Place / Dispatch

An Attempt to Resegregate Little Rock, of All Places

A battle over local control in a city that was the face of integration shows the extent of the new segregation problem in the U.S.

by Adam Harris via The Atlantic on October 22, 2019

...had been covered by a body before the fire marshal, concerned about capacity, ushered those standing out of the room. The crowd spilled into the overflow areas in a wave. Sixty-two years after the world watched Little Rock struggle to desegregate its schools, history seemed to be repeating itself.

Nearly five years ago, in January 2015, the state of Arkansas assumed control of Little Rock’s public schools. At the time, six of the schools in the district had “chronically underperformed” on state exams regularly for several years; 22 superintendents had passed through the district in 32 years, creating a sense of instability. The state gives a letter-grade assessment to every public school, which is based on a combination of state-exam results and other metrics, such as graduation rates. Because of that instability, and the handful of ‘F’-rated schools, the state believed the best way to steady the district was to take it over.

Legally, the state can take over a school district for a maximum of five years. For Little Rock, that deadline is rapidly approaching. To prepare, the state board came up with a plan that would return limited local control to Little Rock School District. The community would hold elections for a local school board, but the newly elected board would only be responsible for the schools that had not received an ‘F’ grade. The “failing” schools, which all have high minority populations, would still be under state control. The board’s plan would effectively divide the district by race.

It was a shockingly brazen proposal in the town that holds a rarified place in the collective national memory over the fight for school integration. Less than a lifetime ago, the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School became a nationwide story. On September 4, 1957, three years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate facilities were inherently unequal, nine black students attempting to integrate Central High School were met by a mob, and the state National Guard. Governor Orval Faubus had declared a state of emergency and deployed troops to block the students’ entrance. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered federal troops into the city to keep the peace and ensure desegregation. And now, in 2019, the state had proposed a plan that many residents argued amounted to an attempt to codify separate and unequal schools in the city.