The 3 Ps in Little Rock

In their attitude toward integration, Little Rock's Protestant and Jewish clergymen can be classified as "pushers," "powers" and "passives." So said Harvard Assistant Professor of Psychology Thomas F. Pettigrew, reporting last week on a survey he and an associate started in Little Rock during last year's school integration crisis. Of about 100 clergymen interviewed, Pettigrew said, the "pushers" for integration numbered only eight--six Protestants and the city's two rabbis. Their average age was 36, their average service in Little Rock four years, their average congregation 400. Two of the Protestants have since been transferred to rural regions; another is "out of a job," and another is about to be fired.

The "powers" were the city's seven most influential ministers, their average age 50, their average congregation 2,800. Most of them were privately for integration but justified their public silence on the subject on the ground that their duty was to hold the church together. The rest were "passives"--older men who favor integration but have a prudent eye cocked on retirement. Their specialty, said Psychologist Pettigrew, was praying for guidance, which is "how to say something without being heard."

Little Rock's 45-50 Roman Catholic priests declined to participate in the survey, but though their church's position is clear, many of them could be classified as passives (see below). Most of Little Rock's ministers indignantly rejected Psychologist Pettigrew's report. Said the president of the Little Rock Ministerial Alliance, Dr. Dale Cowling, a Baptist and clearly a "power": "The ministers in the main churches exhibited a strong kind of courage during the crisis."

But despite the paucity of pushers in Little Rock, Pettigrew holds that "the Christian ministry in the South is the only significant group throughout the area willing to stand up for integration."

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