Written by Kelvin Orduna
In 1955, the Little Rock Board of Education sent a letter to federal authorities outlining plans for desegregation in response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board ruling. The president of the school board, William G. Cooper, emphasized the need for “proper time” and conditions “acceptable to both races” (Cooper Little Rock Board of Education Plan of School Integration 1). On September 4, 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent a telegram to President Dwight D. Eisenhower defending his decision to employ the National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. The telegram cited Faubus’ irritation with “unwarranted interference of Federal agents” and the National Guard’s role to “preserve the peace and good order of this community” (Faubus 20). Notably, the telegram lacked any mention of race. Three years after Brown v. Board Arkansas officials defended segregation by not explicitly stating racial grounds. Rather, they reframed white-supremacy and racism through neutral vocabulary, procedure, public order, and local control.
For decades prior, Southern states maintained segregated schools, establishing separate but equal education systems that were undoubtedly unequal. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared “in […] public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). Yet it was not until the year after that the Supreme Court declared integration must occur “with all deliberate speed” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1955). Scholars such as Joy Milligan and Sonya Horsford, law and educational inequalities experts, have shown that from the late 1950s through the 1970s, local superintendents and state officials corresponded extensively with the federal government demonstrating their cooperation while effectively continuing to maintain segregated schools (Horsford 37; Milligan 901,09). What scholars have not widely demonstrated is how the same rhetorical patterns and use of administrative letters during desegregation in Arkansas persisted across decades from 1955 through 1991. In reviewing rhetorical structure in correspondences between state and federal officials, my paper will demonstrate how Arkansas officials disguised racial motives as legitimate institutional concerns and transformed racial resistance into neutral procedural concerns, allowing the Little Rock School District to delay integration while maintaining the appearance of good-faith compliance, which would define Arkansas’s approach to school integration for decades.
Arkansas exemplified a pattern of resistance not inherently obvious as other Southern states, one that exploited federal regulators’ desire for cooperation while diluting mandates without appearing overtly defiant. Other Southern states passed legislation explicitly preventing integration. In Virginia, for example, Governor Thomas B. Stanley, pressured by state representatives, said he would “utilize all methods legally available to avoid integration in Virginia” (Bartley 80). The Georgia legislature made it a felony to spend public funds on integrated schools (Bartley 75). In The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950’s, Numan Bartley, analyzes state responses to Brown v. Board; according to Bartley Arkansas officials adopted a more cautious approach and did not pass explicitly segregationist laws (Bartley 79). Yet Arkansas’s rhetorical strategy proved equally effective in maintaining segregation. By disguising segregationist policy to public order and administrative concerns, Faubus and education officials evade federal compliance.
In 1955, the Little Rock School Board developed a gradual desegregation plan that would begin with high schools and eventually move down to elementary schools. The board’s plan was sent to federal authorities and demonstrate the district’s rhetorical strategy. The letter emphasized “proper time,” conditions “acceptable to both races,” and requirement to update “inadequate facilities” before integration can begin (Cooper Little Rock Board of Education Plan of School Integration 1–2). The letter furthermore notes it should not be considered an “unnecessary delay” because of the “complexity of the job at hand” (Cooper Little Rock Board of Education Plan of School Integration 3). Each of these three phrases contributed white-supremacist ideological effects through neutral administrative vocabulary. “Proper time” suggests integration must occur but would be premature to go into effect now, a delay the state hopes federal regulators consider reasonable. In Daisy Bates’s The Long Shadow of Little Rock, she accounts her experiences in overseeing Little Rock’s integration. Interpreting the board’s demand for schools “acceptable to both races” implies the board has the consideration both Black and White races, but in reality, prioritizes white comfort. This is highlighted when mobs yell to black children entering Little Rock Central High School “[you are not] going to get in our school. Get out of here!” (Bates 75). Finally, citing “inadequate facilities” for the delay portrayed an infrastructure issue rather than a moral one, and at first glance, could have made it appear the District wanted integrated students to have the best experience saying “[i]ntegration […] cannot be accomplished until completion of the needed school facilities” (Cooper Little Rock Board of Education Plan of School Integration 2). In effect, the Little Rock School District is delayed integration of schools by creating a series of procedural steps to comply with the Supreme Court’s order. Further, the 1955 letter to federal authorities from the board reads, “[i]t is unwise to begin integration until the Supreme Court gives direction through its interpretation of the specific cases before it” (Cooper Little Rock Board of Education Plan of School Integration 1). The board is able to justify its delay by saying it will allow the district to best comply with the rulings. However, as the district will not start the process of integration until all rulings are complete, it gives them an indefinite waiting period.
