayetteville had all been integrated before Central and I have no reason to believe any of those areas were any less racist at the time than Little Rock. There were malcontents in Charleston and Jim Johnson and his crowd tried to foment the same divisiveness in Hoxie that they later created in Little Rock. The key difference in those locations compared to Little Rock was the presence of leaders with integrity, such as Dale Bumpers and Kunkel Vance.

I believe that the majority of Arkansans would have silently gone along with a state-government-supported integration of Central High School just as they silently went along with the state-government-supported resistance to integration. While this passive stance is certainly deserving of scorn, it is important to note the distinction between passively allowing Faubus to behave unethically and actively pushing him to do so.

This is all interest reading, lots to think about.

I don't know -- I was barely a year old at the time -- but I have always believed that integration went quietly and well in places where the school-age population of black students (*not* just the number entering in the first year) was so small that there was no fear of floodgates opening, and eventually having schools "crawling" (as the segregationists would have said) with blacks.

The question I have is -- were Hoxie, Charleston and Fayetteville aberrations -- such that the imagined support for lawfulness by Mr. Faubus would have seen Hot Springs, West Memphis and Pine Bluff turn out more like Central than Hoxie?

I don't know. It is something I have wondered about.

Gosh...the ol' "Stuck pig" retort. I am so wounded (NOT). Again you are providing us no counter arguments and that is a rather impotent technique in any kind of debate. While you flail helplessly against the critics, you are letting the criticisms run free and unfettered.
The "Stuck...." retort is the weakest and most inane of them all. That you're stooping to such tactics bothers me somewhat because I've seen you do so much better and be more cogent in your responses on other topics. Yet, when it comes to this Jacoway issue, you come up with the trite and stale comeback that means absolutely nothing.
Let me use "stuck" in a different sense and it might be more applicable. You seem to be stuck in finding credible arguments to refute those made by Brummett and McConnel, etc. McConnell's essay is a model of how to present a counter argument or a criticism. He lays out a detailed list of problems, brings in a wealth of statements to support his contentions; he makes clear distinctions about areas where Jacoway's conclusions fail to match her own statements or the statements of others or just fail to be logical.
The best you can do durango is pin your hopes on the dried out and worn phrase "stuck pig" as if it will magically prove you right. Now, that's what I would call being stuck.
So, noisome epithets aside, what else do you have to defend Jacoway with against the points covered by McConnell? You may not agree with him in spirit, but academically you've offered nothing to prove him wrong whereas he has presented plenty of instances, evidence and rationale indicating that Jacoway has erred. The game is point/counterpoint, not name-calling.

While it certainly makes some sense that a smaller raw number of blacks enrolling in those towns (I'm not sure what the numbers would be as a percentage of total enrollment) would result in less fervor in opposing integration, I don't think that can explain the more orderly integration. Jim Johnson and his ilk came from places outside of Hoxie and seemed to make a pretty concerted effort to stir up trouble there, in spite of the relatively small number of blacks enrolling in that school system. I think the courageous, unbending behavior of the superintendent and school board was the key factor that made the difference.

One thing that is too often overlooked is the relative success of the pro-integration public servants after these confrontations. Even in Little Rock, moderate school board members were elected right after the crisis. The moderates on the Hoxie school board continued to win elections. Of course, Bumpers went on to a distinguished career. It seems that when forced to choose, Arkansans by and large chose the more responsible path. Unfortunately, when not forced to choose, they allowed the hate-mongerers to run amok, something I still struggle to understand.

An interesting, though perhaps not authoritative, article on Hoxie integration at the link. Again, I am raising a question rather than answering one: I don't mean to dispute ARHawk's point. It does look like the Hoxie school board had a pretty tough fight to do the right thing for the 22 blacks in a district of 900.

"The "Stuck...." retort is the weakest and most inane of them all."

That's pretty much what I said to Max a couple weeks back, Jake, when the inimitable editor was tacky enough to try pinning the stuck pig image on me. Apparently, you missed that exchange.

Nowhere in my first post, did I mention your name. I was talking in general terms. However, you reacted as though YOU had been attacked. Max would likely have said, "Stuck pig squeals." I did not assert as much. I posed it as a question.

My dismay with McConnell's repeatedly accusing Jacoway of taking "cheap shots" at Ashmore and other of McConnell's heroes is well documented on a number of this blog's threads, and you can find my remarks in the archives if you wish. I am not going to take the time to rehash my commentary here.

But back to the crux of what I was saying in my first post tonight, here's the real deal, Jake: If ever you or your son, the professor, go to the trouble to write a book, I will buy it and I will read it and I, alone, will decide what I think about what you've written. I will NOT allow the opinions of Brummett or McConnell or Brantley or anybody else to factor into my own evaluation of your work. And that's a promise, bud.

