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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:16+00:00 Remembering the Little Rock Central High Crisis: The Pryor Center’s Distinctive Insights 3 image_header 2025-01-07T19:44:35+00:00

  by Jay Barth

  Hendrix College
  
  Abstract

  The Little Rock Crisis and Its Legacy
  Political Memory and the Commemoration of the Little Rock Crisis
  The David and Barbara Pryor Center’s Collection
  Changing Memory of the Little Rock Crisis across Time
  The First Three Decades: The Success of Integration
  The Later Decades: The Voices of the Little Rock Nine and Less Optimism
  The Civil Rights Era, Political Memory, and Local Media

  One of the most well-known events of the civil rights movement involves the showdown between Arkansas state officials, particularly Governor Orval Faubus, and the federal government, led by President Dwight Eisenhower, over whether nine high school students should be allowed admission into Little Rock’s Central High School. The Central High Crisis—which played out across two full school years—resulted in the famous entry of the Little Rock Nine into Central High under protection of federal troops in September 1957, followed by a year-long closure of Little Rock schools by Governor Faubus in the ensuing academic year.

  The way these extraordinary events at Little Rock have been remembered has shifted across the six and a half decades since they occurred. This change in the “political memory” regarding the Central High Crisis has been evidenced in the regular moments of commemoration of its anniversary. The distinctive and multifaceted media collection held by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas provides documentary evidence of these alterations in the telling of the Central High story. That shift in political memory has played out in three acts and involved a refocusing of the events away from the legal and political battles over the establishment of Little Rock Central High as a model of successful integration and toward the ramifications of the crisis on the lives of the nine students whose lives were forever impacted by it.

  The Little Rock Crisis and Its Legacy

  While Arkansas had a strong legacy in institutionalized racism tracing back to its origins, the middle of the twentieth century had exhibited some signs of moderation in state-backed racial discrimination as Governor Sid McMath (1949–1953) set a tolerant tone in race relations. In one of his first acts as governor, Orval Faubus—a McMath protégé—enlarged the State Committee of the state Democratic Party to add six Black members. Moreover, the immediate response to the 1954 and 1955 Brown decisions in Arkansas was hopeful, with two northwest Arkansas school districts (Charleston and Fayetteville) quickly desegregating voluntarily. The northeast community of Hoxie, which was much more racially diverse, also desegregated by vote of the school board, and the majority on that board held firm in its decision even in the face of active resistance from inside and outside the state.¹

  Then came the events at Little Rock Central High starting in 1957. Feeling pressure from segregationists, Governor Faubus opposed the Little Rock school board’s desegregation plan and appeared in chancery court to support a request for an injunction to halt desegregation, which was granted. When this injunction was overturned in federal court, Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to seize the school and prevent the first nine Black students to enroll at Central—the “Little Rock Nine”—from entering. After a second federal court ordered the National Guard to withdraw and allow integration to proceed, hundreds of angry white agitators gathered on September 23, 1957, and hurled racist vulgarities at and threatened physical violence against the African American students. In the aftermath of the riotous behavior, President Eisenhower ordered in the 101st Airborne Infantry Division, under whose protection Central High was ultimately integrated. Though Governor Faubus always maintained that his actions were necessitated by his obligation to preclude violence, most analysts of the event suggest that Faubus was even more strongly motivated by his desire for reelection to an extraordinary third gubernatorial term to protect himself from attacks by ardent segregationists. While this political goal was achieved (followed by three additional successful reelections), Arkansas acquired an instant global identity as a state characterized by racism, violence, and demagoguery.²

  The Central High Crisis did not end with the headline-grabbing events of the fall of 1957, however. Across three legislative sessions, Governor Faubus lobbied the General Assembly to pass a flurry of laws to “protect” white Arkansans against the threat of integration. These included creation of a state Sovereignty Commission given broad authority to investigate groups and individuals seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the state because of their support for “encroachment by the federal government” in the aftermath of the Brown decision, the passage of legislation invading the private records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Arkansas and prohibiting members from teaching or gaining political office, and a mandate that any blood donated be marked with the race of the donor and any person receiving a transfusion be notified of that race. Most important, the governor was given the power to close any school in which integration was being forced by the federal government (Act 4 of 1958). When the Supreme Court affirmed Arkansas’s duty to abide by the Brown decision in the landmark Cooper v. Aaron case in fall 1958, requiring the Little Rock school board to respect federal court decisions on desegregation, Faubus immediately closed the public high schools in Little Rock, creating the “lost year” in public education in the city. A spring 1959 purge by the conservative members of the school district’s board of directors of Little Rock teachers and staff thought to be supportive of integration led to recall votes of both militant segregationists and moderates on the board. The close vote in which moderates were retained and militants were removed ended the most intense period of the Central High Crisis.³

