The unanimous U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, overturning Plessy vs. Ferguson, came on May 17, 1954. I heard of it on the radio at noon at home and was surprised that my students in the class I taught were not more excited. We almost immediately asked for and were granted a meeting with the School Board. The new superintendent assured us that Little Rock would abide by the Supreme Court decision and presented us with a plan for gradual desegregation. Two high schools were currently under construction, Horace Mann on the east side, intended for blacks, and Hall on the west side for whites. Under the new plan, once construction was completed in 1956, both schools, as well as Little Rock Central High School, would no longer have a racial designation. In the fall of 1957, the junior high schools would be desegregated and between 1958 and 1960 the elementary school would be desegregated in three stages. We considered this plan acceptable.
In the spring of 1955 the Supreme Court issued an implementation decision. It set no schedule for the desegregation of the schools, but merely stipulated that this be implemented with “all deliberate speed.” In the year since the May 17, 1954 decision there had been little active opposition to the decree. The school board had announced that it would comply, as did the relatively conservative governor of Arkansas, Francis Cherry. However, there were some early signs of opposition. Governors in Arkansas could serve up to two consecutive two-year terms, and normally a win in the Democratic primary—the only one that counted at that time—assured a second term. It was a surprise when Orval Faubus forced Cherry into a runoff and then defeated him. Resistance to desegregation had built throughout the South after the “deliberate speed” decision, and after the so-called White Citizens Councils called for massive resistance and even resort to violence. The Little Rock school board reacted to this changed climate and in the summer of 1955 announced that the new Horace Mann High School, when opened in 1956, would have an all-black faculty, while the teachers at Little Rock Central High School and the new Hall High School would be all white. (p. 76f)
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The situation about the Little Rock schools became increasingly tense in the fall of 1955 and in the winter of 1956. The School Board announced in the fall that Horace Mann would open at the beginning of the spring term in early February 1956 as an all-black school, Hall school as an all white school, and Little Rock Central High would continue as a white school. This, of course, was totally contrary to the promise the Board had given to us in 1954.
The new so-called Blossom Plan, named after the new superintendent, meant in fact that Black students living west of Little Rock Central High School would have to make a long trip each school day from their homes to the far East Side. We decided on the following strategy: We would ask students who had to pass Central High to seek admission to Central High, and if they were turned down we would take legal action. The task now was to find parents and children who were willing to participate. We formed four teams of two persons each - Wilma, myself, Lee, and Daisy Bates were each members of teams together with black NAACP members who would visit homes in the areas affected. The response was overwhelming. A surprising majority of the families we visited were willing to participate. We had to dissuade several because their jobs were vulnerable.
The plan was for parents and children to meet the morning of the first day of the new school semester at designated places and proceed together to the school. The evening before, we had a final planning meeting at our house. The meeting included Daisy Bates, Lee, Wilma, and myself and several of our executive committee members. President Harris, who knew what we were doing, had become frightened and called to ask that no Philander Smith faculty participate. We decided to go ahead nevertheless and there was no recrimination afterward. We expected approximately twenty-eight children. Word had spread and about eighty came. As we expected, their applications to attend Central High were turned down, and we accordingly decided to bring suit.
However, we had problems finding a lawyer. The local black lawyers either did not want to take on the case or demanded exorbitant fees. Then Wiley Branton, a young African American lawyer from nearby Pine Bluff, offered to take the case for free provided we would find the approximately three hundred dollars he needed for court costs to file the suit. Three hundred dollars was a lot of money for us at the time; we did not have it nor did the treasury of the local NAACP branch. We then did something that had to remain strictly confidential. We wrote to Wilmas relatives in Canada to ask for assistance. We soon had the money, and the suit was filed. Now financial contributions began to flow in from members of the local black community and from sympathetic whites, and the national office of the NAACP took over the case. (p. 78f)
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During the year in Fayetteville I kept in close contact with the Little Rock branch of the NAACP. The federal courts finally ruled in our case, not quite as we had hoped, with a broad ruling mandating the desegregation of the Little Rock schools, but in a much more limited way, ordering the admission of nine black students to Little Rock Central High School at the beginning of the school year in September 1957. Although the White Citizens Councils threatened violence and the Attorney General of Georgia traveled to Little Rock to urge noncompliance, we expected everything to go smoothly. I flew to Little Rock once more two weeks before the opening of school for a planning meeting. We drove to Little Rock over the Labor Day weekend to say goodbye to friends on our way to New Orleans, where we had accepted positions at Dillard University. No one expected trouble. The headline of the Arkansas Gazette on Labor Day was “Little Rock Quiet on Eve of Opening of Integrated Schools.” Our last stop was at the Bates’. Their house was barricaded. Bullets had been shot through windows and we met in their basement with our children, who did not understand why we could not meet upstairs. That evening, Labor Day, the day before the schools were to open in Little Rock on Tuesday, September 3, we arrived in New Orleans. We were totally surprised and shocked when we heard on the radio the next morning that Governor Faubus had called out the National Guard to bar the nine students from entering the school.
What happened hit us very deeply. Eight of the students had arrived at the school together; they were unable to reach the ninth student, Elizabeth Eckford, who had no telephone and went by herself. When she arrived outside the school she was surrounded by a threatening mob. Grace Lorch, Lee s wife, who had come to observe, went into the crowd to rescue Elizabeth Eckford, and took her to the nearest bus stop, where she was now surrounded by a host of reporters. Grace then brought Elizabeth home. The next day the story appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Not long afterward Grace was subpoenaed to appear before Senator James Eastland’s Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in nearby Memphis, without being given time to obtain counsel. The subpoena was clearly intended to smear her in the press as a Communist. Now the home of the Lorches became the target of acts of violence. Their daughter Alice, then fourteen years old, was repeatedly insulted and threatened. They nevertheless remained in Little Rock until the end of the academic year and then went to Wesleyan University where Lee had a one-year visiting appointment. At the end of that year, with Lee blacklisted in the United States, they emigrated to Canada, first to the University of Alberta in Edmonton and then to York University in Toronto. Lee had a distinguished career in Canada and became a fellow of the prestigious Royal Canadian Academy of Science. (p. 80)
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 76-80