At long last integration of '54 to go on the map

DAVE HUGHES
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

CHARLESTON -- Tiny Charleston was the first public school district of the old 11-state Confederacy to integrate its public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954.
It did so without any fanfare and with little controversy.
Now, 4 1/2 decades after the historic court case, U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, a Charleston native who got his political start in 1950 on the local School Board, is bringing some recognition to the district for the role it played in the civil rights movement.
Bumpers, a Democrat who's retiring in January when his fourth Senate term expires, has obtained $200,000 in federal funding to build a memorial commemorating the peaceful integration of the Charleston School District.
He said last week that he wanted the memorial for Charleston to commemorate the courage of the residents to abide by an unpopular law because it was the right thing to do.
"And they did abide by the law, and it turned out they were about the only place in the country that did. And I thought they were entitled to some recognition for it," he said.
The appropriation came as a surprise to officials in the Franklin County town of 2,100.
Longtime Charleston school librarian and former teacher Mary Belle Ervin said no one in the community heard about the project before reading about the funding for it in newspapers recently.
School Superintendent Charles Harris said no one from the government has yet contacted the school district about the project and he was unaware of the plans for the memorial before it was publicized in the press.
"We don't really know for sure what's going to happen and we're not aware of the process or how it's going to work," he said. "But we're definitely willing to sit down with the [National Park Service] and see if we can provide any input from the school's viewpoint," he said.
The park service isn't sure what shape the project will take, either. Indeed, the labeling of the site as a National Commemorative Site is the first such designation in the National Park Service system, said Mike Madell, chief of planning for the agency's Midwest region.
While the appropriation bill set aside money for the new commemorative site, it didn't define what a commemorative site was, Madell said.
"It's really wide open," he said.
He said a park service team will be formed soon and will meet with Charleston residents and officials in January to get their input and begin planning.
"I would anticipate quite a lot of community involvement, especially from key entities like school officials," he said.
He said the project could take a year.
Bumpers said he didn't have anything specific in mind for the commemorative site and didn't want to be impose his views on its development. He wants the planning left to the park service and local residents.
"I want to make sure it commemorates the people of a very small community going about their business of doing the right thing and the legal thing," he said.
The commemorative site could be similar to 30 or 40 National Park Service "affiliates sites" that exist around the country, Madell said. Those sites are not a part of the national park system but do have some involvement, such as technical or financial, by the Park Service.
"It will be some perpetual memorial of what happened in Charleston in the 1950s," Madell said.
Bumpers had tried to get the school included in the national park system, something he accomplished for Little Rock's Central High School. Central was designated by President Clinton earlier this month as a national historic site because of its significance to the civil rights movement.
A study by the National Park Service's Harlan D. Unrau that was released in April, however, concluded that the Charleston school didn't meet the criteria for inclusion into the national park system.
The study concluded that Charleston school district didn't have exceptional value in illustrating or interpreting the civil rights movement and that it didn't signify the beginning of trends in educational policies. Also, Charleston wasn't a good site for a national park mostly because the district's schools are still in use and the buildings existing at the time of the integration had been destroyed or modified.
The study also pointed out that while Charleston was the first school to integrate, it wasn't the only one to integrate that year.
Unrau's study said school boards in Fayetteville and Sheridan were the first to vote to integrate their schools, four days after the May 17, 1954, Brown decision. Fayetteville voted to integrate only the high school. Sheridan rescinded its integration vote because of local opposition to the decision.
The Charleston School District voted on July 27, 1954, to integrate both the grade and high schools. Charleston integrated first because its school year started earlier, the study said.
The handwritten entry in the Charleston School Board minutes said simply: "Motion by [H.E.] Shumate, seconded by [A.R.] Schaffer, that we disband the colored school and admit the colored children into the grade and high school. Passed unanimously."
Coincidentally, the minutes reflected that at the end of the meeting the board appointed Bumpers to temporarily take the seat of Schaffer, who was taking a leave of absence to serve in the military in Korea. Bumpers, who was the School Board's attorney, didn't vote on the integration question.
A.R. "Archie" Schaffer II, the father of current Tyson Foods executive Archie Schaffer III, was married to the sister of Bumpers' wife, Betty. He died on July 22 at 78 after a battle with lung cancer.