As the school district attempts to cite procedure as its delay for integration, state officials instead cite public safety to weaponize threats of violence instead of procedural issues. By September 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas is in crisis as Black students attempt to enter the school, as federally court-ordered and agreed-upon the district (Cooper Little Rock Public Schools Notice to Proceed with Desegregation 1). The attempt by the Black students, now recognized as the “Little Rock Nine,” was stopped by National Guardsmen “by order of Governor Faubus” (Bates 67). This was in contrast to the school board’s statement that said Central High School “would be open to Negro students in the morning” (Bates 67). According to Faubus, the placement of the National Guard was not over “integration versus segregation” but rather to fulfil his duty to “maintaining peace and good order within his jurisdiction” (Faubus 20). Faubus makes it clear that he did not ban the schools from integrating but rather believed the effect from integration would cause outcry and violence from white-supremacist groups. Although his approach to the violence makes it seem that it was an inevitable natural force. Faubus’s rhetoric matches what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies as “color blind racism” in which racial ideology is expressed “in abstract liberalism” (Bonilla-Silva 41, 49). His telegram never addresses the wrongdoing of the white-supremacists and rather only says it is one “situation with which he must deal” (Faubus 20). In fact, he was warranting his authority to protecting his jurisdiction and warned, should his executive authority be breached, “[t]he injury to persons and property that would be caused–the blood that may be shed–will be on the hands of the Federal government” (Faubus 20). Faubus’ letter positions himself in an impossible predicament between the federal government and his elected duty to protect the citizens of Arkansas while completely ignoring the underlying issue of integration and violence from white-supremacist groups.
By 1958, the Little Rock School District tried to continue again peaceful integration of the Little Rock Nine. President Wayne Upton and the Little Rock School District Board of Directors issued a letter to parents urging for “pray[ers] that there will not be a repetition of the violence of last year” (Upton). In the same letter, the board wrote that after appealing to the Supreme Court for additional delays, there was “apparently, no other choice” (Upton). The district’s inclusion of the phrase “no other choice” seems to tell parents that the district has exhausted its options for delays and would continue to delay if integration was not court-ordered. In response, Faubus ordered the closure of all public high schools in defiance of federal authority (Bartley 320). Faubus’s closure of schools, as Bartley writes, caused “the dialectic [to be] rephrased, and the […] stability of the governmental process, rather than segregation and desegregation became the central issues” (Bartley 320). Faubus again avoided the issue of race and blamed federal intervention to be destabilizing state governance. The shift likely placed immense pressure on federal regulators. Although in 1957 Eisenhower activated the 101st Airborne to accompany the children, they could not force states to keep schools open (Bates 100). As a result, federal regulators reconsidered their approach to addressing defiant state officials (Milligan 901).
Arkansas’s rhetorical strategies deployed during the Little Rock crisis did not end in the confrontations of the 1960s. Rather, the same patterns defined the institutional relationship between Arkansas education officials and federal regulators continued. Historian Joy Milligan describes the Office of Education as a “small, meagerly funded […] agency” set up in 1867 by Congress to support schools (Milligan 861). Importantly, the agency had a “‘non-interference’ policy [that] was grounded in the Tenth Amendment” (Milligan 855). It meant that it was not the responsibility, and in fact not a power the Office of Education possessed, to combat the issue of segregation. This inherent institutional design alongside lobbying from Southern congressmen and agencies like the National Education Association, allowed the Office of Education to accept legal interpretations that elevated federalism over fair and civil rights protections (Milligan 857, 930). It also reflects a strategy political scientist Jeffrey Prottas believes developed throughout the 1970s to allow “street-level bureaucrat’s exercise of discretion” (Prottas 296). In which depending on the bureaucrat effectively allowed federal regulators to believe state and school official’s appearance of compliance. Likewise, although confined by Congress, the Office of Education allowed Southern state and schools officials to push around the administration while remaining powerless to remove funding or penalize districts. Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which formally required the Office of Education to bar federal funds to discriminating schools, the office’s institutional culture persisted decades later (Milligan 855–56).
