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John Taylor’s Story is found in the “Afterward” on
pages 177-179.
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Finding the Lost Year: What
Happened When Little Rock
Closed Its Public Schools
(University of Arkansas
Press Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
~ Sondra
Gordy (Author)
Review
"Gordy's
razor-sharp analysis of Little Rock's
'Lost Year' is wonderfully balanced by first-hand accounts of the often
devastating effects on those students who could least afford to lose a year
of their lives." - Grif Stockley, author of Ruled by Race and Blood in
Their Eyes"
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Afterword
And all of that hate just left me
–Edie Garland (Barentine), Lost Year Student
The loss of part or all of the
1958-59 school year was more than an inconvenience for 3,665 students, 177
teachers and administrators, their families and their community. Both race and class brought disproportionate
suffering to displaced Black and some poor white students. Public schools lost support in the
segregationist community. Public school
teachers lost their civil liberties at the hands of the legislature and
governor. School closure for these
teenagers was a life-changing event, often to their personal detriment. More important than the disruption of their
physical world was the molding of their identities, their egos, and their views
on race and desegregation within a cauldron of racial turmoil. The general tendency
of historians to dismiss the Lost Year as a footnote to the media-drenched Little Rock desegregation
crisis of 1957-58 obscures its true significance. Beyond the
public tragedy for the community and the schools, the personal stories
remain. For the students, the private
victims, the consequences of this year have been playing out quietly over
lifetimes. Students were separated from
friends and families, and parents watched as their aspirations for their children
dissipated, young people delaying or deferring their young dreams. There was no
one outcome for these young people–some redirected themselves toward personal
achievement and a higher vision.
Dick Gardner, who lived near
Central High and was a sophomore the 1957 crisis, now runs a successful heating
and air-conditioning company. When
schools did not open in 1958, Gardner
asked his parents for permission to join the U.S. Navy. He served four years and earned his GED. He now looks back on how his life and career
were affected by closed schools and denied access: “I think things would have
been different if I had not left home...I know I would have finished high
school at Central. I’d have gone to
college, my daddy would have seen to that.
He would have seen to it.” Gardner mentioned several
times that his father wanted him to be an engineer: “The navy was better than
what so many others were doing. So many
didn’t go to school, they didn’t have a job, they were just kicking the gravel
around. It wasn’t a good situation. Daddy was scared I would get into
trouble...kids all over the place with nothing to do, seventeen-year-old kids
loose on the streets. He always wanted
me to be an engineer, to get an education, and I did, not like what he wanted...It
just didn’t work out that way.”
P.H. Gilkey, a Black junior who
did not return to school, also remarks on the Lost Year: “Well, it separated
from the people I knew and loved. I was
seventeen years old, and I was away from home.
I had not completed high school and was having to depend on the military
to complete it. I was suddenly thrust
among people from all over the world who had no idea what I was even thinking
and who didn’t really care.”
Shirley Collier Stephens, a Black
eleventh-grader who after tree months finally left town to attend another Arkansas school, felt
betrayed. She and so many other students
spent weeks in anticipation, hoping that with the passing of time their schools
might open. Her experience living with
an aunt out of town was not a particularly good one, but the following year she
refused to return to Horace Mann: “I would never go back to Horace Mann. I told my mother I could not. I told my father that I could not go there
after what they did. I felt so violated
and rejected. There was probably a lot
more pain within me that even I didn’t realize because when they opened the
school my mother just so anxious for me to come back and I said, “No.” Denied access, she summed up her feelings
about the Lost Year: “I lost everything.
I lost friends. I lost my home
and my family for a time. I lost my
community. It wasn’t just about
school. I lost everything.”
Edie Garland (Barentine), from Hall High, was sent to Oklahoma to live with
relatives for her senior year. Prior to
that, she had been active in her church, served as a white counselor at an
all-Black Methodist camp and participated in mixed-race discussion groups at
the YWCA and in private homes. She
remembers saying: “If I ever come face to face with Orval Faubus, he will hear
what I think of him. I wanted someone to
blame for what happened in the Lost Year and what happened at Central
High. Many, many years later I ended up
alone on an elevator with him. He was
much older. I noticed his suit was
ill-fitting and his shoes were dirty. We
made no eye contact and in that short rid, I thought, this is a man and he is
vulnerable, and he is old and tired. And
all of that hate just left me. His shoes
were dirty, and I had never stood in his shoes.
