The Tossed Year #2

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. A group of strictly segregated white women formed the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools that unsuccessfully campaigned against closed schools. The women then pressured the white male business community to act. With the city’s economy in tatters and a segregationist-dominated school board bent on firing teachers and administrators who were in sympathy with desegregation, the businessmen finally took control of the school board. But in the end, as in the beginning, it took determined federal action to seal the deal: the courts ruled Arkansas’s school-closing laws unconstitutional and schools reopened on a token desegregated basis in August 1959.