From Pulpit To Public Square

The students who integrated Central High School in 1957 were known as the Little Rock Nine.

During the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders made a series of remarks about the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. She said she was so proud that in 1997 her father, then-Governor Mike Huckabee, and President Bill Clinton, who had also been a former Governor of Arkansas, held the doors open to welcome in the nine African American students that had integrated that school in 1957. She said how wonderful it was that those nine students were now memorialized in a bronze statue located in the state Capitol building in Little Rock.

It is unfortunate that she did not say anything more about her alma mater, Central High School of Little Rock, Arkansas. There are several things she chose not to say about her school.

First, she did not say that Central High School went from having a 100% white student body in 1957 to a school that is now more than 58% black, with white students comprising 30% of the student body according to a 2017 report by the Arkansas Department of Education. What happened to the other 70% of the white student body that caused such a radical racial transformation of the student body? How could such a thing have occurred?

Governor Sanders did not talk about the white parents who pulled their children out of that school when nine (not 90 or 900) African Americans students were allowed to attend that school that had over two thousand white students at the time. She did not talk about the so-called private Christian academies founded all over the South between 1955 and 1965, including Arkansas, to provide an alternative educational environment to white parents that were determined not to comply with the 1954 U. S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education.

Sanders chose a half-truth to offer a narrative about the “progress” that has occurred in this country since 1957. What was most astounding about her recollections of the Little Rock Nine and Central High School is that Republican governors across the country, including her, are boasting about banning books and classes that might well have the effect of prohibiting any discussion about all the events that occurred at Central High School in 1957.

Huckabee Sanders even boasted about signing an executive order banning what she called CRT without even defining what those three letters mean. That is probably because she does not know the difference between Critical Race Theory as coined by Professor Kimberly Crenshaw of Columbia University Law School and the 1619 Project spearheaded by Professor Nikole Hannah Jones of Howard University. Her confusion about the two is at the heart of the objection by many conservative Republicans to CRT, which is not taught in any elementary or secondary public school in Arkansas or any other state in the nation.

What they think they are banning is any aspect of American history which if recounted truthfully might result in causing “discomfort” to white students by learning the truth about some things they had never been told before about their state and their country.

That is what the 1619 Project aims to do; tell the whole truth about American history. That truth would include Orville Faubus who as Governor of Arkansas in 1957 used the Arkansas National Guard to prevent those nine African American students from entering Central High School.

President Eisenhower was forced to call in federal troops to protect the Little Rock Nine from racist white mobs.

That truth would include the fact that the school was not integrated until President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in soldiers from the 101st Airborne with rifles and bayonets to escort those nine students into the school.

Governor Sanders followed the script preferred by the followers of Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.

I wonder if Arkansas in 1957 is an example of the time when America was great?

I wonder if eliminating any narrative that tells the real story about American history is the real goal of the MAGA movement?

Huckabee Sanders was correct when she said that the political choice in this country today is between normal and crazy. What she must not have realized is that her speech placed her squarely in the crazy camp.