As he exited the elevator, I looked at him and was able to say, “It’s
good to see you, Governor. Though her
statement appears to absolve Faubus, she can now forgive the person so many in
the community blamed for their loss only through her own personal moral growth.
P.H. Gilkey, who went on to
serve for over twenty years in the U.S. Navy before earning his undergraduate
and graduate degrees, was the principal of the Step
One Alternative
School operated by Pulaski
County within the
juvenile justice system for twelve years before his retirement. He was able to use his own history to inspire
the incoming students, telling them that they had been given a second chance at
getting an education, something he was denied.
If a student made it through the Step One program, his expulsion would
become null, he would receive credit for the semester, and would be allowed to
return to school. Gilkey, now, is proud
of the 86 per cent success rate this school had under his leadership and feels
his example played an important part in its achievement.
Faye Perry (Russ) remained in Little Rock after
graduation from Horace Mann in 1960, earning her LPN degree and working at the
Veterans’ Administration
Hospital from 1966 to
1973. But when the second of her three
sons entered preschool within the LRSD, she quit her nursing job and
volunteered with the public school’s pre-K program. Soon she was offered a position to work in
the program and became is home school coordinator. In that capacity, she gained even more
interest in cultural diversity and heard of the work of the Panel of American
Women, which chose her as its facilitator and coordinator of culturally diverse
teams. The Panel, started by WEC member
Sara Murphy in 1963, consisted of about thirty women representing different
religious and racial groups who talked informally about how prejudice had
affected their lives and the lives of their children. Each team included a Catholic, a Jew, a
Black, sometimes another minority, and a white Protestant and appeared by
invitation to speak before organizations in public settings. By 1979-80, when Faye joined the croup, the
Panel received federal funding that allowed it to work with all sixth-graders
in the LRSD. Russ state3d: “That was the
best job I’ve ever had in my live. I
believe I could see so much growth from our work.” Sadly, the funding ended in 1980, but Russ
mentioned that some of those young people, no grown live in her neighborhood
and still talk to her about the program.”
John Taylor was a sixteen–year-old junior at Little Rock Central High
during the 1957-59 school year. He
describes himself during that time as a “science nerd” who was brand new to Little Rock and just
trying hard to fit into his new surroundings.
His father, a psychiatrist, was the new clinical director at the Arkansas State
Hospital, and the two drove into the
city the weekend of ‘August 31 from Alexandria,
Louisiana. The family was to have a house on the grounds
of the hospital, but he and his dad were to “bach” it in smaller temporary
quarters until his mother arrived within six weeks. Taylor was small in size, and he recalls now
that for sixteen-year-old boys “all that matters is going to school, doing your
job of learning, earning good grades, and trying to be something your are
not–an athlete. So I played in the band
and did science instead.” His
experiences during the first year of integration revolved around his own new
world, his classes, and the new white friends he had made. In 1997, as a long time college professor of
chemistry, he began to tell others about “some of those dark memories of
eleventh grade. How I was in the wrong
place at the wrong time. How I was part of the silent minority as my father
talked equality for all...I was ashamed for never speaking up. Too scared.
