LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock city directors are being asked to repeal a declaration adopted by their counterparts Sept. 30, 1957, that supported Gov. Orval Faubus’ intervention at Central High School and suggested state aid be withheld from schools being forced by the federal government to integrate students.
A task force originating out of the Chamber of Commerce is working on ways to unify residents living in different parts of the city, and repealing the 1957 declaration is their first undertaking.
“It will show that we do know better and that we can admit that we made mistakes in the past and that that’s important. Healing only takes place when you face your mistakes,” said Ruth Shepherd, a co-chairman of the Better Together Building Community Task Force and executive director of Just Communities of Arkansas.
Shepherd and Charles Stewart, the group’s other cochairman, asked city directors Tuesday to immediately pass a resolution repealing the declaration. The proposed resolution also calls for a review of city ordinances, resolutions and declarations to identify others that “classify or reflect negatively upon citizens because of their race, religion, economic or ethnic background.”
Little Rock Central High School became internationally known Sept. 2, 1957, when Faubus sent Arkansas National Guardsmen there. Faubus said he called out the National Guard “to maintain ... the peace and good order of the community” and directed the Guard to prevent nine black students from entering the all-white school, notwithstanding a court-approved desegregation plan.
On Sept. 20, Faubus removed the guardsmen on the order of a federal judge. When the black students went to Central three days later on Sept. 23, a violent crowd gathered. The students were removed for their protection.
President Dwight Eisenhower then federalized the National Guard and sent 101st Airborne Division troops to the school the next day to enforce the school’s integration. The black students attended school the rest of the year under federal protection.
Mayor Mark Stodola told Shepherd and Stewart that he was willing to have the resolution be added to the board’s Dec. 6 agenda.
Woodrow Mann, mayor at the time of the declaration, did not sign the document, although five of the city’s 10 aldermen did. Two other alderman didn’t sign the declaration but voted for it be read into the record, according to an Arkansas Gazette account of the meeting. Three others were absent.
Alderman Franklin E. Loy said its main purpose was to put the members “on record,” according to an Oct. 1, 1957, Arkansas Democrat article about the meeting.
In the same article, Mann was quoted as saying the council’s declaration “is unimportant” and said he might enter a statement of his own disapproval “just in order that the record will be clear.”
The declaration said the federal court order that removed the National Guard and ordered Central High immediately integrated was not in the best interest of race relations in Little Rock and Arkansas. It deplored Eisenhower’s judgment and said time and understanding, not force, were the answer to Little Rock’s integration problem.
Neither the declaration, which city directors sent by telegram to Eisenhower nor the newspaper stories at the time say who wrote the declaration, although Loy was the one who read it into the record.
“They must have been scratching Faubus’ back politically,” said Elizabeth Jacoway, whose book Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation chronicled the time period.
Jacoway wasn’t familiar with the 1957 City Council declaration but said in an interview Wednesday, “At that point, there was a huge segregationist contingent in Little Rock.”
Mann was a known critic of Faubus but was at odds with the City Council even before the Central High School crisis.
He had been criticized for buying $4,000 worth of office furniture when his term started the year before and the city was in the midst of an election campaign to change the form of government from a mayor-council relationship to a city manager form of government, with the city manager being hired by the council.
Mann, who left the capital city shortly afterward, was recognized by city directors in 1997 during the 40th anniversary of the school’s integration, with a resolution commending him “for the courage and moral decency he showed in directing city departments to follow the rule of law and to obey the orders of the federal court during the integration of Central High School in 1957.”
The declaration’s existence has not been lost to time — the 1997 resolution honoring Mann referred back to the Sept. 30, 1957, meeting.
But when Jerry Jones first learned of the declaration last year, he suggested its repeal to the task force.
“I believe that the law matters, and it’s important that the public pronouncements and the public policies of the city of Little Rock be in a very progressive and very inclusive manner. It was time that we repealed this,” said Jones, chief legal officer for Acxiom.
“Some people may say you ought to just leave the past to be the past, but the past affects the future and this is something I think we should do to help bring Little Rock closer together,” he said.
City directors at the meeting Tuesday indicated support for the repeal, although Director Erma Hendrix said she’d rather they take a look at getting rid of at-large director positions that many people feel disenfranchise black residents.
“I think we need to be dealing with something that’s at hand, not history,” said Hendrix, who was in her 20s at the time of the declaration’s passage.
City Director Joan Adcock said she was hesitant to judge the City Council of 1957.
“Do I have a right to sit there and say someone who might have been doing the best they could made the wrong decision? I don’t know the person’s heart at the time, and I just feel like I can’t say someone was wrong 50-something years ago,” she said.
Adcock, a senior at the high school in 1957, described her teenage self as a shy girl who was engaged to be married. She worked after school to help out her mother, who was a sales clerk at a downtown department store.
“I would hate for someone to say my mother was wrong for sending me to school or that my mother was wrong for obeying the law,” said Adcock, who remembers her home phone ringing night after night with people asking her mother if she would pull her daughter out of the school in protest of the integration efforts.
Adcock doesn’t know how she will vote on the repeal. She’d be fine with noting that people in 2011 don’t feel the same way.
“But if we are criticizing or playing down the people who voted at the time, I would not be part of that because I’m not to judge anyone,” she said.
“We can never say if we was them sitting at that time that we would have voted differently than they had voted, because we wasn’t sitting there,” she said.
Stewart, the co-chairman of the Better Together Building Community Task Force, said the new resolution isn’t an attempt to change history.
“I think it would be making a statement for us to say that this is not what we believe in hindsight and given the experiences of history, and this is what we believe today,” said Stewart, a retired bank executive who recently served as the interim chief executive officer for Heifer International.
Once that statement is made, Stewart said, he’d like to see the old declaration and the new resolution hung together at the Central High School museum.
“I think it belongs in a museum,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 11/17/2011