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PAGE 6—NOVEMBER 1959—SOUTHERN SCHOOL NEWS
ARKANSAS
Three Begin Pupil Placement Procedure After Transfer Plea Denied
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.
he Dollarway School Dis
trict at Pine Bluff denied an
application for transfer to a white
high school by three Negro stu
dents. The students, under in
structions from a federal appeals
court, are going through the ad
ministrative procedures stipulated
in the state pupil placement law
which the court upheld. (See
“School Boards and Schoolmen.”)
A Methodist pastor in the Dol
larway district wrote that the hate
which was being sown in the com
munity was far worse than the
schools being closed. The Citizens
Council responded by calling him
an integrationist and a rabble-
rouser. (See “Community Ac
tion.”)
In Little Rock, a county association
of Southern Baptist churches expelled
the church of the Rev. Wesley Pru-
den, outspoken segregationist and a
Citizens Council officer. (See “Com
munity Action.”)
Three Little Rock residents sued
Police Chief Eugene G. Smith for $50,-
000 each, alleging their civil rights had
been violated. (See “Legal Action.”)
In the first trial of a Labor Day dy
namiting suspect, a Little Rock jury
convicted Jesse Raymond Perry of dy
namiting the school office and sen
tenced him to three years in prison.
(See “Legal Action.”)
Harry S. Ashmore, whose editorials
on the school crisis won him a Pulitzer
Prize, resigned as executive editor of
the Arkansas Gazette and took a new
job in California (See “Miscellane
ous.”)
SCHOC
>L BOARDS
AND S
CHOOLMEN
Following instructions of the Eighth
Circuit Court of Appeals, the three
Negro student-plaintiffs in the Dollar
way School District case (Dove v. Par
ham) applied again to the Dollarway
board for admission to the all-white
Dollarway High School. The board had
a closed hearing with the students and
their parents and gave the students
both physical and intelligence exami
nations, then rejected their applica
tions on Oct. 21.
Under the pupil placement law, Act
461 of 1959, which the appeals court
has told them to follow out, the Ne
gro students have 15 days in which to
file an exception with the board. If
this too is rejected, the students may
apply to the state courts for relief.
ORDER REVERSED
The students had skipped these pro
cedures originally and filed directly
in federal court where in August, Dis
trict Judge Axel J. Beck ordered the
Dollarway board to admit them to the
white school. Judge Beck upheld the
pupil placement law but said the Dol
larway board was just using it to
maintain segregation and that, in ef
fect, the plaintiffs had already ex
hausted their remedies under it. The
Dollarway board appealed that ruling
and postponed the start of classes. On
Sept. 21 the appeals court at St. Louis
reversed Beck’s order for the immedi
ate admission of the three Negroes and
instructed them to carry out the ad
ministrative procedure set forth in the
placement law. Then the Dollarway
board reopened its segregated schools
and the Negro plaintiffs—Ernestine
Dove, James Edward Warfield and
Corliss Smith—applied for transfer
from the Townsend Park School to the
Dollarway High School.
On Oct. 8 the board met with the
students, their parents and attorneys,
in a hearing closed at the request of
the Negro families. A crowd of white
people gathered outside the building
during this hearing and some of them
twice pulled the master switch to turn
out all the lights. Some threw stones
at the Negroes as they left the hear
ing but didn’t hit them. After that the
board gave each student a physical
exam that lasted about four hours and
an intelligence test that lasted six or
seven hours. At another closed meet
ing Oct. 21 the board made its de
cision and released the following state
ment:
“The board has met tonight and con
sidered all relevant information avail-
ible to it in connection with applica
tions for re-assignment from Town
send Park School for Negroes to Dol
larway School of Emestive Dove, Cor
liss Smith and James Warfield. It is
the unanimous opinion and conclusion
of the board that the re-assignment
requited in each of these three cases
would not be in the best interests of
the individual child, and would be
detrimental to the educational program
of the district. Therefore, by unani
mous action of the board in each case,
these three applications have been dis-
approved. The detailed findings and
conclusions of the board in connection
with each of these applications will be
furnished to the respective parents
within a few days.”
SUSPENSIONS AT CENTRAL
In addition to nine students sus
pended Sept. 18 over an attempted pro
test walkout at Central High, four
others were suspended later for stay
ing out of classes as protest against
the admission of three more Negro
students. Ten of the 13 were readmit
ted after a conference between each
student and his parents with the Lit
tle Rock School Board. The other three
withdrew from school.
Of the 2,241 white students enrolled
at Central and Hall high schools, 68
have requetsted that they not be as
signed to any class with a Negro stu
dent, Supt. Terrell E. Powell said. Such
a request is authorized by Act 7 of
1958 and each one is granted. Powell
said this was fewer than had been ex
pected and that the transfers had not
interfered with the school schedules.
