During the Lost Year, the closure of Little Rock's public high schools forced parents of some 3,600 affected students to scramble and find alternatives. The new, inferior status quo exemplified a city's need for a public school system, as the community turned to the short-lived televised classes or shipping their children elsewhere. The fractured city activated a group of white women, who resided in the social elite, to form the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC).
Adolphine Fletcher Terry served as one of its initial organizers. She was a product of the Fletcher family fame, wife of a former congressman, and was a foot soldier in the Women’s Suffrage Movement during the 1910s.
Her intentions to reopen the schools began from a phone call with Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore. “The men have failed. It’s time to call out the women,” she told him.
Women Take Action
Her affiliation with the Women’s Suffrage Movement, in many ways, inspired the WEC. She employed the tactics of grassroots organization, engaged with state legislators, and used the media to publicize the organization as an outlet for civil dialogue rather than agitation. Above all, like in Terry’s suffrage days, the WEC artfully dodged racial politics as much as possible. The Southern suffrage movement, rapt with racism, divided moderate and progressive suffragists on granting black women the right to vote.
She lent her house to the WEC's meetings and dealt with the same arguments from the suffrage days on whether to include black women in the organization. According to historian Stephanie Bayless, Terry desired that the WEC be a vessel where white and black citizens could work together to end the desegregation crisis. Many women dropped out of the WEC at the mere suggestion of biracial participation, with even some walking out of the Fletcher Terry home mid-meeting. Terry made sure not to include Little Rock Nine mentor Daisy Bates in the meetings, fearing a backlash from other members. “Now don’t you come, Daisy, don’t you come. Because if you do, I can’t get the other women to come,” Terry told Bates. The push back resulted in an exclusively white organization that meant to not tackle inequality from Jim Crow laws but to simply reopen the schools.
The hushed relationship between and the WEC and the desegregation issue put Terry and other organizers in a difficult position. Reporters asked them if they supported integration and received non-answers or flat-out lies. Terry and other leaders suggested that aiding the WEC did not mean supporting integration but reopening the schools.
The WEC's membership swelled as the weeks passed and new volunteers joined its efforts. Members were generally older, married, from well-to-do households, and had at least some college education. These women, like those active in women’s clubs during the Progressive Era and beyond, had the time and the motive to make a dynamic impact on the community. Women engaged the city as a local election to determine the fate of the schools loomed. WEC members distributed leaflets, hosted Coca Cola parties, and launched phone banks. When Faubus made a televised address to sway voters to keep the schools closed, local television station KATV gave a WEC panel airtime to directly respond to the governor. However, the prominent public image affected Terry, as many segregationists pointed to her as betraying tradition and heritage as her father served the Confederate army during the Civil War. Others noted that the Klan held meetings in the Terry home in the past, as an attempt to label her as a walking contradiction.
Little Rock Reacts
Segregationists reacted by forming separate organizations. Along with the White Citizens’ Councils that mocked WEC members as the “nice old ladies,” supporters of Faubus organized into rival outfits such as the Committee to Retain Our Segregated Schools. These groups sought to keep segregationist members on the Little Rock School District’s School Board.
When the school board fired forty-four teachers, the Stop This Outrageous Purge Organization launched and collaborated with the WEC. The Lost Year ended with the recall of segregationist members on the school board and a federal court ruling the school closings as unconstitutional.
With the reopening of the schools, Terry resumed her progressive work like launching a Head Start program for African-American children in College Station, Arkansas. She died in 1976 and was buried at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock.
Anderson, Karen. Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Bayless, Stephanie. Obliged to Help: Adolphine Fletcher Terry and the Progressive South. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2011.
Gordy, Sondra. Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed Its Public Schools. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2009.
Murphy, Sara Alderman. Breaking the Silence: Little Rock’s Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1963. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1997.
Jared Craig serves as virtual exhibit coordinator for the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture. He received an MA in Public History from UA Little Rock and a BA from the University of Central Arkansas. His research interests include political movements in the American South, crime, and the media.