Bielefeld, Germany, 2006
“We attempted to document the inequalities. For example, I traveled with a Black lawyer to West Helena on the Mississippi River, where we easily visited all the Black schools and were greeted by Black teachers who gave us all the information we needed. When we then went to the superintendent of schools, whom I told that I was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago and needed the information for my doctoral thesis, he gave me all the necessary information. Wilma then went to the school board in Little Rock and got the statistics there. She also told people that she was a doctoral student. Then we initiated a process. Then I made a comparison of the high schools in Little Rock. A white high school with a capacity of 3,000 students had only 1,800 students, and it offered a large number of career preparation courses—of course, for Whites, not for Black people. A few hundred meters away from this school was Dunbar High School. This was the Black high school, built for 1,000 students and now serving 1,800 students, so the students could only be taught half-day, half in the morning and half in the afternoon. They weren’t being prepared for important careers or for university studies. The study I conducted was published in the newspaper and sparked debate. We then suggested to the school board that they begin the process of abolishing racial segregation by allowing Black students to take courses at the white school that weren’t available at the Black school. Arkansas was interesting in every respect, especially Little Rock. It was in transition—not the Deep South, but what was called the New South, where people were already willing to make some concessions. In May 1954, the Supreme Court in Washington ruled unanimously that racial segregation in schools violated the Constitution. Schools should begin to abolish racial segregation. We then met with the school board in Little Rock, and they were willing to present us with a program—which we actually agreed to—that they would completely desegregate schools within six years, by 1960, in stages: first the high schools, then the junior high schools, then the elementary schools. We thought that was the plan, but then in 1955 came the second Supreme Court decision, which stated that schools should desegregate “with all liberate speed,” or as quickly as possible. But that was vague, and that led to increased resistance to the abolition of racial segregation. The school board in Little Rock also reversed its decision. We then initiated litigation in February 1956, at the beginning of the second semester. Wilma and I were very active in finding students and parents willing to participate as plaintiffs. We then went to families with Black members of the NAACP – always a group of two – and the interesting thing was that we received a lot of support. The strategy was… the white high school was in the middle of the city, and many Black students had to walk past the white high school and then quite a distance to the new Black high school on the east side of the city. We wanted the students to register at the white high school. We expected 26, for which the parents had agreed, and then expected them to meet at a meeting point in the morning. Instead of 26, there were 85. They then went to the white high school and tried to register, but were, of course, turned away. We then initiated litigation. We only partially won the case. The federal courts ruled that the high school should admit nine Black students in September 1957. That was at least a start. Then, at the last minute before schools opened for the new semester in the fall of 1957, the governor of Arkansas mobilized the National Guard—the National Guard was the state’s military—and prevented the students from entering the school. President Eisenhower, who was no liberal in this regard, waited three weeks and then finally sent paratroopers to Little Rock to allow these nine students access to Little Rock Central High.”