COMMUNITY ACTION
A Methodist pastor in the Dollarway
School District wrote in his church
bulletin that hate was taking over the
community, a happening he called “far
more horrifying” than the closing of
schools. In answer the Dollarway Citi
zens Council called him an integra
tionist, an outlaw and a rabble-rouser.
White residents of the Dollarway dis
trict, where three Negro students have
applied for admission to the white high
school, are violently opposed to de
segregation.
SEEDS OF HATE’
Rev. Carlos Martin of St. Luke’s
Methodist Church wrote that Citizens
Council extremists, some political lead
ers and some ministers were inciting
with inflammatory words and sowing
seeds of hate that will last for years.
“The greatest tragedy of all is not
closed schools,” he wrote. “I see some
thing happening in my community far
more horrifying than this. I see an aw
ful harvest being reaped in the lives
of children and youth as they hate.
For within the past few days I have
heard groups of children and youths
saying loudly, ‘I hate niggers. I hate
niggers.’
“Something within me caused me to
grow faint as the words echoed around.
I look at these children and am moved
to tears . . . This is the terrible har
vest of seed sown. Children and youth
being used as pawns for those who
hate. Little children using the tele
phone to make obscene calls. This is
the harvest. . . .”
LEAFLETS CIRCULATED
When the Dollarway Citizens Coun
cil met in October, a document was
distributed containing a reprint of the
Rev. Mr. Martin’s bulletin and a re
buttal, without signature. It called the
Rev. Mr. Martin’s bulletin “another
article by a proponent of integration.”
Written in the first person singular,
the rebuttal classed the Rev. Mr. Mar
tin with “do-gooders, bleeding-hearted
proponents of racemixing” who never
want integration for themselves, with
liberal school boards, vote-grabbing
politicians and ladder-climbing preach
ers. They are the true rabble-rousers,
not promoters of peace, it said.
Segregation is the law in Arkansas
and every exponent of integration is an
outlaw, it said.
“They point their finger at decent
white and colored people and call them
‘segregationist’ as though that were
some foul name. A segregationist is
what all decent, respectable people
were before May 1954 and what all de
cent people, white and colored, are
today,” it added.
At the same council meeting, the
Rev. Alvin Mayall of DeWitt, a Land
mark Baptist minister, said that segre
gation was God’s law, established by
the Bible, and that marriages between
a Negro and a Caucasian, or between
a Jew and a Gentile, were a sin.
DRIVE-IN TARGET
In Pine Bluff and near the Dollar
way district, a group of 60 to 70 white
men spent several nights at a drive-in
restaurant for white customers, filling
the parking spaces with their cars and
taking up all the seats inside for hours
at a time while they sipped coffee and
nickle drinks. Tommy Priakos, the
owner, said the men told him they
would keep it up until he got rid of
two young Negro men, both college
students, who work for him as carhops.
Priakos said he had used Negro car
hops for years without any previous
complaint or criticism. After a week
of this treatment, Priakos suspended
the two Negro workers and his busi
ness returned to normal. He said he
was not firing them but was waiting
for things to cool off.
CHURCH EXPELLED
At Little Rock, the Pulaski County
Baptist Assn., a voluntary association
of Southern Baptist churches, expelled
the Broadmoor Baptist Church whose
pastor, the Rev. Wesley Pruden, is an
outspoken segregationist and an officer
of the Capital Citizens Council. The
association said the Broadmoor Church
had given neither money nor personal
support to the association in the last
year and had shown no “desire to co
operate with the association.” The Rev.
Mr. Pruden, who arrived at the meet
ing after the vote against his church,
called the expulsion a reprisal against
him because of his segregation stand.
Afterward the Rev. Dale Cowling,
pastor of one of the largest Baptist
churches at Little Rock, said he heart
ily approved of the expulsion “as a
means to say to the world that we dis
approve of the activities of Mr. Pruden
throughout the racial controversy in
Little Rock. In my judgment the for
eign mission work of the Southern
Baptist Convention was severely em
barrassed by Mr Pruden’s stand. Many
of my missionary friends have told me
how difficult the news stories coming
out of Little Rock with regard to Mr.
Pruden’s stand as a Southern Baptist
made their work on the foreign mis
sion field.”
The county association’s vote has no
effect on the Rev. Mr. Pruden’s con
nection with the Southern Baptist
Convention or its Arkansas affiliate,
the Baptist State Convention.
SEEK HELP
Four Negroes headed by the Rev.
James T. McCullum asked the Little
Rock School Board to help them im
prove communications between the
board and the Negro community. They
wanted to do this through a Negro
committee that could obtain informa
tion from the board and spread it
through the Negro community. They
said such a setup was needed because
there was a great deal of tension and
many rumors in town, and they didn’t
want trouble to develop. They said they
were in accord with the board on “cer
tain principles” and wanted to help the
board put its program across.
