The large Roberts Family were seventhday adventists and very religious. His father attend meetings all summer. Discussing immigration but remained ambivalent about his sons attending central until his governors actions made a matter of principle. If theyed parents pressured some of to attend central. Responded nobody urged me to go. The school board asked about wanted to go, i thought if i got in, some of the other children would be able to go and have more opportunities. 27 27,er the 25th, Terry Roberts, the other eight members of the little rock nine in the world will return to little rock to remember 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 central tigers played basketball for the first time. Was at central, the African American not only could not play sports, but they could not even attend the games. As many in this room are ready no, 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. Powerful,ok is a 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 the lengthening chronicle of harassment of the nine lead New York Times reporter Gertrude Samuels to suggest the mob had moved inside the school. The book takes us inside Central High School in a way no one had ever done before. When you read this very well researched and documented account, you will witness the depth of the abuse and how some in authority actually tolerated. It does not rich, shy away from controversy. The challenges conventional wisdom, it makes some people uncomfortable. It causes people to think, to react and engage in this muchneeded and continuing dialogue. Were still many people who get to come to grips with the story and dont yet understand it. Betsy grew up in little rock, graduated from the university of arkansas, earned her phd in history at the university of north carolina. She lives in newport where her husband is an attorney and where they have raised their family. She has taught at the university of florida and at lyon college, where she and i now serve together on the board of trustees. Rutherford, a past president of the Little Rock School board and now dean of the university of Arkansas Clinton School of public service. Ladies and gentlemen, the author of turn away thy son,. [applause] betsy thank you for that wonderful introduction. I want to think Patrick Kennedy and nick for all of their work to make this happen. I want to thank the students were inviting me to be a tonight and i want to thank all of my dear friends that are sitting in the audience to hear to share with me this exciting story. I want to share my findings with. He world this is 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. Its a little scary. Standardow the textbook treatment of what happened in little rock in 1957. A thumbnail sketch in every High School Ted textbook is that the opportunistic governor of arkansas battled orville fathers, cap the for his own advantage, for his own political gain. If it not been for him supporting his story, the schools would have been integrated without difficulty and little rock was certainly prepared and that should of all gone off without a hitch. Thats been my experience few people in little rock are or elsewhere know anything much beyond that story. That little thumbnail sketch. There is very little depth of understanding of what happened here and once i began to probe and ask questions, i began to realize that everyone was kind of embarrassed area they somehow thought everyone else knew more. 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 number of people to keep the truth. One of the distorted ors desk distorters was Harry Ashmore. Gazette one prizes for its coverage. Harry was one of the creators courageous figures who stood up. How liberal can i possibly say that. The other source of distortion in little rock was the fbi. Fbieptember of 1957, the was sent in to little rock to investigate what was happening. Harry ashmore had the people in the Justice Department what he was telling everybody, this was a manufactured crisis. The editorial you wrote was i really believe, although i dont write this because i dont have support, but i think they wanted to arrest orville. They were trying to catch him in these lies when the fbi came in and did 500 interviews between september 4 and september 14. 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. Sat on the judges bench during one of the key trials and there had been a lot of media hype with that. That fbi report was going to prove. He never alluded to the report. I think its because he knew that if he did use it, he would have to make it available to the lawyers on the other side. That report was suppressed. Thank you goodness tony friar used the freedom of information act to get it. Just one year before the 25 year statute of limitations would have caused it to be lost. We have it. Who studiesanyone the constitution to go out to uli are and look at it. It is huge and ill keep and poorly organized. It is really inaccessible and i think thats on purpose because the fbi didnt want people reading it. You have to read it all the way through. To really understand it make sense out of it. Got my juicy i stuff. I also want to suggest and i do in my book that not only is the ry that has the story been i want to tell you why the standard mythology is wrong. I want to back up for a minute and tell you where i came from in all this. As i say in the book, i was 13 when the crisis broke, i was totally mindless. We lived up in the heights in a culture that encouraged little said to be cute and my dad frequently little girls arent supposed to think about unhappy things. So i didnt. Know anybody in Central High School. We didnt have a television, i didnt see those images and somehow that whole thing just went by me. I knew was happening but i had no idea 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 yete in and outs none of this was ever discussed. Conspiratorial about that. I think the idea was that the little girls and the women werent supposed to think about those things. Finally went to graduate school and came into the real world and only went because my dad made me go, at that point i was a good girl. I always was. He forced me to go, insisted that i go and i went. On thevered to my horror reconstruction, all of the time kinds of things that white people had done to black people in the south. That i had never heard of. That i did know anything about. At first i was unbelieving. This cant be true. Me, it began to dawn