Arkansas Council also recruited members outside of Little Rock, including many faculty members at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
During my association with the Little Rock chapter of the NAACP, I worked closely with Daisy Bates, the young president of the Arkansas State Conference of Branches of the NAACP, a dynamic activist and the wife of L. C. Bates, the editor of the outspoken Arkansas State Press. As the conflict over school desegregation became more bitter in the course of the 1950s, she became the most hated black person for the radical racist right. As attitudes have changed in more recent years, she has come to be recognized as a heroine, particularly for her role in the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. She and her husband were made honorary citizens of Little Rock, a school was named after her, and when she died at the age of eighty-three in 1999, she lay in state in the Arkansas State Capitol. More recently, an important thoroughfare was named after her.
One of my first projects as chair of the education committee of the NAACP was a study of educational inequalities in the small town of West Helena, Arkansas, along the Mississippi across from Helena, Tennessee. We still had to operate under the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, which had established the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Our task was to document that the separate facilities were unequal everywhere. In West Helena I was met by a local black attorney, and together we visited all the black schools and interviewed the teachers. I then went alone to the white superintendent and introduced myself as a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Chicago. He willingly answered all my questions about facilities and curricula. Wilma then went to the Department of Education in Little Rock, also introduced herself as a graduate student in education at the University of Chicago, and obtained all the statistical information we needed, including the salary scales that showed striking inequalities, with Blacks earning about half as much as white teachers. We then filed a suit that resulted in a court order that mandated major improvements.
I then began investigations of further school districts. The most important was, of course, Little Rock. In the spring of 1952 I prepared a study of inequalities between the city’s two public high schools, white Little Rock Senior High School—soon afterward renamed Little Rock Central High School—and black Dunbar High School. Little Rock Senior High School had a capacity of 3,000, and in 1950-51 had only 1, 438 pupils. Dunbar had been built for 1,600 pupils, but was seriously overcrowded because the 1,525 senior high school students shared the building with the junior high school and with the junior college. Because of a lack of classrooms for study halls, three to four hundred students were required to be in the auditorium during their study periods. Three classes met generally in the cafeteria, where the band also practiced and interfered with instruction. Because of the lack of space, classes at Dunbar ran for only 42 minutes, whereas classes in the white high school, Little Rock High ran for 55 minutes. The library was so small at Dunbar that teachers were advised to issue only two or three permits an hour for the use of the library, while students at Little Rock Senior High School could use theirs freely. In addition to Little Rock Senior High School, there was a special technical high school for whites. Moreover, there was a marked discrepancy in student load, per capita per student expenditure and teachers’ salaries. The “Peabody Report” rated Little Rock Senior High School as well as the Technical High School as “good,” as to size and condition, and rated Dunbar High School as “poor.”
Finally, the schools had very different curricula. In addition to the courses offered at the Technical High School, Little Rock Senior High School had extensive college preparatory, commercial and vocational courses that were not offered at Dunbar. Dunbar offered only the most rudimentary courses, virtually none in the liberal arts or in business—not even a course in bookkeeping—and almost no preparation for technical occupations. Thus Dunbar offered no courses in mechanical training, auto or aviation mechanics, machine shop, or radio. There were seventy-six courses offered at the two white high schools that were not offered at Dunbar. The report called upon the Little Rock School Board to make a beginning toward overcoming inequalities by admitting a select group of Dunbar students to courses at Little Rock Senior High School that were not available to them at Dunbar. The two schools, moreover, were in easy walking distance.
The report was released to the Little Rock press in the name of the Little Rock Council on Schools, an interracial organization I had initiated, which had the support of the Little Rock branch of the NAACP, the Urban League and the Southern Regional Council as well as of a number of distinguished white public figures such as Rev. Deer. We asked for and were granted, a meeting with the Little Rock School Board, which would not have been possible at the time in most Southern cities. We asked the board to begin a process of gradual desegregation by admitting a small number of Dunbar students to courses at Little Rock Senior High School as the report had suggested. The reception at the board was cordial.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 99f