Turn away thy Terrence Roberts was the best student in a group of nine, and perhaps for that reason he was to become one of the main targets of the segregationists. His father was a navy veteran and a dietitian. His mother was a caterist. The large Roberts Family were sevenday adventists and very religious. Terrences father attended meetings all summer discussing integration, but remained ambivalent about his sons attending central until the governors actions made it a matter of principle. When newsmen asked terrence if the naacp had pressured to him attend central, the idealistic 15yearold responded, quote, nobody urged me to go. The school board asked if i wanted to go. I thought if i got in, some of the other children would be able able to go and have more opportunities. On september 25th, 2007, Terry Roberts, the other eight members of the little rock nine, and the world, will return to little rock to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of little rock Central High School. I had the privilege of helping coordinate the 40th ceremony in 1997. Among the many things associated with that commemoration, i accompanied Terry Roberts when he saw the central tigers play basketball for the first time. You see when terry was at central, the africanamerican students not only couldnt play sports, but they couldnt even attend the games. As many in this room already know, Central High School is a special place to our family. All of our children graduated there, and i have spent many years questioning why at a school in little rock, arkansas did america face its most challenging constitutional crisis since the civil war . Betsy jacoways book, turn away thy son, is a powerful, compelling, and at times heartbreaking story of what did happen and most importantly, why it happened. To me, the most revealing part of her book is on page 228 when she writes, quote, the lengthening chronicle of harassment of the nine led New York Times reporter Gertrude Samuels to suggest the mob has moved inside the school. Betsys book takes us inside Central High School in a way no one has ever done before. When when you read this very wellresearched and documented account, you will witness the depth of the abuse and how some in authority actually tolerated it. This book is rich, it does not shy away from controversy, it challenges conventional wisdom, it makes some people and some families uncomfortable, but most importantly, it causes people to think, to react and to engage in this muchneeded and continuing dialogue. After all, there are still many people who have yet to come to grips with this story and dont yet understand it. Betsy grew up in little rock, graduated from the university of arkansas, earned her ph. D in history at the university of north carolina. She now lives in newport, where her husband tim is an attorney and where they have raised their family. She has taught at the university of florida, ualr, at lyon college where she and i now serve together on the board of trustees. I am skip rutzherford, past president of the school board, now dean of the Arkansas Clinton School of public service. Ladies and gentlemen, the author of turn away thy son, betsy jacoway. [applause] betsy thank you. Thank you, skip, for that wonderful introduction. I want to thank Patrick Kennedy and nicolai for all their work to make this evening happen. I want to thank the clinton students for inviting me to be here tonight, and i especially want to thank all my dear friends that im seeing out in the audience who are here to share with me this exciting story. And one of the first times ive talked about it publicly and shared my findings with the world. I was saying to a young woman a minute ago, this has been like my third child. Ive nurtured this for 30 years, and ive been very paranoid about having other people steal my thunder, so i havent talked about it. And now my baby is out there in the world for everyone to appraise, so its a little scary. Ok, we all know the standard textbook treatment of what happened in little rock in 1957. The little thumbnail sketch in every high School Textbook is that the opportunistic governor of arkansas, orval faubus, called the National Guard to keep the nine black children out of Central High School for his own advantage, for his own political gain. If it had not been for orval faubus, according to the story, the schools would have integrated without difficulty. And little rock was certainly prepared, and that should have all gone off without a hitch. It has been my experience that few people in little rock or elsewhere know anything much beyond that story. That little thumbnail sketch. Theres very little depth of understanding of what happened here. Once i began to probe and ask questions, i began to realize that everybody was kind of embarrassed that they didnt know more about this story, they somehow thought everybody else did, but somehow they had missed out and just didnt really know how it all fit together. What i have found is that the real story of what happened in little rock was consciously suppressed at the time. The story was distorted consciously, and thats why we dont know what happened here , because it was a conscious effort on the part of a number of people to keep the truth from being known. One of the distorters was our old heroic figure, Harry Ashmore, editor of the arkansas gazette, and the gazette won two pulitzer prizes. Harry is one of the courageous figures who stood up to bad old orval faubus. How can i say that . The other distortion in little rock was the fbi. In september of 1957, the fbi was sent in to little rock to investigate what was happening here. Harry ashmore told the people in the Justice Department what he was telling everybody, that was a manufactured crisis, the editorial he wrote was the crisis mr. Faubus made. So i think, i really believe although i dont write this because i dont have proof for it, but i think they wanted to arrest orval faubus. I think they were trying to catch him in these lies. When the fbi came in and did 500 interviews between september 4 and september 14th, 87 of those interviews