  However, the legacy of the Central High Crisis persisted for decades. The long legal odyssey of the desegregation of the Little Rock School District in the federal courts continued into the twenty-first century. Again and again, the district returned to federal district court to make the case that it had achieved “unitary” status and should be released from federal court oversight as a fully desegregated district. During the 2002 case in which the district ultimately was deemed unitary in a number of aspects, one witness for those opposing a unitary declaration—an African American Central High alum about to enroll at Amherst College—described the two institutions that existed simultaneously within the walls of Central High: “Central College,” where mostly white students take challenging courses, and “Central High,” where mostly African American students take distinctly less rigorous courses. The near half century of discord over the desegregation of the schools also affected the Little Rock metropolitan area by causing significant white flight to the surrounding suburban school districts.⁴

  Political Memory and the Commemoration of the Little Rock Crisis

  Major events like those in Little Rock in 1957–59 live on because of their historical importance, which leads to continued analysis by scholars, but also for their lingering power to shape perceptions of related topics today because of their place in the consciousness of rank-and-file citizens. This second role of significant historical events is often termed their “memory.” For instance, our collective memory of 9/11 may shape attitudes about future terrorist events or policies related to fighting terrorism, such as airport security, or our collective memory of the Wall Street crises of 1929 or 2008 may shape our current views on financial regulation. “What happens in daily social life is the reverse of H. G. Wells or Back to the Future: we do not travel in a machine to the past; the past travels (through a variety of cultural machines) to us.”⁵ Separate from a more objective historical account of events, “memory consists of the subjective, selective, and potentially unreliable accounts of the past told by those outside the academy and circulated in the media and popular culture.”⁶ As such, political memory is particularly susceptible to change across time.

  Many academic works examine memory and its relationship to key moments in American history, ranging from the death of Crispus Attucks to the Oklahoma City bombing.⁷ Perhaps the best model for such an analysis is Michael Schudson’s work on the Watergate scandal. Schudson argues that political memory is a mass phenomenon: “Memory is collective . . . it is not the sum of private, individual recollections, located in individual brains.”⁸ That said, the brains of individual humans have limited capability to resist such collective memory, almost as a form of peer pressure. As Schudson argues: “We do not remember the past just as we choose. In some respects . . . the past imposes itself on us.”⁹

  The framing of collective memory of an event such as Watergate or the Little Rock Crisis may change across time either for ideological reasons or to connect the historical events to the reality of today. As Schudson argues, collective memory can be driven by political actors with “devious” ends to reframe past events for their current ideological benefit. As Big Brother’s party in 1984 put it: “Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future.”¹⁰ Thus, a group arguing for a policy outcome that benefits them may have an interest in employing past historical events as lessons for their argument. That said, multiple memories may exist simultaneously, creating a competition for the attention of the collective. The winner matters in that it might lead to a particular policy preference among the public.  

  Other reshapings of collective memory are much more innocuous, driven by changes in society that determine which historical events are relevant and how they are perceived. Anniversaries of events, particularly big anniversaries tied to a decade, create openings for the development of a new collective memory about an event as many discuss it and its long-term meaning. 

  For Watergate, Schudson argues that two continua come together to create four different competing memories about the events of the early 1970s. First, was Watergate a “crisis” or a “scandal”? The first perspective sees Watergate as a constitutional crisis “signifying something deep and disturbing about our politics.”¹¹ The second view instead sees the events as more fleeting and tied to unique moments regarding Nixon and his political and media enemies. On the second continuum was a debate over whether the Watergate events should be seen as expressions of a system that had established an “imperial Presidency” or events driven by the distinctive corruption of President Nixon and those around him.¹² As Schudson argues, this creates four possible memories of Watergate and, importantly, different notions of the policy changes, if any, needed to prevent such abuses in the future.

  In any political memory, some components of the story are overemphasized, and others are left out. Innocuous or not, “memory is always memory of some things and not others, and it is always memory for some purposes, and these may be uncivil as well as civil.”¹³ When it comes to the Central High Crisis, no systematic analysis of a collective political memory has been carried out. One work does focus on memories of the Central High Crisis: Beth Roy employs oral histories to evaluate individuals’ memories of the events.¹⁴ However, these were primarily white alumni of Central High, and rather than focus on a singular memory, Roy instead explores the ways that race, class, and gender create significant divergence in those memories.

