Little Rock closes every high school
Closed 8 a.m., 15 September 1958; reopened 12 August 1959The Little Rock School District's four high schools, Pulaski County, AR
A year after the Little Rock Nine, the governor shut all four of the city's high schools for the whole of 1958-59 rather than let desegregation continue. 3,665 students, Black and white, lost the year.
The nine students who integrated Central High School in September 1957 did it behind soldiers of the 101st Airborne. What happened the following year is less often told.
In June 1958 the Little Rock school board asked a federal court to postpone desegregation for two and a half years. On 12 September 1958, in Cooper v. Aaron, the US Supreme Court refused, holding that a state's hostility to a constitutional right is no reason to suspend it. The board ordered the high schools to open on the 15th. Governor Orval Faubus closed them instead, as of eight o'clock that morning: Central, Hall, Little Rock Technical and Horace Mann, the city's Black high school. The closure was to stand pending a public vote.
The vote came on 27 September, and the ballot asked whether the city was for or against "racial integration of all schools within the Little Rock School District". Little Rock voted against by roughly three to one, and the schools stayed shut for the entire 1958-59 academic year. Arkansas remembers it as the Lost Year.
3,665 students had no public high school. The Little Rock Private School Corporation was formed for white students and rented buildings where it could; others left for schools in other districts, took correspondence courses, or stopped at the eleventh grade and never resumed. Black students had the fewest options, because nothing comparable was organised for them. Teachers were paid through the year and had nobody to teach.
It ended when the segregationist majority on the school board fired dozens of teachers and administrators suspected of sympathy with desegregation. The purge was what finally moved the city's white business and professional class. A campaign called STOP - Stop This Outrageous Purge - won a recall election on 25 May 1959 that removed three segregationists from the board, and the high schools reopened on 12 August 1959, almost a month early.
3,665 students, Black and white, had no public high school for a year. The shape is the city of Little Rock, drawn indicatively; the closure applied to the Little Rock School District, whose boundary is the authoritative one.
Sources
- Lost YearEncyclopedia of Arkansas, Central Arkansas Library Systemencyclopediaofarkansas.netBacks the four schools named, the 27 September referendum and its three-to-one margin, the figure of 3,665 students, and the 12 August 1959 reopening.
- Crisis TimelineLittle Rock Central High School National Historic Site, National Park Servicenps.govDates Cooper v. Aaron to 12 September 1958 and the closure order to 8 a.m. on 15 September 1958, pending a public vote.
- Stop This Outrageous Purge (STOP)Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Central Arkansas Library Systemencyclopediaofarkansas.netThe teacher purge and the recall election of 25 May 1959 that ended the Lost Year.