D-Day in Little Rock

In an Arkansas governed by a nervous demagogue. Little Rock's moderate school board prepared to face the consequences of obeying the integration laws of the land. With canny suddenness, the board ordered high schools opened this week--nearly a month ahead of schedule. Announced reason: the 2,500 students, including six Negroes newly assigned to Central and Hall high schools (compared to the embattled nine at Central in 1957), will need judicious counseling before classes start.

The operative reason was Governor Orval Faubus. Already the board had rejected a "solution" by Faubus that masked segregation with an illegal veneer of "integration" (TIME, Aug. 10). And the board was painfully mindful that last summer Faubus called a sudden session of the state legislature that stopped high schools from opening all year. Though the laws that turned this trick have since been declared unconstitutional, another special session might pass new ones.

With awkward surprise, Faubus improvised a segregationist defense against the board's offense. Last week he kept his hands under the table, but they still showed. Little Rock's Raney High School, the privately run effort to educate segregationists' children, announced suddenly that it was broke and would close. Raney may well have run out of money--this was the first such news--but it was busily building new classrooms when it shut down. The effect: turning back 1,235 of the city's most segregation-minded children to Central, Hall and Tech high schools at a tense moment.

Startled by this maneuver, the school board pondered where and how to place the Raney children. But another segregationist move was easier to check. Seizing on the city's high incidence of polio this year (21 cases, three deaths), the segregationist Citizens' Council loudly denounced the board for opening schools "in the face of a polio epidemic.'' In short order, the board got a signed statement from 35 Little Rock physicians that set things straight. Said the doctors: the polio is centered in preschool children; teenagers are safer in the relative quiet of high school.

What else would Orval Faubus do? Few knew the answer. He might well get the legislature (reportedly, to meet this weekend) to pass a sheaf of school-closing acts, simply sign a new one as soon as the old one was thrown out of court. And his backwoods segregationist supporters might yet descend on the city in force when the integrated schools open this week. Said Little Rock's able Police Chief Eugene Smith, canceling all leaves: "We don't know what to expect. But we're going to be ready."

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