The Lost Year, When Little Rock Closed Its Schools
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
In the summer of nineteen fifty-eight, Governor Orval Faubus found a way to shut the question down entirely. Rather than comply with continued federal court orders to integrate Little Rock's high schools, he arranged for the Arkansas legislature to pass a law allowing him to close any public school under court-ordered desegregation. On September twelfth, nineteen fifty-eight, all four of Little Rock's public high schools closed.
They remained closed for the entire school year. That school year became known as the Lost Year. Roughly three thousand seven hundred students were displaced.
Some left the city to attend schools in other districts. Some enrolled in hastily organized private schools in church basements and living rooms. Many white students attended the newly created Little Rock Private School Corporation, funded partly by public money diverted from the closed schools.
Black students had far fewer options. Many simply lost a year of their education. Some never returned.
The women of the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, founded by Adolphine Fletcher Terry, organized public pressure against the closings throughout the year. The group was initially cautious, these were white women from the city's establishment, not civil rights activists in the conventional sense, but they gathered signatures, ran newspaper advertisements, lobbied businesses, and ultimately helped shift the climate of local opinion. In May of nineteen fifty-nine, Little Rock voters recalled three segregationist members of the school board and replaced them with moderates.
On August twelfth, nineteen fifty-nine, the high schools reopened and, in compliance with court orders, integrated, quietly, without troops, without the confrontations that had convulsed the city two years before. The Lost Year left scars. The displacement, the fractured educations, the costs borne almost entirely by the students least able to absorb them, these were not abstract policy consequences.
They were specific losses in specific children's lives. Central High today is a National Historic Site and an operating public school, one of the very few places in the country where federal history and living education share the same building.
