With a series of bombings on Labor Day 1959, opponents of segregation in the Little Rock School District made a final, symbolic and futile gesture.
Explosives damaged the school board office, the mayor’s office building, and the Little Rock fire chief’s car. Outraged businessmen, stating that the incident harmed the city’s reputation, offered a twenty-five thousand dollar reward. Five men, including ringleader E.A. Lauderdale, a leader of the segregationist Capital Citizens’ Council, were arrested after an FBI investigation tracked the plot to a Ku Klux Klan meeting a few days before the attack. All five men were convicted, and the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the verdicts, including Lauderdale’s three-year term from an all-white jury.
Governor Orval Faubus, though, reduced that sentence to one year and commuted three others so that none of the men served more than six months. Only truck driver J.D. Sims, who had pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, was left to serve his full two-year term.
To learn more about the Labor Day Bombings of 1959 at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