  While there are various cultural machines (e.g., school textbooks or public memorials) that bring the past to us, the most potent in American life is the news media. Thus, in any examination of the political memory of an event, starting with the news coverage is crucial. Fortunately, a distinctive, multifaceted collection exists in Arkansas that allows a deep dive into a crucial cultural machine in Arkansas.

  The David and Barbara Pryor Center’s Collection

  The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History was created over two decades ago at the University of Arkansas at the urging—and with the support—of the longtime Arkansas politician and his wife to ensure that key aspects of the state’s history were not lost. The mission of the Pryor Center “is to document the cultural heritage of Arkansans by collecting audio and video resources to share with scholars, students, and the public.”¹⁵ Initially part of the Special Collections Department of the university’s library and then administered by the Chancellor’s Office, the center is now part of the university’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, although it maintains a partnership with Special Collections.

  In its early years, the Pryor Center’s work focused on chronicling the “living memories” of Arkansans who had distinctive perspectives on key aspects of the state’s history. In doing so, it employed traditional oral history methodology; the interviews with the subjects were transcribed and then maintained for future generations on the center’s website. Dozens of these transcripts, part of different projects ranging from interviews with key players on the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton in the Diane D. Blair Project to a collection of interviews with women who have served in the Arkansas General Assembly, are maintained on the website. The center then moved to videotaping the best known of those interviewed in a series called the Arkansas Memories Project. Over 120 videotapes are included in this section of the Pryor Center collection. Because of the centrality of the Central High Crisis in the modern history of the state, perspectives on the events are included in a number of the interviews—either video or transcribed—on the website.

  Most relevant, however, are two collections—from the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat—that include interviews with dozens of journalists who covered the state for the two newspapers, which ultimately merged in 1991 at the end of a protracted war. A number of these journalists covered the initial events of the Central High Crisis or its aftermath. For example, Gazette reporter Jerry Donahue was on the scene at Central High throughout the early days of the crisis and had a unique perspective on some of the most noteworthy and haunting moments.

  While all aspects of the Pryor Center’s collection are highly valuable resources in understanding modern Arkansas history, perhaps the most distinctive component is a collection of news footage from Little Rock news station KATV (Channel 7), which went on the air in 1953. Originally KATV’s news coverage was captured on film, which was surprisingly mostly maintained by the station rather than being copied over, as was the norm at that time. Sadly, however, a 1960 fire destroyed most of the original tape, including the events of the Little Rock Crisis. After the fire, some film was maintained, and the station’s news director, Jim Pitcock, saved the most historically important footage when the station shifted to videotape recording in the late 1970s. Later, some of that film was also shifted to U-matic videotape, although some original tapes were retained. In creating what was called the KATV News Archive, Pitcock also developed an archiving method known as the master cassette reel (MCR) system.

  As the station moved to digital formats, three hundred hours of film and twenty-six thousand videotapes were donated to the Pryor Center in 2009 as one of the largest—and most temporally expansive—local news collections in the country. The first step was to save and digitize the film. Those digital files are maintained on a searchable portal of the Pryor Center website. Included in that collection are some pieces relevant to better understanding the ongoing perceptions of the meaning of the events at Central High.

  When KATV switched to videotape in the late 1970s, Pitcock—committed to the archiving of the collection—preserved edited news stories and other raw footage on what ultimately added up to twenty-six thousand videotapes. The digitization of this mammoth collection is underway but, understandably, will take time and money. In the meantime, the coordinator of the KATV collection project at the Pryor Center—longtime KATV employee Randall Dixon—will work with scholars to digitize select sections of the tapes, as occurred with this project. Pitcock created two sets of dot matrix documents that list key contents of the tapes; one set is a subject matter listing, and the other focuses on personalities. The alphabetized documents are also searchable, although typographical errors can create some miscues in the searching process. Each story can be found on film or videotape based on a distinctive MCR number (see Figure 1). Once MCR numbers are identified, digitized copies of the pertinent stories or footage can be created. It is a somewhat convoluted and time-intensive process, but it gives scholars across all fields who would benefit from using such an extensive local television collection a window into key subjects, such as those related to civil rights history.

  Of course, KATV continues to be an active source of television news in the Little Rock market. More recent coverage from the station is available either on the KATV website (katv.com) or through the station. 

