The Tossed Year #4

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. For an entire school year the city had no functioning public high schools at all. Teachers sat in empty classrooms while many students went without any access to an education. In fact, the only thing that happened in the public high schools that year was Central High School’s football program, which continued to train and play regardless, seemingly the only non-negotiable part of Little Rock’s education provisions that the city decided it could not do without. In May 1959, a segregationist-dominated school board attempted to fire forty-four teachers and administrators from the school district who they felt were sympathetic to desegregation.