Counter-Revolution

For months the schools of Little Rock, Ark. have deteriorated under the segregationist pressure of Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus. By closing the four high schools, integration has been stopped cold, and this school year some 3,086 high school students have been forced to find private or correspondence schools. The remaining 579 students have attended no classes since fall and have had but one school function--playing football.

Last week Little Rock, scene of an unfinished American morality play, produced a second act. At issue was a Faubus "suggestion" that the six-member Little Rock school board fire certain veteran teachers. Segregationists expanded the purge to 44 teachers, including the principal, two vice principals and 21 teachers at Central High School. No charges were specified; no hearings were held. The teachers, some of whom have been in Little Rock since the '20s, were simply "imprudent" about integration.

"Keep On." When the school board's three Faubusites dutifully heeded their sponsor fortnight ago, the script was switched by the three moderate members. To keep the teacher purge from being legal, the moderates walked out of a board meeting, and there was no quorum. The Faubusites fired the teachers anyway, and Little Rock erupted: 179 angry citizens organized STOP (the Committee to Stop This Outrageous Purge). Using a new anti-integration law rammed through last fall by Faubus himself, STOP flooded the city last week with petitions for a recall election of the Faubusite board members. In three days STOP surged over the required minimum of 7,000 signatures, at week's end had 9,603, plus financial contributions from all over the state.

To STOP's support came an overwhelming majority of Little Rock's 13,000-member-P.T.A. council. When the P.T.A. at one grade school invited Attorney Amis Guthridge of the White Citizens' Council to state his pro-Faubus case, Guthridge merely grumbled a few words to the packed auditorium and sat down. Later he called the meeting "a trap," spoke darkly of "leftwing" P.T.A. leaders rigging "Communist-like demonstrations" at other schools. Such old saws cut no ice. What parents clearly preferred was the stand taken by Russell H. Matson, one of the moderate board members: "If we keep on, we can end up with a better school system than we have ever had."

Orval's Law. Alarmed, segregation extremists last week hurriedly petitioned their own forces for a recall election of the moderate board members, managed to gather 7,700-odd signatures. At week's end the two sides appeared qualified for a recall election of the entire school board in about ten days.

A victory for the moderates would not guarantee an all-moderate school board: vacancies can still be filled by the county school board, which seems pro-Faubus. Even an all-moderate board would not mean imminent integration of Little Rock's schools--but simply the first real step in that direction in 20 long months. Whatever the outcome, anti-Faubus sentiment was so rife last week that Faubus himself cautiously announced: "It's the people's business. If they want to recall anybody, that's their right under the law. I signed that law, you know."

While Little Rock stirred, the man who tried to prevent the collapse of the city's schools was elsewhere. In 1955 Little Rock so respected its superintendent of schools and his calm desegregation plan that it named him Man of the Year. Last winter big (6 ft. 3 in., 250 Ibs.), outspoken Virgil Blossom, 52, was forced to leave town. Out of work for nearly six months (and still owed nearly $7,700 by Little Rock), Dr. Blossom has a new job: in July he will take over the semi-integrated schools of San Antonio, which sought him mainly for his talents as an organizer of new schools.

"I had come a far piece," he recalls of his departure from Little Rock, in a new book entitled It Has Happened Here (Harper; $2.95). "Little Rock was a classic example of what a community should not let extremists do to it. I did not think it could happen ... I don't believe it will happen again in the same way. It is no longer possible to escape the realization that the future of our public education is at stake, that the future of thousands upon thousands of wonderful young people depends on respect for the law. I hold a fundamental conviction that the South will intelligently and ably face, not to the illusory past, but to the high promise of our nation's future.''

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