  Changing Memory of the Little Rock Crisis across Time

  Much like Schudson’s analysis of competing memories when it comes to Watergate, different memories of the Little Rock Crisis are shown in the Pryor Center collection. To borrow this analysis, four boxes are created by the answers to two questions: First, is the dominant focus on individual students—either the Little Rock Nine or current students—or on elites—either the original combatants in the crisis or current political leaders? Second, is the narrative frame hopeful or pessimistic about the trajectory of a healthy integration at Little Rock Central or in general?

  What is shown across time is a shift away from a focus on the original elite combatants—such as the governor and NAACP leader Daisy Bates—to students, initially current white and Black students and then the Little Rock Nine themselves in later years. What is also shown is a shift from a quite optimistic take on the ramifications of the crisis to a more mixed—and at times somewhat negative—take on where issues of school integration are at Central High, specifically, and across America, more generally.

  In the sixty-five years since Central High was desegregated, media conversations about the long-term meaning of the crisis have waxed and waned. Most of the conversations have centered around anniversaries of the key events. As longtime KATV journalist Steve Barnes said at the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1982, “Our society seems obsessed with anniversaries . . . we generally note them in years divisible by five.”¹⁶ Such anniversaries often marked not just renewed interest in the events but an opportunity for a recalibration of collective memory.

  The First Three Decades: The Success of Integration

  In the first thirty years following the events of September 1957, anniversaries were more likely to be manifested by the media itself than by coverage of public events commemorating them.  The first postcrisis stories on Central High in the KATV collection were from the 1967–68 school year, including the start of the year and events surrounding the ten-year class reunion for Ernest Green, the first Black graduate of Central High, and his classmates. The footage in the collection includes interviews with Green, marking his professional progress on urban development issues, and Brooks Hays, who lost his seat in Congress through a write-in campaign in 1958 because of his perceived integrationist tendencies. He was invited as the keynote speaker at the class reunion. In the video, an optimistic Hays is saying “the things that I predicted have been fulfilled,” meaning that desegregation has begun to succeed at Central High (see Figures 2 and 3).¹⁷

  Hays’s optimism is reinforced in the KATV story at the start of the 1967–68 school year, just a few months before the reunion, in which interviews with white and Black current students at Central noted the peacefulness now surrounding integration at the school (see Figure 4).¹⁸ Thus, at this earliest point, the KATV coverage reflecting on the crisis highlights current students along with one of the combatants who lost the battle in the form of his reelection campaign in 1958 but saw himself as winning the war over desegregation.

  Around the time of the twentieth anniversary of the crisis, a series of news stories—both national and local—were produced; they are part of the KATV collection. It was noted in the news coverage that though Green was earning $50,000 a year in Washington as President Carter’s assistant labor secretary, Faubus—whose comeback attempts in 1970 and 1974 had failed, as did his 1986 race against Clinton, and who refused to be interviewed at the time—was working as a bank teller in Huntsville, Arkansas, to supplement his state pension. The primary focus of the twentieth-anniversary coverage was that integration was working at Little Rock Central High—its student body now evenly balanced between Black and white—even as it was showing strains in northern cities such as Boston.¹⁹ In a national story for Good Morning, America, a youthful Geraldo Rivera went even further, arguing, “This once troubled and divided school has become something of a national model . . . that integration can succeed.”²⁰

  Two stories on Good Morning, America focused on current students at Central High—both white and Black—who emphasized that they “relate to each other quite well.”²¹ As white student Jeff Ledbetter put it, “We’ve been integrated since 7th grade . . . so, we’ve known each other for awhile” (see Figure 5).²² The youthful Black principal of Central, thirty-six-year-old Morris Holmes, was given special credit for ensuring maintenance of the “peaceful coexistence” by Rivera. In a locally produced piece later that day, KATV reporters captured mostly positive reactions to the Rivera story from the morning.

  Five years later, in 1982, the silver anniversary of the Central High Crisis was commemorated, mostly on television. Partly because one of the key players—Governor Faubus—was now ready to speak, much of the coverage now centered on the original, aging combatants. The Little Rock Nine were included primarily as sepia-toned actors in archival coverage from 1957. A special KATV broadcast hosted by news anchor Steve Barnes included an interview with Bates, but the bulk of the show was dedicated to a fairly remarkable twenty-five-minute interview with Faubus, now trying to defend his behavior. In the initial interview with Barnes, Faubus contended, “All of us were caught in a chain of circumstances” and he had lived up to his duty as chief executive to protect the safety of the community, which was at significant risk of violence (see Figure 6).²³ Faubus was then peppered with specific questions about his “rationales” for his 1957 decisions by two longtime Arkansas newspaper editors—a deeply critical Paul Greenberg and a more sympathetic John Robert Starr. 

