What Is The Little Rock Crisis?

The Supreme Court decisions of Brown and Brown II called the attention of Americans to race-relations in America. The Little Rock Crisis was an aftermath of these federal decisions alongside with other events inside and outside of Arkansas in which sparked a change in the civil rights movement. During this event, there were multiple factors that had played a role in shaping the nation’s view on racial discrimination. Elizabeth Jacoway recorded these factors surrounding the event in her monograph Turn Away Thy Son. The main contenders of this time in history were civil rights activists and white segregationists who were putting their effort into the events that took place at Central High School surrounding the Little Rock Nine. However, to further
Ferguson. During this time, members of the NAACP settled legal cases that sought for giving black schools the resources needed to be “separate but equal”. However, when the decision for Brown came through across the nation, civil rights activists began to shift their focus to getting rid of segregation in schools as a form fighting the discrimination against blacks. As the former president of the Arkansas NAACP, Daisy Bates was one of the civil rights activists who pushed for integration of seventeen black students at Central as the Blossom Plan began to take form. After those seventeen students became into what is known as the Little Rock Nine, Bates served as their mentor while the students were transitioning into the all-white Central High School despite the threats that were made towards her and her husband (Jacoway 167). At the same time, she stood as a centerpiece of the events that surrounded the Little Rock Nine as she coordinated with Virgil Blossom, the parents of the students, and the NAACP to keep the process of integration at Central from becoming
This opposition against the desegregation of schools and integration of black students at Central High School came to be known as Massive Resistance. During the Little Rock Crisis, the white segregationists carried out Massive Resistance in two spheres. The first sphere came from ordinary citizens who organized as communities to form the Capital Citizens Council (CCC) chapter in Little Rock. The CCC in 1957 bashed Orval Faubus and Virgil Blossom with threats of causing violence at Central High School if the Blossom Plan was to be implemented accordingly. Amis Guthridge was one of the leaders of these ordinary citizens who voiced Massive Resistance mainly through the idea of miscegenation, or from his own words, “integration will lead to intermarriage” (Jacoway 34). Alongside Guthridge were white ministers who often joined with the CCC to spread their voice on the topic of miscegenation. Although they were not successful in the events of “Professor Williams” and the attempted segregation of a school in Hoxie, these citizens were able to organize at a local and national level under the ideology of white supremacy in which had appeared during the Little Rock