During their first year of desegregation at least 220 identifiable individuals from Central High’s near 2,000 enrollment showed their distaste for blacks in their school by stalking out of class, verbal abuse and/or physical assaults. Others contributed anonymously.
Socioeconomically (because several hundred of their fellow students had migrated to recently opened Hall High in upmarket Pulaski Heights), the named offenders were broadly indistinguishable from their remaining classmates: They came predominantly from the lower (but not the lowest) ranks of Little Rock society and lived mainly east of Broadway and south of Markham in blocks increasingly favored by African Americans. They were the offspring of lower middle- and working-class folk who were helpers, operatives, salespersons, cashiers, clerks, firemen and rank-and-file police rather than the proprietors of independent businesses or college-educated professionals with regional and/or national affiliations, "what we would call," the editor of the school’s paper remembered later in life, "the poor kids, the country kids, the working-class kids."
What, however, set student segregationists apart was not so much their home locations and the social standing of their families as the degree to which they were disconnected from the life of a large and prestigious high school: their looks, attitudes, and behavior.
Like the well known "pretty tough character" who clobbered Jefferson Thomas in November 1957, declared student segregationists were often at odds with school culture. Criticized for—among other things—their "extremely bad attitude" and "poor history of citizenship," they included repeat offenders against classroom decorum, the sullen, surly and uncooperative, and, interestingly, those behind in their work as well as a sprinkling of the academically adroit but personally erratic, the "belligerent" and the "troublemaker of longstanding" as well as the "smart but definitely a problem" and the "intelligent … non-conformist." They were the notable pass forgers, regular absentees, and pests who, according to "one of the most extreme" of their number, didn’t bother with all "that stuff" from teachers about behaving properly and, according to Vice Principals Powell and Huckaby, reveled in their momentary notoriety. They were the ones who played to the telephoto lenses across Park Street, held black girls under scalding water in the showers, hissed racial slurs in corridors and stairwells and besmirched walls and desks with offensive graffiti. They were the ones who quickly made it clear to other white students that abusive telephone calls and isolation were the price of innocent interracial friendship.
Typically, Central's juvenile segregationists were neither high achievers nor pupils prominent among homeroom officeholders, sportsmen and women, student services personnel, or musicians and budding thespians. They included, for instance, only five of 171 members of the swing and pep bands, none of the 38 students making the honor roll for the second six weeks of the year and but one of the 132 individuals involved in the senior class play and the choral music department’s April 1958 production of The Mikado. Not one of the 51 young women who succeeded in the first tryouts for cheerleader in March 1958 was a known segregationist.
The boys also looked like trouble. "Most hecklers," Vice Principal Powell noticed, "wore the standard uniform of blue jeans, T-shirts, black leather jackets (with skulls, cross-bones, etc. painted on their backs), soiled white socks, and black leather moccasins or loafers. And many of them affected the rooster-comb hair-do." Rejoicing in such sobriquets as "Hoodie," "The Spook," and "The Jeep," they were the sort of dudes who adopted "motor-cycle appurtenances and general’s stars" on their sleeves and became, in Melba Pattillo’s eyes, "the sideburners … [who] fancied themselves to be 'bad boys.'" Along with consorts like Simple Sarah and Flossie the Floozie, they were the "tough" pupils who intimidated white students as much as black. They certainly talked the talk. "Sure, sure, sure, Daddy O," said one "notorious punk" as he twisted the wax from his ear while being threatened with a visit to the principal, "I know what it’ll mean. Les' jist be sure an’ git this deal set up so’s I kin cut that study hall."
Notwithstanding examples of collusion with Governor Orval Faubus, the Capital Citizens’ Council, and the Mothers' League, not to mention cues taken from parents aggrieved by their being made to bear the burdens of desegregation that could be evaded by the more affluent and better connected, the extent to which segregationist students were architects of their own mischiefs remains moot. While the presence of blacks in their school was grist to the mills of the already disaffected, other troublemakers were simply attention-seekers "jumping in the fun wagon."
Beals, Melba Pattillo. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Huckaby, Elizabeth. Crisis at Central High: Little Rock, 1957-58. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Lanier, Carlotta Walls. A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School. New York: One World Books, 2009.
Powell, J.O. “Central High Inside Out (A Study in Disintegration),” unpaginated typescript, box 1, Velma and J.O. Powell Collection, Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Roberts, Terrence. Lessons from Little Rock. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2009.
Graeme Cope did his honors, masters and doctoral research on the development of the woolen textile industry and the metal trades in nineteenth century Victoria, Australia. He developed his fascination with Little Rock from preparing a single class for a survey course on African American history he initiated at Rusden State College and continued- with an expanded Arkansas section- at Deakin University. He has published a number of articles on the desegregation crisis concentrating, rather more by default than prior intent, on the segregationists.