Red, white, and black : anti-communism, massive resistance, and the case of Orval Faubus

Abstract

In 1954, The Supreme Court of the United States declared in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools was against the U.S. Constitution. In the South, where racial segregation was the norm, the decision triggered a region wide reaction called the Massive Resistance. The resistance movement also coincided with the domestic anti-communist consensus of the Cold War, but the historical southern tendency to brand racial reform as communistic was more central. One focus of the thesis is this continuity. The other focus is on how a moderate Upper South state, Arkansas, became the site of the greatest Massive Resistance crisis in 1957 over the integration of the Little Rock High School, owing to the anti-communist and segregationist propaganda emanating from the Deep South. Although the movement was initiated by a conservative white elite, the support of local southern community and the intimidation of moderately inclined white southerners, was a key to its success. In reaching down to grassroots and pushing moderacy to inactivity, the combination of an anti-communist and anti-integrationist rhetoric had specific importance in Arkansas. It was with such combination that the resistance could contribute greatly to the building up of the 1957 integration crisis in Little Rock, by mostly mobilizing the otherwise silent grassroots and by giving the previously moderate Governor Orval Faubus an opportunity to assert a new and more acceptable conservative stance. To get down to local circumstances personal papers of southern leaders, mostly including propaganda material, Faubus’s personal papers and autobiographies, and memoirs of Arkansas figures were consulted, as well as secondary sources.