"Remember Little Rock!" Legacies of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
In September 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas, became the focal point of an emerging southern civil rights struggle. As the city's Central High School was due to desegregate under court order, Governor Orval Faubus called out National Guard troops to prevent it. After several weeks standoff between state and federal officials, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to desegregate the school. Remember Little Rock!" read the White Citizens Council's postal frank soon after, with an image of integration at bayonet-point. Events in Little Rock have been remembered and reinterpreted many times since. The city's moment in the national spotlight has come to define its racial history in the twentieth century, just as other events in other cities in the 1950s and 1960s, from Montgomery to Memphis, have defined the racial history of those places too. The unfolding project of writing the long civil rights movement" has helped to contextualize events in those (and other) places within an expanded chronology of evolving race relations and African American activism. But it has also led to a more expansive understanding of civil rights struggles too. The focus on the 1950s and 1960s tended to privilege preeminent issues of those times such as desegregation and voting rights. Now a more complex picture of a much broader-based, as well as longer struggle for African American freedom and equality is beginning to emerge.Locating familiar events in Little Rock within a larger struggle over race and power in the postwar era, this paper demonstrates how recent histriographical developments can help to recast events in that city and elsewhere. It argues that the most decisive driving force in shaping postwar race relations in Little Rock was in fact the city's planning policy of slum clearance and urban renewal, formulated in the late 1940s, rather than the massive resistance to school desegregation in the late 1950s. Little Rock's slum clearance and urban redevelopment plans made sure that even as local civil rights activists successfully battled to end segregation and disfranchisement in the 1950s and 1960s, their efforts were already being comprehensively undermined, and the way for resegregation in the 1970s and 1980s was already being decisively paved.
The whole rationale for segregation laws from the 1890s onwards was the amount of inter-racial mixing that was actually taking place in rapidly expanding towns and cities. Segregation looked to counteract this by instituting laws that imposed a clear distinction between the races that might otherwise have been blurred by the extent of day-to-day contact. By embarking upon a policy of geographical residential racial separation during the postwar period the need for segregation laws was gradually eroded. If African Americans and whites were separated in different parts of the city, and inter-racial contact radically lessened as a consequence, then there was no longer any need for laws to formally provide for a distinction between the races. Geographical separation therefore replaced segregation as the main instrument of racial discrimination, ensuring that many city facilities would effectively remain racially defined by their location close to African American and white areas of residence. As Little Rock and other southern cities abandoned Jim Crow laws, they had already established a pattern of racial exclusion practiced in cities outside of the South. Developments in Little Rock have much to tell us about the persistence of racial discrimination, and the legacies of the southern civil rights movement, not just in that city, but also in the South, and in the United States.
John A. Kirk, Royal Holloway, University of London