Thanks for the article TAP. I guess the interpretation of that article depends on one's point of view, but the main point I take away from that is that the Hoxie school board was able to fight off a fairly organized and substantial effort to roll back integration with pretty limited resources. Imagine how effective Faubus might have been with the resources of the state of Arkansas at his disposal.

There was a very well-made documentary about Hoxie's integration that aired a couple of years ago on AETN. I remember Superintendant Vance talking about someone calling him at home and privately supporting him, but not being willing to show that support in public. Vance angrily told him that he really wasn't doing him any good. Unfortunately, I think that timid supporter is pretty representative of a lot of Arkansans at the time. Willing to do the right thing, but not strong enough to inist upon it.

TAP, missing from the account at Hoxie is the name of Jim Johnson who until this day is very proud of his actions there. The AETN special on the integration of Hoxie goes into great depth on his role.
Thanks for the link.

"On this rare occasion in which I disagree with Deathbyinches, I thought I would take a moment to post my first message. While I agree that the white majority at the time was complicit in the events surrounding the Central High crisis, I firmly believe that had Faubus shown integrity and leadership, the worst of the crisis could have been averted.

I don't believe history supports DBI's assertion that Faubus "would have been pulled out of the Mansion by his petard and beaten" had he welcomed the black students. Charleston, Hoxie, and Fayetteville had all been integrated before Central"

Welcome aboard ARhawk! We'll never know what might have happened 50 years ago today if a man with more integrity and less political ambition had been Governor of Arkansas. Of course leadership in the right direction would have ultimately helped the situation in Little Rock. But imagine how risky that would have felt to Orval in 1957, 5 years before James Meredith entered Old Miss with an army and 6 years before George Wallace blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama.

There were ugly words and bad tempers in Charleston, Arkansas in 1954 when Dale Bumpers helped integrate the schools there. Same with Van Buren in 1958. Nothing much happened in Fort Baptist when our schools were finally integrated in 1964. I believe the difference was the number of black kids. There were hardly any blacks in Charleston or Van Buren. I been told all my life that blacks make up less than 10% of the population of Fort Smith. But this wasn't the case in Little Rock. Once the floodgates were opened lots and lots of black faces were going to be peering out of formerly all white classrooms.

Add to that the insult of having the 101st Airborne invade Arkansas soil for over 2 months pointing their guns at the home folk. If they'd have been from New Jersey instead of Kentucky......lord have mercy! And some people think everything was hunky-dory in LR by Christmas, 50 years ago. There were no winners then, the school year sputtered to a close with one ugly incident after another.

In the fall of 1958 the high schools failed to open in September. In November Faubus won reelection with 83% of the vote.......no Supreme Court needed here! Click on my name to read the time line of events.

Went back and did a search for your remarks in the archives, durango. As I looked through each of them, I was again struck by the fact that you failed to lay down any foundation or evidence to show Brummett or McConnell wrong. You beefed a lot about them attacking such a worthy author as Jacoway and how would they like it if critics tried to show how BRILLIANT they were taring apart such endeavors, etc, blah blah blah.
You defend the author mostly and if you cite the Jacoway's book, it is not to prove Brummett or McConnell wrong but to show that at heart Jacoway said some good things about the evils of segregation (which is something the critics have lauded her for already).
I agree with you about the "stuck pig" quote. It's just plain stupid and I hope Max and other wits and dimwits cease using it when too tired to argue effectively.
Don't be so quick to condemn critics. In everyday life, many of your decisions are based on following the advice of others. In fact, it is often good for you to heed what others say. And, hey, sometimes the opinions are contradictory. There's hundreds of adages for such situations and you can see there's hundreds of ways to view the problem.
Am going tomorrow to visit son and daughter-in-law. Will look through his copy of the book. I will especially check out the sections on Faubus & Ashmore. My son tends to makr books so it might be easier. When I return from NY, will have met your criterion, a standard which you, Brummett and McConnell have already met. In the meantime, maybe you can find a better defense for Jacoway that has the ability to refute the claims and rationale of Brummett and McConnell. Or point to the works of someone who has done so already.
Must go and attend to the vacation preparation. Wife has put serious limits on Blogging today. Ciao!!

ARHawk said:
"Thanks for the article TAP. I guess the interpretation of that article depends on one's point of view, but the main point I take away from that is that the Hoxie school board was able to fight off a fairly organized and substantial effort to roll back integration with pretty limited resources. Imagine how effective Faubus might have been with the resources of the state of Arkansas at his disposal."----
_____

Great point, something I hadn't thought of. Thanks to you and eLwood for mentioning the AETN special. Seems clear to me I don't yet know enough about the situation to offer much to the discussion. I will try to track it down.

One thing I know -- if Mr. Faubus knew better and refused to do the right thing (putting those nine kids and The Rule of Law at risk), he was even worse than history portrays him.

One thing I like about Congressman Vic Snyder is his refusal to sacrifice principle at the altar of keeping his job.