on lived through one of the major , thes of American History little rock crisis, and i never asked any questions about it. And i know all of these people. I wonder if maybe i could go home and write about this. Went home and told my dad i would like just write about the little rock crisis. He said no youre not. He was still practicing law. Thank goodness i found another topic that was great and im making is much too long, but the bottom line is when i finally did come around to studying the crisis, i knew little about it. Almost nothing. Largely for the same reason that most people dont know much about it, there was not much out there that was really useful. I had been working under George Kendall at chapel hill and i learned to be a historian with my district station with my dissertation. That was much easier. Had stressed that the way to write history is not to go out and read what everyone else has read about the topic and you dont do that because if you do that, you are simply going to adopt their point of view, youre going to adopt their conclusions and ask their questions. He said what you do is you go read in the primary sources, you go and you read peoples papers, you read their diaries. You read the public documents. Thats messy. It takes a lot of time. You really dont know much about them, you dont know about what he was involved in. You start reading his mail. It is getting interesting, but you dont know what you are collecting. Youve a general idea of where you want to go with this or you start taking notes and questions begin to come into your mind about the material you are gathering. Sure enough, you begin to form your on ideas and conclusions about whats happening here. 1976 going all the way around the country reading other peoples mail and i had a wonderful time doing it. I guess 10 years ago that i started reading the secondary literature. Everybody knew i was writing about the little rock kleist debt crisis and i was terrified someone would pin me down about soandso said such and such and i didnt want to give this speech about why dont read the material. By the time i got to all the secondary material, i renew. It was a much better strategy. Kendall, he had a death in his 10 commandments for the muse, number nine is now shall not past judgment on mankind or any manner woman for anything. You may seek the reason for error but neither the excuse nor the blame. Vengeance is mines a is the saith then just is mine, sayeth the news. I wanted to form my own conclusions and i was not in the business of passing judgment. Some people have criticized me for not being harder on the segregationists or not being not praising the good guys and damning the bad guys, i dont think thats what my job is. My job is to gather the material in a full, balanced and fair way. It is up to you as an intelligence intelligent reader to draw your conclusions. Let me tell you what did happen here. 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. You had 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. He was a 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, a progressive, a liberal, his father was an old mountain socialist, his made dl name was middle name was eugene, he was named for eugene v debs, socialist candidate for president way back. 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 his own horror, no School System will be forced to 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 knee high. E what the amendment said it was , called the interposition amendment, it said that the governor should have the power to interpose 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 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 have anything 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, became a nuisance because he was always there saying what are you going do . Are you going to help us if there are difficulties, if there is violence in the fall . Will you call out the National Guard to enforce integration . Faubus says no, im going to im not going to enforce integration. This is your plan, virgil, this isnt my plan. I dont want to have anything to do with it. My view has always been hands off. My view has always been if a Community Wants to integrate, thats fine, they can integrate, im not going to stop it. But if they dont want to integrate, i just said in the election last summer, no city will be forced to integrate against its will. So many things happened through the summer to increase blossoms panic. He takes a bullet through his kitchen. He takes a bullet through his car door. His wife picks up the phone and her life is threatened. He is threatened daily on the telephone that his daughters will be killed. That his house will be bombed. Any one of us would panic. And he was a big guy who was used to pushing and getting his way, and he thought if he just pushed orval faubus hard enough he could make that man yield to him. Well, in all these exchanges between faubus and blossom during the summer, blossom began to develop an understanding of faubus position and why he didnt want to be involved, why it would be political suicide for faubus to get involved. And he realized that what what faubus needed was a delay so that these, so a court test could be launched to test these four arkansas laws. So they start scratching each others back trying to figure out how we can make this work. Enter at this point, wayne upton. He lived across street. He was a lawyer who went to ft. Smith to meet with john miller and pulled him aside and said if a case is brought adam not saying there will be, but if, a case is brought to your court in which a case has been successfully tried in a state court, granting an injunction against the school board for integration in little rock this fall, would you uphold that injunction . And john miller, completely unethically, says, yes, i would. And in fact discusses with him how this case might be drawn. So upton comes back to little rock, tells blossom this. Blossom says oh, my gosh, this is wonderful. I mean i had no idea. Blossom and upton go out to see faubus, tell him about this, and they all kind of get in this together. Faubusssom persuades about on the plaintiff for the case. I told you this was confusion. It is. This is very complicated, and you really have to sort it out. But what we have going on here in a nutshell is that the school board or part of the school board is now engaging in a plan to sabotage its own plan of integration.