"The Workingest, Fightingest, Band of Patriots in the South"? the Mothers' League of Central High School during the Lost Year, 1958-1959

It now seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive history of the League of Central High School. Unless a previously unknown cache of documents emerges from within the ranks of the segregationist organization itself, conclusions about its personnel, activities, and ideas will forever be bound by the scattered and often hostile evidence that remains in the public domain, primarily in the columns of Little Rock's two major newspapers (the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat) and, to a lesser yet still vital extent, in a series of interviews given to FBI agents inquiring into the extent of gubernatorial interference with court- ordered integration.1 Indeed, very little has changed in the four decades since Neil McMillen prefaced his ground-breaking study of the citizens council movement with the observation that resistance groups have left few records of primary value to the historian. To date, there are available few manuscript materials, few financial records, no complete membership lists, and no minutes of closed meetings.2 Regrettably, no League members joined their male counterparts from the Capital Citizens Council (CCC) among the subjects of Columbia University's otherwise splendid Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration Oral History Project. There are, of course, incidental references to the Mothers and their leadership in a number of participant accounts of the Little Rock crisis, but contemporaries who put their thoughts on paper were more likely to damn the group than to describe it.3 Unlike other prominent players in the crisis, the League's second president and easily most voluble and visible presence, Margaret Jackson, was profiled by the media only once, and then by a Canadian broadcaster apparently more interested in providing an impression of the woman than in recording what she said in her own words.4 Pointedly, Jackson herself remained impervious to inquiring academics probably no more inclined to empathize with her position than either the ladies of the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) who thought of their opponents as ignorant, uneducated white trash or an anonymous gossip peddling repetitive rumors regarding Jackson's moral standing in the community.5 With just ten Mothers ever named in the press and even fewer quoted between August 1957 and August 1959, it is just not possible to examine the lives and ideological enthusiasms of any of the foremost Mothers comprehensively.A relative scarcity of resources has not, of course, deterred historians from commenting on the involvement of the Mothers' League in the Little Rock school crisis. From my own early study through Phoebe Godfrey's work to incidental contributions from Elizabeth Jacoway, Karen Anderson, and others in the course of major overviews, researchers have concentrated their energies, however, on the League's establishment, activities, and influence during the first year of the school crisis, 1957-1958.6This article, by contrast, considers what historian Sondra Gordy has called the Lost Year of 1958-1959.7 Focusing on the referendum of September 1958 that closed Little Rock's four public high schools, the school board election of December 1958, the recall vote of May 1959, and events surrounding the reopening of the schools in August 1959, it suggests that, once the provocation of a real black presence in Central had faded with the end of the 1957-1958 school year and segregationist forces had asserted their ascendency in the wake of Gov. Orval Faubus's triumph in the July 1958 Democratic primary, the Mothers lost a solid measure of their unique clout. No longer able to balk at the prospect of seeing black pupils entering school with whites, seethe at the prospect of troops peering into the girls changing rooms, or grizzle about the intolerable stress inflicted on their undeserving offspring, the Mothers increasingly concentrated their stand on the idea of being forced to integrate.8 Adding fresh emphasis to the states rights populism that had always been part of its armory but not conceded star billing while it was able to make its case in the name of maternal concern for the well-being of children in a fraught situation, the League turned toward arguments based on objections to federal dictatorship and toward the more overtly political stance taken by the CCC. …

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