Central High crisis diarist dies

LINDA S. CAILLOUET
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Another key figure in the Central High School integration has joined the crisis in history.
Elizabeth Paisley Huckaby, a longtime English teacher and the dean of girls at the high school during those turbulent times, died Thursday in Little Rock of heart failure. She was 93.
As an English teacher, Huckaby did what came naturally in her profession. She wrote. Every day in a journal about what was unfolding at the school as the first nine black students were admitted.
By the early 1980s, the diary she'd kept during the 1957-58 school year at Central High School was the basis for her book, Crisis At Central High, and a made-for-television movie of the same name starring Joanne Woodward in the key role of Huckaby.
More than 40 years later, some say Huckaby didn't do enough for the black female students she was charged with protecting. But at the time, many others thought what she did do for them was too much.
"My uncle took to carrying a shotgun around with him because of all the phone threats she got," said Huckaby's niece, Liz Humeston of Danville, Calif.
In one instance, a girl who had been suspended for passing out segregationist literature in the school and her mother chased after Huckaby. In the confrontation, Huckaby's glasses were pulled off and the mother raised an umbrella as if she were going to hit her when the principal, Jess Matthews, stepped in.
Huckaby was born in Hamburg where her father, the Rev. Henry Lewis Paisley, was a Presbyterian minister. Huckaby once credited her parents with raising her and her four siblings to look past race.
"Prejudice simply wasn't in any of our patterns of thinking," she said then.
She lived in Hamburg for three years before her family moved to San Marcos, Texas, where Huckaby attended grammar school. The family then moved to Fayetteville, where she attended high school and the University of Arkansas.
She taught school in Fort Smith for three years before returning to the university in Fayetteville to begin work on her master's degree.
In 1930 she heard of an opening at Central High School in Little Rock and was hired as an English teacher. That summer, she returned to Fayetteville to complete her master's degree. She wasn't too thrilled with the job at Central -- all the other teachers were so "old," 30 or 35, but jobs were scarce and she held fast to hers.
Three years later, she married G.T. Huckaby, who spent most of his career as principal of Pulaski Heights Junior High School in Little Rock. He died in the mid-1960s.
After teaching English at Central for 25 years, she was named a vice principal in 1955 but continued to teach 10th-grade honors classes in English.
In the 1957-58 school year, she also assumed the role of protector of the six black girl students. The three boys reported to the dean of boys.
For the first year, she carried copies of the students' class schedules in her purse. She needed to know where to reach them at all times, she said later.
Huckaby would recall later that the white students who harassed the nine black students were not large in number but were well organized and were led by adults.
"They had some rough times," she said of those who integrated the school. "It's rough anywhere you are not made to feel welcome."
Huckaby had some rough times as well, becoming the object of vilification by the segregationists who repeatedly threatened her.
One anonymous card distributed through the high school in 1957 read:
"Rockaby, Huckaby, betray your own race, Get an umbrella smack in your face; When white folks discover all that takes place, You'll leave Central High in total disgrace."
"Of course it was a blow to my ego, to find that people don't like you," she recalled later. "But apparently it hasn't scarred me. I still like everybody and have no feeling of even resentment."
When the Little Rock schools were closed during the 1958-59 school year because of the continuing controversy, she wrote a 100,000-word narrative from the diary she'd kept.
Then she tucked it away in her husband's gun cabinet until she retired in 1969. She tried for three years to sell the manuscript but was unsuccessful. She took it out again in 1977 when interest in the integration was renewed with the 20th anniversary.
By 1980, Time-Life Productions had bought the rights to her work and made the docu-drama which aired in early February 1981. Soon after, her book was published by Louisiana State University Press.
Huckaby said the film was based on fact but some creative license was taken. For example, some events are shown out of sequence, others have been slightly altered, and she was given a more prominent role than she played.
"She was a staunch defender of the Constitution," said Robin Loucks of Little Rock, a former student of Huckaby's. "She tried to make it as pleasant as she could."
But Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine students who integrated that first year, said there was only so much that Huckaby could do.
"Her words were encouraging and she did her job," Eckford said. "But there was no relief from the repeated abuse."
Arkansas Democrat columnist Meredith Oakley wrote in 1980 after reading Huckaby's then newly released book:
"When their books were stolen or their clothes ruined with ink and tossed food, Mrs. Huckaby offered replacements. When nasty propaganda was distributed, she confiscated the material. When their bodies and spirits were battered and bruised, she soothed them with words. But few of the tormentors were restrained or expelled."
"In her time she probably would have been considered a white moderate," Eckford said of Huckaby. "And she was criticized by some white people who thought that, in just doing her job, she was doing too much. There weren't a whole lot of people who stood up for us at that time."
Huckaby's niece said she believes her aunt strove for fairness for the black students.
"I know she did her best to try to protect the students and give them the education they deserved," Humeston said. It was quite difficult on her as she discovered the people, the community, and even some of her own relatives she had never suspected, had some very biased views."
But Huckaby, who never had children of her own and considered her students to be her family, said she always looked for the best in others.
"I can walk downtown and see the people I've taught," she told the Arkansas Gazette upon her retirement in June 1969. "I love to see them; to see what they have -- or have not -- become. One thing I've learned is to never give up on people. Often, they have too much inside of them to fail."
In her retirement, Huckaby spent her time traveling and transcribing a collection of more than 500 family letters passed down through the generations. She continued to live in the same house on Fairfax Street she'd moved into as a young bride in 1933 until her failing health about three years ago at age 90 forced her to move to Presbyterian Village.

This article was published on Saturday, March 20, 1999

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