The board members gave the sug
gestion a frosty reception. They said
they were accessible already to Negroes
or anybody else who wanted informa
tion and that they were deliberately
trying not to communicate any more
with one segment of the community
than any other.
SCHOOL AUDIT
A final audit of the Little Rock Pri
vate School Corp., which has voted
itself out of existence after operating
a high school for white students only
during the year that the Little Rock
public high schools were closed by Gov.
Orval Faubus, showed that its income
consisted of $300,480.43 in donations
and $71,907.50 in state aid that had
been withheld from the closed public
schools. The private school, T. J. Raney
High, spent $313.72 per student, com
pared to $322.75 per student in the
public high schools for the year 1957-
58.
There was a great deal of difference
in the per student cost of some ele
ments of the total, as follows:
Private
Public
Instruction
..$202.40
$236.62
Plant operation ....
.. 41.39
23.06
Plant maintenance
.. 9.61
5.68
General control ...
.. 42.62
5.64
Debt service
.. 1.46
42.81
Auxiliary activities
.. 5.04
2.60
Capital expense ...
.. 0.00
3.52
■BBSS
Six Little Rock residents—one of the
Labor Day dynamiting suspects and
five persons who were in the segrega
tionist crowd near Central High on
opening day Aug. 12—filed damage
suits in federal court for $50,000 each
against Police Chief Eugene G. Smith.
Each one claimed that his civil rights
had been violated.
E. A. Lauderdale Sr., 48, lumber
company owner and officer of the
Capital Citizens Council, filed the first
suit. He is charged in connection with
the dynamite explosions Sept. 9 at the
Little Rock school office and under the
fire chief’s car, and he claims that the
manner in which he was arrested and
held by the Little Rock police violated
his rights under the Fourteenth
Amendment.
Then two women filed similar suits.
They are Mrs. Mary Ellen Pritchard,
31, who was arrested Aug. 12 on
charges of loitering, resisting arrest
and assaulting an officer, and Mrs.
Lela Sosebee, 69, who was not arrest
ed in the Central High incident but
who fell or was pushed down during
the fracas. Mrs. Sosebee is suing be
cause of the injuries which she said
were caused by a policeman knocking
her down.
Chief Smith’s answers to these three
suits were filed before the other suits
came in. In the Lauderdale suit, he re
plied that he had been acting in offi
cial capacity under directions from
Prosecuting Atty. J. Frank Holt and
that all his actions had been legal and
proper. To the two women, he replied
that Mrs. Pritchard and her husband
Charles, 32, were leaders of the march
on Central High and with Mrs. Sose
bee were “part of a mob in defiance
of the law attempting to prevent the
opening of Central High School.” He
again claimed that his actions had
been legal and proper and added that
Mrs. Sosebee’s injuries, if any, had been
caused by another member of the
mob, not by him or any other police
man.
Then the three other suits were filed,
all by the parents of teenage boys
who were arrested Aug. 12 near Cen
tral High. The boys and the charges
against them are Calvin Parish, 18, re
sisting arrest and assaulting an officer;
Leon Kyzer, 16, disturbing the peace,
and Charles Bailey, 16, loitering. Ky
zer lives at North Little Rock, Bailey
has moved away from Little Rock and
the other four plaintiffs are Little Rock
residents. All the plaintiffs have the
same legal counsel—Amis Guthridge of
Little Rock, a Citizens Council officer,
and Sidney W. Provensal Jr. of New
Orleans.
FOUND GUILTY
The first trial of the suspects in the
Labor Day dynamiting at Little Rock
took place Oct. 27-28 and the defend
ant, Jesse Raymond Perry, 24, a truck
driver, was found guilty and sentenced
to three years in prison. He was tried
for dynamiting the school board office,
one of three explosions in town the
night of Sept. 9. He is also charged
with dynamiting the fire chiefs car.
Most of the two-day trial was taken
up with the reading of two long state
ments that Perry had given to Prose
cuting Atty. J. Frank Holt right after
his arrest in September. In the state
ments, Perry said he had been re
cruited into the Ku Klux Klan last
July by A. C. Hightower of Little
Rock, then the KKK grand dragon for
Arkansas, and that the talk at the
meetings was about violence. He said
Hightower quit the Klan because of
that. He described some later meetings
with E. A. Lauderdale Sr., 48, Little
Rock lumber company owner and Citi
zens Council officer, and J. D. Sims,
another truck driver. He said the dy
namiting was planned at these meet
ings and that Lauderdale furnished
the dynamite.
Perry said he was supposed to dy
namite the school board office and that
Sims was to dynamite the city car used
by the fire chief. Perry said he backed
out and turned his dynamite over to
Sims. Sims, who had previously
pleaded guilty and is already serving a
five-year term, was brought from pri
son to testify. He told how he and
Perry got the dynamite from Lauder
dale, how they separated and he drove
to the fire chiefs home and set off
the dynamite, how they met again and
he got the dynamite from Perry to use
at the school office.