talk about rumors of violence or threats of violence that the interviewee had heard about. Because the interviews did not reveal what the fbi was hoping to find, that report was never released. It was suppressed, and although it sat on the judges bench during one of the key trials and , and there had been a lot of media hype about how that fbi report was going to prove that faubus was wrong, he never alluded to the report. I think its because he knew that if he did, if he used it on appeal, which would happen, he would have to make it available to lawyers on the other side. And so that report was suppressed. Thank goodness tony fryer, a scholar out at ualr, used the freedom of information act to get it. Just one year before the 25year statute of limitations would have caused it to be [inaudible] so we have it, and it has been the source of much of the juicy information in my book. I encourage anyone who has got a sturdy constitution to go out to ular to look at it. It is huge, bulky, poorly organized, really inaccessible , and i think thats on purpose. Because the fbi really didnt want people reading it. You have to read it all the way through and really hang in there to make sense out of it, but the investment is worth the time. Thats where i got lots of my good, juicy stuff. I also want i also want to suggest and i do in my book, that not only is the story, has the story of the little rock crisis been distorted, but its also wrong. And i want to tell you a little bit of why the standard mythology, standard treatment is wrong. Now, i want to back up for a minute and tell you where i came from in all of this. As i say in the preface to my book, i was 13 when the crisis broke. I was totally mindless, i lived up in the heights in a culture that encouraged little girls to be cute, and my daddy said frequently, little girls arent supposed to think about unhappy things. And so i didnt. I didnt know anybody at Central High School. I wasnt going to go to Central High School. We didnt have a television. I didnt see those images, and somehow that whole thing just went by me. I knew it was happening, but i had no idea of what the issues were. What is even more astonishing to me now as i look back on it, my family was closely related to several of the major players, and they were in and out of my house. And yet none of this was ever discussed in my presence. And im almost conspiratorial about that. I think that the idea that was the little girls and the women werent supposed to think about those things. So i really, when i finally went to graduate school and came in to the real world, and i only went because my daddy made me go at that point, i was a very good little girl, actually i always was, but he forced me to go, insisted that i go and i went. And i discovered, to my horror, in a course on the south since reconstruction all of the kinds of things that white people had done to black people in the south. That i had never heard of, that i didnt know anything about and at first i was unbelieving. I thought i would have heard of some of this. I mean this cant be true. And then it began to dawn on me, i lived through one of the major events of American History, the little rock crisis, and ive never asked any questions about it. And i know all these people. I i wonder if maybe i could go home and write about this. So i went home and told daddy that i was going to write about the little rock crisis. And he said no, youre not. He was still practicing law, and he knew that that would stir people up, and he was not going to have it. So i didnt. Thank goodness i found another topic that was great and im making this much too long but the bottom line is when i finally did come around to study the little rock crisis, i knew little about it. Almost nothing. Largely for the same reason that most people dont know much about it, there just wasnt much out there that was really useful. But i had been working under George Tindall at chapel hill and learned how to be a historian. I had dissertation which covered a safe South Carolina topic where everybody was dead. And that was much easier. But dr. Tindall had stressed that the way to write history is not to go out and read whatever else has read about the topic that youre interested in. And you dont do that because if you do that, then youre simply going adopt their point of view, youre going adopt their constitutions, youre going to ask their questions. So he said what you do is you go out and you read in the primary sources, you go to archives and you read peoples papers, you read their letters, you read their diaries if they wrote them. You read the public documents that came out of that period. Takes a lot of time. And thats ma lot of time. You go to the brooks hayes papers, you dont know much about brook hayes, you dont know much about what he was involved in. You start reading his mail, and it gets really interesting, but you dont know what it is youre really collecting here. And you have a general idea of where you want to go with this, and so you start taking copious notes, and questions begin to come in to your mind about the material youre gathering. And sure enough, you begin to form your own ideas and conclusions about what was happening here. So i spent the year of 1976 on a grant going all around the country reading other peoples mail. I really had a wonderful time doing it. It wasnt until i guess 10 years ago that i started reading the secondary literature, and everybody knew i was writing a book about the little rock crisis, and i was terrified that somebody was going to start pinning me down about so and so said such and such and i didnt want to have to give this whole speech about why you dont read the secondary material. But after, by the time i got to all the secondary material, i already knew what i thought had happened. And it was a much better strategy. The one other major maxim of George Tindall, he had a clios deck log. Clio is the muse of historians. In his 10 commandments of the muse, number nine is thou shall not pass judgment on mankind nor pardon any man or woman for anything. Thou may seek