Safe travels to you, Jake, as you head out on vacation. I'm delighted to read that you'll study Jacoway's works more closely during this time. In the meantime, here are a few quotes from a review by Dr. Stanley N. Katz, Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

You may choose to cast Katz's opinions aside before reading, however, since his full review was published in the hated Arkansas Democrat-Gazette several months ago. As for me, I'm going to let Katz and others who have reviewed Jacoway's work favorably fight it out with the Brummetts and McConnells. They have more time on their hands than I do. Again, safe travels.

(1) "This is a book that could only have been written by an insider, and yet it is a book that does not suffer from the self-absorption that ordinarily characterizes insider literature."

(2) "Jacoway was almost entirely insensitive to the implications of the school crisis as a high school student and only became aware of the implications when she began her doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina with the great historian of the south, George Tindall."

(3) "There are only two sets of heroes in Jacoway's history. The primary set is led by the "Little Rock Nine" -the children who attended Central High School in 1957. The second group for whom Jacoway has respect are heroines-some of the elite women of Little Rock, led by Vivion Brewer and Adolphine Terry, along with Velma Powell, the wife of J. O. Powell, Central's vice principal for boys."

(4) "But for the most part this is a book about failure, not heroism. Jacoway is clear eyed in her analysis of what went wrong during the crisis, and almost no white leader comes away unscathed by her judgment."

(5) "Jacoway makes a strong case that Ashmore consistently and deliberately "blur [red] the distinction between news and opinion." That is, Ashmore used the Gazette as a weapon against Faubus and the segregationists in a way that discredited it with moderate citizens of Little Rock and reduced its capacity to provide the sort of news that a city in crisis required."

(6) "In Jacoway's account, though, almost everyone failed, of course, and Orval Faubus is the most obvious example. But in Turn Away Thy Son we have the most complex and convincing account of the governor's role in the crisis that I have read."

(7) "Worst of all, to my way of thinking, was the federal district court judge, John Elvis Miller, a former U. S. senator and congressman, who appears to have completely forgotten his responsibilities as a member of the federal judiciary. Miller frequently gave out of court advice to participants during the crisis, wavered or disappeared at crucial junctures and helped as much as anyone to weaken the capacity of the federal courts to play a constructive role."

(8) "The Little Rock Story shows in microcosm the difficulty of extending justice to a historically powerless group in the absence of a majoritarian will to do so. What we hear in this marvelous, insightful and courageous volume is the voice of a native southern liberal judging her own community honestly and harshly."

(9) "But for northerners like myself, Turn Away Thy Son is also a reminder that the nation as a whole has not made the progress toward racial justice that liberals have long believed in. In the end, the Little Rock crisis needs to be seen as a national, not a local, tragedy. I agree with Jacoway when she concludes: Only when the nation chooses to name [racism as its] adversary, and discuss candidly the fears that continue to animate white racism, can we hope to move at last toward the goal that one of the Little Rock Nine so forthrightly named, the hope of "liberty and justice for all."

Thanks durango. CU later. Will check out Katz article once I reach NY and settle down for a respite from family time.

jakester

I can certainly understand the argument that the greater number of black students in Little Rock was the key difference between it and Hoxie, but I don't know that I completely believe that desegrationist fervor was a function of the number or percentage of black students. If that were the case, you would have expected Hoxie to have received much less attention from the segregationists than it did, considering it only had 21 black students. It's purely speculation on my part, but I imagine Jim Johnson would find a single black student in a white school as loathsome as 100.

I think the actions that Faubus took emboldened the segrationists and fueled the fire of discord. I suppose it's a bit of a chicken or egg issue: did Faubus behave as he did due to the overwhelming demand of the public or did the public behave as they did due to the actions of Faubus? Due to the integration experiences in the other towns in Arkansas (which may or may not provide fair comparisons), I tend to believe the latter.

DBI, you're quite right to point out that Faubus faired very well with the public after taking these actions, largely due to his segregationist stance. Even though it may seem anti-intuitive, I believe he also could have won his election by taking an almost opposite stance (undoubtedly by a smaller margin). The Arkansas population seemed to be somewhat conflicted by the entire issue and able to respect anyone who took a strong stand on it one way or another. For instance, in Hoxie, two of the most rabid segregationists were elected to the school board in the immediate aftermath of the integration of the school. However, when given the opportunity to remove three of the integrationist members and give the segregeationists a majority, the voters declined. This seeming contradiction in voting for and against segregationists for the school board occurred in Little Rock as well.

All in all, I suspect that a strong integrationist leader would have succeeded in leading the people down the path of peace and justice, just as a strong segregationist leader obviously succeeded in leading the people down a path of strife and injustice. To me, that is one of the great tragedies of this entire event: had Faubus taken Lincoln's example and appealed to the better angels of our nature rather than cynically exploiting our basest fears, we could have been held up as an example for the rest of the country and Central High could have been a source of pride rather than shame for the entire state.