A jury of eight men and four
women, all white, heard the case.
Prosecutor Holt told the jury that
Perry, though he did not actually go
to the school office, had “guilty knowl
edge” of the dynamiting and under
Arkansas law was just as guilty of the
crime as if he had committed it per
sonally.
Three other suspects are to be tried
in November. One of them is Lauder
dale. The other two are John Taylor
Coggins, 39, and Samuel Graydon
Beavers, 49. Before the Perry trial,
Perry, Coggins and Beavers asked for
a change of venue, claiming that they
could not receive a fair trial in Pulaski
County. Judge William J. Kirby de
nied the request.
ASK CHANGE OF VENUE
In Little Rock Municipal Court, 19
persons arrested Aug. 12 in the segre
gationist march on Central High have
asked for a change of venue. While they
said they did not think Municipal
Judge Quinn Glover was prejudiced,
they objected because his court is in
the City Hall building and they do not
like “the attitude in City Hall.” Judge
Glover denied their request but al
lowed them until Nov. 10 to appeal his
ruling to circuit court. The defendants
want the trials moved to municipal
court in Jacksonville (population
13,000), 12 miles away.
Gov. Faubus asked the U.S. Supreme
Court to review and reverse a three-
judge district court decision of June
18 nullifying Acts 4 and 5 of 1958, the
state school-closing laws. He based his
request on the contention that the dis
trict court ruling took from the state
its exclusive control of public schools
under the Tenth Amendment and also
on the fact that the state Supreme
Court had upheld both the laws. Fau
bus had used the laws only once, to
close the four Little Rock high schools
for the 1958-59 school year.
The state; Sovereignty Commission
asked the state Supreme Court to
reconsider its ruling of Sept. 14 nulli
fying Act 85 of 1957, which required
certain persons and organizations to
register with the commission. The court
refused to do so.
In the original Little Rock desegrega
tion case, the hearing scheduled for
Sept. 30 was postponed at the request
of the Negro plaintiffs and won’t be
held until sometime in November. It
will be on the plaintiffs’ motion chal
lenging the way the Little Rock School
Board is using the state pupil as
signment laws and, in effect, asking
that pupils be assigned to schools sole
ly on the basis of residence in a
school’s normal attendance area. Six
teen Negro students, two of them
among the original plaintiffs in the
case, filed the motion. All of them were
assigned to the all-Negro Horace Mann
High School after they had requested
assignment to either Central or Hall,
the predominantly white schools.
GOOD FAITH ATTESTED
On the eve of the Sept. 30 hearing,
District Atty. Osro Cobb disclosed that
the Justice Department did not intend
to have an attorney present, probably
for the first time since the crisis of 1
September 1957 in the Little Rock
case. Cobb notified Judge John E.
Miller that he personally was con
vinced the school board was trying
in good faith to carry out the court’s
order for desegregation. In addition
the assignment laws have been upheld
by both the federal district and ap
peals courts.
The Justice Department has taken
part as “friend of the court” and near
ly always on the side of the Negro
plaintiffs.
MISCELLANEOUS
Harry S. Ashmore, executive editor
of the Arkansas Gazette and one of
the leading figures in the Little Rock
school crisis, has left Little Rock. He
resigned from the Gazette in October
to become a consultant to the Center
for the Study of Democratic Institu
tions, at Santa Barbara, Calif., estab
lished by the Fund for the Republic-
The Gazette supported the plan of
gradual integration adopted in 1955 by
the Little Rock School Board. These
policies made the newspaper and Ash
more personally the object of strong
attack from segregationists.
When Gov. Faubus used troops iu
September, 1957 to keep Central High
from admitting Negro students under
court order, the Gazette condemned
the action and laid the blame for the |
crisis on Faubus. Thereafter Faubus J
joined the segregationists in attacking !
Ashmore. Both Ashmore and the
Gazette won Pulitzer Prizes for their
performances during the 1957 crisis.
STUDENT INCIDENT
Annette Harper, 16, a white student
at Central High, and Cecil White, 14.
a Negro student at Dunbar Junior
High at Little Rock, were involved in
an incident Sept. 21 on a city bus.
Annette’s mother, Mrs. Kenneth Harp
er, had Cecil arrested on a charge of
assault and battery, but the boy was
turned over to Juvenile Court because
of his age. Juvenile Court proceeding 5
are not public under Arkansas law-
This was Annette’s second public ap
pearance in the Little Rock school
situation; two years ago she was one
of the white girls who said the FBI
had questioned them incommunicad J
for several hours while investigating
the violence at Central High, a charge
the FBI denied. A month after the bus
incident, Mrs. Harper and Annette sued
the bus firm, Citizens Coach Company
(See ARKANSAS, Page 15)