Too stupid, just a kid being a teenager wanting a normal school
year.” As for the Little Rock Nine, he says: “I did not even
know their names. They kept to
themselves, and we kept to ourselves. I
did learn one of the Nine’s name early in the year, Minnijean Brown, as she was
a target for group of white students. At
graduation I learned the name of Ernest Green, as I was in the band playing
that evening...I did not know who Martin Luther King [Jr] was or that he was in
the stands. Just that Ernest was in
danger of being shot at the ceremony and security was high at the
stadium.” The following year, when
schools were close, he kept his two summer jobs “to make more money for school
which certainly would begin soon.” He
started two correspondence courses, one in English and one in solid
geometry. After six weeks had gone by,
he says, the hope of school starting was fading, and reality was setting in:
“There was no school. There would be no
senior year.” In October, he went with
his mother to southern Louisiana,
where two former classmates and their mothers offered to allow him to live with
them. His father refused, offering him
the possibility of living with the family of one of his former patients. “I didn’t know them, but I should have
gone. I didn’t want to leave home...I
wanted to with the moms of my friends, not someone I didn’t know.” When Raney High opened, John enrolled in
physics and trigonometry for the second six weeks. Then he dropped out to go to college, after
taking his College Boards. He began at Little Rock University as a college freshman at just
seventeen years of age, one of 64 of Central High’s 535 “seniors”. He went from being an honor student in high
school to a struggling B/C college freshman, attempting to survive without the
proper preparation. He did well in
chemistry, but he knew he did not have the conceptual understanding to continue
in engineering. Since that time, he
says, “I have devoted my life to education, especially community college
education, where underprepared adults come for a second chance to attempt postsecondary
education in a caring environment.” John
has just completed his forty-forth year as an educator. In recent years, he has begun speaking in
public venues during Black History Month, telling his story of life in Little Rock. He spoke in April 2008 at the eighteenth
International Conference on Teaching and Learning. He begins each talk with the following, “When you lose your
health, your understand what you have taken for granted. When they take school from you, you realize
the value of education, that education is a privilege and should not be taken
for granted or wasted.”
Robert L. Brown has been an Arkansas Supreme Court justice since 1991; has had a
career in the legal profession; and has published extensively in journals such
as Arkansas Lawyer, Arkansas Business, and Arkansas Times. He was scheduled to be a senior at Hall High
in 1958-59. His father, Robert R. Brown,
the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas, had called
for the integration of Little Rock
Episcopal churches in 1957 and been roundly criticized by many for doing
so. Brown recalls that his father lost
friend because of his principled stands.
In some cases, old friends would cross the street to avoid speaking to
him, and he received harassing telephone calls.
Brown was sent away to an Episcopal high school in Texas
during the 1958-59 year, but even from that distance he knew that “the fiery
glow of racial hatred continued to burn unabated in Little Rock...Raised in this crucible of
racial ferment, my personal views began to take shape. I supported integrated schools in 1958-59,
and my commitment was strengthened by a trip to Morehouse College in Atlanta my
senior year in college, the 1963 March on Washington, the 1966 race riots, and
the assassinations s of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Through it all, I recognized that affording
equal education was the only chance for our multicultural society to survive
and prevail and that it would take several generation for progress to be truly
obtained and gauged.”
In 1982, when his
only child, Stuart, entered the Little
Rock public schools, it was at the height of white
flight and much turmoil. His desire to
understand these problems led to his 1999 report to the Winthrop Rockefeller
Foundation entitled “The Second Crisis of Little Rock.” From researching that report, he says now: “I
concluded that much remained to be done.”
Today Brown says: “No doubt, my personal history and my participation and
connection with the Little Rock public schools
gave me a unique perspective when the issue of public school funding for
adequate and equal education raised in my court in 2002 in the Lake View case.
The future of this state and, indeed, this country, rests on the
education of all of our children. Our
state constitution requires adequacy and equality in education. And my court did not shrink from this
challenge int the Lake View cases.
I am convinced that the seeds of what we sowed will bear fruit in the
succeeding generation for races in this state.”
The
voices of the Lost Year still resonate–if we will only listen. Those who remain bitter warn us to never take
away the right to a free public education for all. The voices of those who have on to higher
personal achievement or to a higher vision inspire us in their triumph.
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Review:
Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed its Public Schools?
Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed its Public Schools?
Sondra Gordy
During the Little Rock School
crisis, the governor of the state closed the public schools for a year.
Although much has been written about the crisis itself, little has been
published on the lost year when the schools were closed to students, both black
and white. Finding the Lost Year is the first book to examine how a
desegregation crisis turned into a community crisis. In Little Rock in 1958, 3,665 students were
locked out of a free public education. Teachers’ lives were disrupted. Students
were scattered to schools outside the city, some left the state, some joined
the military and ot hers took correspondence courses. But fully half the black
students went without schooling that year.
Author Sondra Gordy draws on personal interviews with more than 60 former
teachers and students, detailing the long-term consequences for students
affected by events and circumstances that were out of their control.
Gordy, a history professor at the University
of Central Arkansas, also
has produced a documentary on the topic, which can be ordered at thelostyear.com.