By 1991, similar rhetorical patterns to those utilized in the Little Rock crisis reemerged in Arkansas’s response to federal desegregation monitors. When questioned about the discrepancy in academic achievement between white and black students, Superintendent Ruth Steele employed the same procedural complexity and technical complexities claims that characterized the district’s 1955 integration plan. (Steele 5–8). Steele listed recommendations from “[a] review and adoption of revised […] policies in Curriculum and Instruction,” to “implementation of an Instructional Management System,” and “development and implementation of a leadership academy and training program for current and prospective principals” (Steele 6–8). The answer to the achievement gap at hand, which required the district to implement all sixteen recommendations, was a 2.0 GPA graduation requirement (Steele 9). The language is strikingly similar to the school board’s 1955 integration plan which called for a series of steps to be completed before integration. Albeit a different scenario, where black students were allowed to be in schools, the district was failing its purpose to lead black students successfully to careers or further education. Steele also attributed the district’s dysfunction to federal desegregation litigation, writing “[s]ince January 1983, we have been in court almost continuously” and “job roles [have] become less clearly define, lines of authority eroded” (Steele 5).
By analyzing these letters, it is nearly impossible to not see mirrored framing between Steele’s letter and Faubus’s telegram citing frustration with federal troops intervening with his authority to keep the peace (Faubus 20). Just as in 1955 when the Little Rock School board called delays of integration to allow for facility updates and Supreme Court uncertainty, Superintendent Steele called for procedural delays, positioning Black academic excellence as a maintenance item alongside “[p]eriodic reports to the Board […] showing the distribution of student grades at the secondary level” (Cooper Little Rock Board of Education Plan of School Integration 3; Steele 7). The tactic echoes what scholars Robert England and law expert Betsy Levin label as “second generation” segregation where “school system[s] […] remain segregated even after a court-ordered desegregation plan has been fully implemented” (England and Meier 228; Levin and Moise 120). Levin calls out several discriminating practices, but particularly the misuse of “ability grouping,” a practice where students are grouped in classes based on “standardized achievement or IQ test scores” which, Levin claims, “it cannot be said with any sense of conviction whether ability grouping does or does not lead to increased achievement” (Levin and Moise 121).
The Office of Desegregation Monitoring (ODM) was an oversight committee created by the Eight Circuit to monitor and assist Pulaski County, Arkansas’s three school district to meet federal desegregation obligations ("Office of Desegregation Monitoring"). The committee’s response to Steele’s procedural deferral demonstrated the impact of Arkansas’s rhetorical strategies on federal regulators. In an April 1991 letter addressed to the district’s Superintendent for Desegregation, the committee asked for clarification on timelines for an early childhood education program and future documentation but did not question or challenge the district’s two-and-a-half-year deferral of addressing achievement gaps (Response to March 28, 1991 Update on Desegregation). Instead, ODM requested process updates, asking the district to “keep the ODM informed of the actual dates the corrections were made by each incentive school and/or the plan […] regarding the problems cited in the monitoring report” (Response to March 28, 1991 Update on Desegregation). The focus is only on the procedural concerns and leaves the district with no mandates to move the process along quickly to improve Black education (Bartley 320).
The Office of Desegregation Monitoring’s response, which is federal in nature, reflects the broad rhetorical shift that Horsford identifies, in which regulators moved from addressing “segregation and discrimination” to “diversity,” which one superintendent claims allowed the government to not “have to talk about…past segregation and discrimination” (Horsford 44). By accepting Steele’s delayed timelines and focusing on procedural compliance, requesting updates only on “actual dates” and “written agreements,” ODM adopts the shift Horsford identifies (Response to March 28, 1991 Update on Desegregation; Horsford 44). While ODM’s response to the superintendent doesn’t explicitly use “diversity,” the tone of the letter reflects the shift. Instead of demanding immediate attention and to remediate racial disparities, monitors praise the district for developing “an interest” from colleges for the education training program Superintendent Steele wanted in place before the graduation requirement (Response to March 28, 1991 Update on Desegregation; Steele 8).
From 1955 to 1991, Arkansas officials strategized resistance as cooperation, demonstrating racial inequality did not require explicit defiance. Instead, procedural delay and neutral administrative language weaponized bureaucracy, allowing officials to maintain segregation while appearing to comply with federal and court mandates. Governor Faubus claimed he was protecting public safety; the Little Rock School Board insisted difficulty in managing technical complexities; Superintendent Steele maintained she was implementing best practices. Each was also a deliberate obstruction of civil rights and to delay indefinitely. Sociologist Bonilla-Silva identifies the strategy effectively as “color blind racism,” which allowed federal regulators to focus on procedural compliance rather than the actual outcomes. Federal monitors, shifting vocabulary and tone to appeal to resisting states, inadvertently enabled the strategy further. In response to Steele’s plan to add a 2.0 GPA graduation requirement, federal monitors chose to prioritize cooperation from the district while ignoring the two-and-a-half-year deferral to address the black achievement gaps. Until federal regulators require substantive equity outcomes over accepting procedural compliance, Arkansas’s “all deliberate delay” strategy remains effective for perpetuating racial segregation.
