During Little Rock's Central High Crisis, two separate and competing groups—segregationists and the labor movement—cast themselves as champions of the common man and vied for the allegiance of the city’s working-class whites. The segregationists told working-class whites that the maintenance of the colorline was essential to protecting their jobs and preventing miscegenation, warning that integration would make common whites indistinguishable from the despised blacks. Labor leaders, with 16,000 trade unionists in Pulaski County, wanted to bring working-class whites and working-class blacks into a class-based political alliance to challenge the power of the business leaders who traditionally controlled city (and state) politics. Neither group, though, was able to secure the undivided loyalty of the white working class. Like the white population more generally, Little Rock’s working-class whites remained deeply divided over school integration and African-American demands for civil rights.
Working-Class Segregationists
The city's segregationists- led by former Little Rock Chamber of Commerce official Amis Guthridge- made much of the class discrimination inherent in the Little Rock School Board's integration plan. The plan allowed the children of the city's economic and social elite, who mostly lived on the west side, to attend the brand new and all-white Hall High while requiring the white working-class families living around Central High to send their children to school with blacks. Guthridge and his compatriots made this class discrimination a centerpiece of their campaign, highlighting the hypocrisy of city leaders agreeing to integrate working-class Central while maintaining a segregated school for the elite. Thus, the segregationists sought to transform the fight over integration into a conflict between elite and working-class whites.
Before the storm of massive resistance, a political coalition that Daisy Bates called "labor, Negroes, and liberals in the cities” had started to transform Arkansas politics. This labor-black-liberal coalition was especially strong in central Arkansas, electing Woodrow Mann mayor in 1955 and integrating the region’s bus service in 1956. But massive resistance and the success of segregationist appeals to white workers threatened to undo these efforts. In their struggle to preserve a class-based, biracial political movement, labor officials, led by Arkansas AFL-CIO president Odell Smith, faced a problem: how to support integration and a biracial working-class movement when working-class whites (like nearly all Arkansas whites) favored Jim Crow and white supremacy. If they publicly advocated integration and civil rights for blacks, they would lose the support of working-class whites. If they did nothing, they would effectively abandon the idea of a working-class alliance to curtail businessmens' political power. Smith and labor leaders settled on a strategy of attacking segregationists as enemies of the working class. The Arkansas AFL-CIO’s newspaper, the Little Rock-based Union Labor Bulletin, explained, “the drive against the United States Supreme Court’s [Brown] decision mainly stems from anti-union industrialists and plantation owners who want to cause additional turmoil between white and colored workers in order to wreck unionism in the South.”
Organized Labor Taking a Stand
After Governor Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent the integration of the Little Rock Nine, the segregationists gained the upper hand in the contest for the allegiance of Little Rock’s working-class whites. But the labor movement fought back. The Arkansas AFL-CIO was the only white-led political organization to oppose Faubus’ reelection, charging that he had governed “in opposition to the best interests and welfare of the working people.” It also mounted a successful court challenge to a segregationist effort to expand the sovereignty commission and curtail black voting. Most importantly, labor leaders opposed efforts to close Little Rock’s high schools to avoid integration and stood at the forefront of the movement to reopen them.
Nothing shows how the Central High crisis divided working-class whites as much as the May 1959 school board recall election that became a contest between segregationists and those wanting to reopen high schools on an integrated basis. When the votes were counted, about 44% of working-class voters cast ballots for the integrationist slate and 56% for the segregationist slate (a slight majority of the entire white vote went for the segregationist slate; only the overwhelming black vote for the integrationists tipped the balance). Historians usually consider this election to be the beginning of the end of the Central High crisis and portray it as a black/elite victory over working-class segregationists. But working-class voters provided half the votes for the integrationist slate.
Throughout the Central High crisis, working-class whites responded much the same way as the larger white population, Initially, there was overwhelming support for massive resistance, but as the disadvantages of maintaining segregation became clear, significant numbers of whites began moderating their views. In the end, only a slight majority favored the hardline segregationist agenda.
Bates, Daisy. Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986), 81.
Pierce, Michael. “Historians of the Central High Crisis and Little Rock’s Working-Class Whites: A Review Essay.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 70 (Winter 2011): 468-483.
"We View the News." Union Labor Bulletin. September 14, 1956, p. 1.
Michael Pierce is an associate professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He earned his Ph.D. in History at Ohio State University. His publications include Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party, In the Workers' Interest: A History of the Ohio AFL-CIO, 1958-1998, and several articles in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.