  Five years later, at the time of the thirtieth anniversary, the KATV coverage returned to an almost total focus on the peaceful integration of Central High. As one white student said, referring to her Black friend: “Me and Marie have been friends since 7th grade. We started Central together and we’ll finish together” (see Figure 7). While Bates was interviewed in the piece as an homage to 1957, the KATV story focused on the lives of the students in 1987. The reporter closed the story with “The biggest problem seemed to be finding their next class . . . no National Guard necessary.”

  The Later Decades: The Voices of the Little Rock Nine and Less Optimism

  Around the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Crisis, the voices of the Little Rock Nine became much more prominent. Events over several days in late September were planned by a City of Little Rock committee in collaboration with the Central High National Historic Site once it was established by Congress in 1998. The stories of the nine alumni emphatically personalized the Little Rock Crisis but also allowed for a much more nuanced, and at times negative, take on the trajectory of American race relations. On September 25, 1997, before a cheering crowd of 7,500 spectators gathered in front of Central High, the president of the United States, the governor of Arkansas, and the mayor of Little Rock saluted the nine individuals who had once been denied entrance to the school but courageously returned to integrate it. President Bill Clinton, who had welcomed them to the governor’s mansion during his tenure, praised the sacrifices of the Little Rock Nine, who had “changed the course of our history here forever.” Governor Mike Huckabee added, “We come here today to say once and for all that what happened here forty years ago was simply wrong. It was evil and we renounce it.” After further speechmaking, the trio of dignitaries escorted the Little Rock Nine through the front doors of the school.²⁴ While the voices of the Little Rock Nine were heard at other events during the week, at this event that gained the bulk of public attention, they were primarily silent actors in a play written by elites—Clinton and Huckabee most prominently. Only Green, who had served as the spokesperson for the nine at all major events over the decades, spoke at Central High to represent the group.

  Attitudes in the Black community, as well as some comments by the speakers at the fortieth-anniversary events, showed growing concerns about the direction that integration politics was taking after decades of thorough optimism about the success of Central High. Tellingly, the state and local chapters of NAACP boycotted the anniversary event, maintaining that little progress had been made during the intervening four decades. Moreover, as President Clinton noted, “Today, children of every race walk through the same door, but then they often walk down different halls.”²⁵

  Ten years later, at the half-century anniversary, another commemoration was held in front of Central High. Now a former president, Clinton once again was a headline speaker. However, this time all nine students who had desegregated Central High in 1957 spoke, taking up the bulk of the program. In these first remarks, most of the nine emphasized positive, hopeful perspectives on their role. As Carlotta Watts Lanier said: “We knew we were doing the right thing. The struggle was really worth it.” Several of the honorees spoke directly to the current Central High students in attendance in referencing the meaning of their lives: “So, students, when you get your education and career, look around you and reach out and use it to offer someone else a better life,” Gloria Ray Karlmark said. Even those who recognized the persistence of racism were decidedly hopeful in their emphasis on the potential for progress. Minnijean Brown Trickey said: “It’s my hope that this 50-year commemorative ceremony will energize and invigorate the social movement that is absolutely called for in 2007. We have to remember that justice is a perpetual struggle and that we’ve got to keep doing it . . . forever.”²⁶

  The sixtieth anniversary event in September 2017 was held inside the auditorium at Central High rather than outside. It was the first event following the death of one of the nine—Jefferson Thomas had died in 2010. The tone of the event, held less than a year after Donald Trump had become president and during an era in which federal courts had increasingly turned a blind eye to resegregation of schools, was different from the past. Again, former president Clinton was present and spoke, but he was more emphatic about the need for persistence on issues of racial justice: “I wanted to say: ‘You did 60 years. Take a victory lap. Put on your dancing shoes. Have a good time.’ But instead, I have to say, ‘You’ve gotta put on your marching boots.’”²⁷

  Along with historian Henry Louis Gates and other public figures, the eight living members all spoke. There was an agitation in many of their words not heard ten years earlier. Dr. Terrence Roberts contended: “We all have to engage in the war against the forces that are determined to shore up and maintain the status quo. How can we do that? You can decide to choose to live a life that’s different from the life you’ve thus far chosen to live.” Even Green, typically one of the more moderate of the nine in public comments, linked the events of Little Rock to various other events in American life showing the persistence of racism, including the shooting of nine congregants at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, two years earlier: “The Little Rock Nine turns to the Charleston Nine, paying the ultimate sacrifice.” 

