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The Tossed Year #1

Sixty years ago this month, Little Rock voters decided by an almost 3-to-1 margin to keep closed all of the city’s public high schools rather than desegregate them. Gov. Orval Faubus had closed the schools under segregationist Arkansas General Assembly legislation. The public high schools remained closed for an entire school year. Sometimes this is misleadingly referred to as the Lost Year. A more accurate term is the Tossed Year, since the year was not lost, but rather deliberately thrown away in a reckless move by an unwitting electorate that had been misled by segregationist politicians into believing that the city would do fine without its public schools. Those politicians were dead wrong. The damage inflicted upon Little Rock’s students, their families, and the wider community quickly became apparent.