the reason for error but neither text skews nor the blame, vengeance is mine , sayeth the muse. So those are the two key points that i went out in to the world trying to research this topic. One that i wanted to form my own conclusions and two, that i was not in the business of passing judgment. So some people have criticized me for not being harder on the segregationists or not being, you know, praising the good guys and damning the bad guys. But i dont think thats what my job is. My job is to gather the material in as full and balanced and fair way as i can and tell the story fully. And its up to you as an intelligent reader to draw your own conclusions. Ok. So let me tell you what did happen here, and the story is very complicated and it can be confusing. So pay attention. [laughter] betsy this is, im going to try to compress in to 10 minutes what it has taken me 30 years to sort out. So lets have a romp through this stuff. All right. You know the brown decision was handed down in 1954 that said separate and equal didnt work. Had you to have integration. But the brown decision did not say integrate immediately. They said were going to send this material back to the local, to the states, and were going to let them submit arguments about how we should go about integrating. So virgil blossom was new superintendent of schools in little rock. He had just integrated in fayetteville. They only had six black kids up there, so he thought piece of cake. I can go to little rock, show them how to do it. Eaves school he was this school man who was on top of the decisions that were coming down through the supreme court, through the court system, and he knew intergration was coming. The very week the brown decision was handed down, blossom called together his school board and he told them, we are going to have to do this. We are going to have to integrate, so we might as well just step out front and do it voluntarily. He had some strong segregationists on that school board who didnt run the next time. And they had some concerns about it, but strongwilled man, he persuaded those people that they needed to issue a Public Statement in may of 1954 that they were going to comply. So they did. Blossom went all over. First of all, he had meetings with all kinds of public groups trying to sell the idea and gather information for how they should proceed in little rock. His first thought was that they should integrate at the first grade, but he immediately found that the parents were most concerned about letting little bitty kids integrate when they hadnt already formed their racist views. They wanted to maintain racial purity, this separation of the races, so they persuaded blossom that he should start at the High School Level where these views had already been formed. So he, blossom, gives about 200 speeches around the community , and he thinks he has prepared the community. All the signs are that the community is willing to accept integration. In the summer of 1956, segregationist firebrand jim johnson ran against orval faubus. Johnsons whole campaign was about maintaining segregation. Faubus was a populist, progressive, a liberal, his father was an old mountain socialist, his made dl name was eugene, he was named for eugene v debs, socialist candidate for president way back. Faubus had. Faubus had no history of racism, didnt even see black people until he was 23 years old. But he was a politician, could see which way the wind was blowing. The stronger jim johnson talked, his racist line, the more faubus got pushed to the right. By the end of the campaign, faubus heard himself saying to , to his own horror, no School System will be forced to spe integrate against its will as long as im governor. There he made the promise. In the fall, although jim johnson was soundly defeated, only carried 7 counties out of 75, and that seemed to be to everybody just a clear endorsement of integration, that this was going to proceed, still johnson had a very strong following, and he got an amendment to the constitution, to the arkansas constitution on the ballot in november of 1957 1956, in which he said, i mean he said it was so strong it would kill corny high. He said it was really too strong for me. It was actually, i think, in large part written or influenced by strong segregationists from the deep, seep south. But what that amendment said, it was called the interposition amendment, it said that the governor should have the power to interpost the power of the state between the citizen and the power of the federal government. And that in case, in the case, in the event that integration was demanded, the governor could actually resist. Now, this was only going to work if johnson was governor, because he would have resisted, but this won by huge margins in the election in november. And faubus took note that that is what the people want. The people do want to resist integration. In the winter of 1957, the legislature was in session and , and four laws got passed by the legislature that called for ways to preserve segregation. Faubus knew the laws were not going to stand up. He knew that federal lawsuit precedes state law, but he was a politician, and he knew that since those laws are on the book , and since he as governor is sworn to uphold the laws of the state of arkansas, he has to have a court test of those laws and have them declared unconstitutional before he can say to the people, you know, i did everything i could, but i cant defy the law. As long as those laws are on the books and theyre untested, hes in trouble. So faubus knew this whole integration issue was dangerous, didnt want to have figure to do with it. So when blossom begins to panic in the summer of 1957, when the capital citizens council, the strong segregationist group really starts a Huge Campaign in the summer of 1957, and starts badgering faubus in the news, the school board panics, and especially virgil blossom panics. They knew each a long time, worked in education together in northwest arkansas. Blossom starts going to see faubus every day, calls him six times. Faubus says he badgered him, shadowed me, bec