  While Trump’s name was not spoken, two of the eight quite clearly referenced the attitudes and expressions of the president in their speeches. Trickey noted his “profound intentional ignorance” in her remarks. Lanier said, “Behind the scenes and through his Twitter account, we become as we were 60 years ago,” but concluded more optimistically: “We know these things, though: As a human race, we are strong people. In the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘We have come too far to turn back now.’”

  Perhaps the most moving comments of the day were more personal and came from one of the nine who had previously been quite reticent in talking about her experience. Karlmark talked not about her first day at Central but about her last, when the Central High yearbooks were handed out. “I had my book, and I knew people signed each others’ books. But here I was, now a 15-year-old little girl, and who was going to sign my book? Who would I dare go up to and ask to sign my book?” She said a girl named Becky, with whom she had developed a secret friendship through exchanging notes, signed her book. Then a second girl approached her to sign. The second girl’s simple, but telling, message: “In a different age, we could have been friends.”

  Somewhat surprisingly, particularly because of the ongoing threat of COVID-19, another commemorative event was held in fall 2022, at the request of several of the Little Rock Nine, not on a decade anniversary but at the sixty-fifth. As in the past, smaller events were held over several days, but the two primary events were on the anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s entrance, on September 25. One event was held outside Central High, but rather than a formal commemorative event, it was a street renaming as Park Street became Little Rock Nine Way for the block in front of the high school (see Figure 8). Despite the late summer heat, five of the nine were present for that short event, which is available for viewing on the KATV website.²⁸

  The formal event was much smaller than the three prior events and was held at the Clinton Presidential Center, with the former president once again on hand for the festivities. Five of the living members of the Little Rock Nine were on stage at the Great Hall of the Clinton Center, while two others participated virtually from their homes. The remarks of Thelma Mothershed Wair were read aloud; she could not participate because of a conflict. While Roberts continued to express his frustration at the legacy of oppression of people of color in the United States and the “institutions, philosophies, practices and ideologies” that are barriers to necessary progress, others returned to a more hopeful tone at the 2022 event, while recognizing that steadfast dedication to progress would be necessary. Trickey emphasized that “ordinary people can do extraordinary things” and then read the final lines of a song she often uses in explaining the meaning of the Little Rock Crisis to younger children: “Don’t be silent, don’t be afraid. You may be someone’s hope someday.” Finally, the most stoic of the Little Rock Nine over the years, Elizabeth Eckford, provided her most expansive and personal remarks on the meaning of the events—particularly her infamous harassment on the first day of the crisis: “I want young people to understand that they need to know themselves so other people can’t tell them who they think they are” (see Figure 9).²⁹
  
  

  The Civil Rights Era, Political Memory, and Local Media

  Examining political memory is vital to understanding the ongoing import of the civil rights movement in American life. As shown here, the memory of one of the most telling events of the so-called Second Reconstruction—the Little Rock Crisis of 1957—has not been stable across the six and a half decades since it occurred. Instead, attention has wandered back and forth between elite actors (the original combatants and later political leaders) and students (both the Little Rock Nine themselves and current students at a high school that has become a thermometer of integration’s success or failure). The tone of that memory has also meandered between decidedly optimistic about the direction of integration and negative regarding the state of American race relations.

  As a key delivery mechanism for political memory, the news media across time—particularly local news media that is closest to the citizens in their home communities—is vitally important to ascertaining memory at different points across the decades. Rarely, however, are archives of such media readily available. Fortunately, such an archive is available for Arkansas, the home of the Little Rock Crisis, and will continue to grow over time: the KATV collection at the Pryor Center at the University of Arkansas. This collection promises to become a vital source for understanding local news coverage in America, about not just racial politics but a variety of other topics in the years ahead.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.³⁰
  
  Jay Barth is M. E. and Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Politics at Hendrix College. Barth’s academic work includes research on the politics of the South, state government and politics, LGBTQ politics, political communication (particularly radio advertising), and the achievement gap in Arkansas. He is the co-author (with the late Diane D. Blair) of the second edition of Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule? (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
  
  Title Image: Central High graduate Ernest Green, 1968.
  
  Remembering the Little Rock Central High Crisis: The Pryor Center’s Distinctive Insights © 2025 by Jay Barth is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.