Bumpers said he believes the district's decision to integrate had greater importance than what the National Park Service allowed. He said the move showed courage by the residents of a small Southern community that was the only place in the South to fully integrate its schools in 1954.
On Aug. 23, 1954, 11 black children -- three ninth-graders and eight elementary school children -- joined 480 white students in the Charleston schools. Before that, the school district had maintained a one-room rural school house for black elementary students. The high school students were bused to high school in Fort Smith 20 miles away.
Few outside Charleston knew about the integration at its start-up. Ervin said School Superintendent Woodrow Haynes and others spent the summer quietly informing residents of the inevitability of integration after the Supreme Court's decision and persuading them to accept it.
Haynes, who died in 1991, also persuaded community and business leaders to keep quiet about integration to protect the small town from national attention and from attracting agitators. Everyone was to refer any press inquiries to him.
"After opening day, when Haynes received calls from Fort Smith, Little Rock or the Eastern press checking on rumors, [Haynes] simply denied everything," Unrau's report quoted board member Schaffer as saying.
Bumpers remembered Haynes' news blackout and that it extended to such national publications as Life magazine.
"He refused to talk to them," Bumpers said. "He wouldn't tell them how many black students were involved. He wouldn't tell them anything. So, there was never any publicity about it."
Charleston kept its integration secret until Sept. 13, the day Fayetteville admitted black students to its high school. Charleston School Board President H.M. Osburn then revealed to reporters that Charleston schools had integrated three weeks earlier. Officials at Catholic schools in Paris and Fort Smith also announced that black students were admitted to their schools.
The attempt at secrecy may have saved Charleston from the racial strife that plagued some other school districts in the early years of integration. Ervin said she remembered there was little trouble in town.
"It was a sort of matter-of-fact thing because there was no big deal made of it," she said.
The decision to integrate also had economic advantages that may have made it more appealing. School records showed the district paid around $5,000 in the previous school year to enroll, transport and pay some expenses for the high school students it sent to Fort Smith. Ruby Haynes, the superintendent's widow, noted last year that the black elementary school had needed a new roof and furniture that the district couldn't afford.
The only problem that arose, Unrau's report said, was that Haynes found a racial slur painted on an outside school wall before classes began on the first day of school in 1954. Workers washed it off before anyone else saw it.
There were some other repercussions from Charleston's integration. Bumpers said some schools wouldn't play Charleston in football because black students were on the team. Charleston also wasn't invited to participate in some band competitions because of the black band members.
On the other hand, Charleston became a model for other districts around the state that struggled with school integration. Bumpers said several schools called on Charleston for their "secret" to peaceful integration.
"The answer was that we told the chamber of commerce and the people of the community what we were going to do," he said. "And they accepted it."
Things went surprisingly well for Charleston the first couple of years after integration, Bumpers said. But the fear and hatred caused by the Central High School crisis in 1957 spread to Charleston and threatened to undo what the community had achieved.
Even though Charleston integrated three years earlier, it didn't mean everyone liked it. Bumpers said there was an undercurrent of opposition to the integration that surfaced when things turned hot in Little Rock. And the state's governor at the time wasn't calming things, he added.
"Orval Faubus gave them the courage to believe that they could thwart the law and resegregate Charleston," said Bumpers, who served as the state's governor in 1971-74, having defeated Faubus in the 1970 Democratic primary runoff.
The crisis led to the biggest and most contentious school election in the small town's history, Bumpers said.
"1957 was a much more difficult year for Charleston than 1954 was," Bumpers said.
Things got so hot in Charleston that two School Board members resigned. In the school elections that year, Bumpers was up for re-election. He said he also persuaded a friend, another moderate, to run for the board.
He said they spent little money on the campaign and relied instead on the belief that they had the backing of a majority of the residents.
On the other hand, well-organized and well-financed opponents campaigned hard and even took out full-page newspaper ads proposing and publicizing a plan to resegregate the schools.
There was some "night riding," too, as Bumpers called it. He said that when some whites drove through the black community two miles east of town, Bumpers drove to the community and sat with a frightened family. Bumpers said the night riders would know he was there because, in such a small community, everyone would recognize his car. He said the men didn't return.
He also said someone painted a racial slur on the front on the school building but, as in 1954, it was washed off before anyone saw it.
Bumpers noted that for all the intimidation locally and from Little Rock, Charleston residents voted 2-1 to retain integration. Bumpers and his friend both won their seats on the board.
"It was very encouraging," Bumpers said. "And that's another reason Charleston deserves some recognition."

This article was published on Sunday, November 15, 1998

RETURN to Central High index