University of Arkansas Press Issues Two New Books on Local and National Civil Rights Stories

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – In two new books from the University of Arkansas Press, a little known aspect of the Little Rock School Crisis is explored in Sondra Gordy’s Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed Its Public Schools (cloth, $29.95), while the tragic history of civil rights in the south is retold in Jim Crow America: A Documentary History by Catherine Lewis and J. Richard Lewis ($19.95, paper)

Much has been written about the Little Rock School Crisis of 1957, but very little has been devoted to the following year — the Lost Year, 1958-59 — when Little Rock schools were closed to all students, both black and white. Finding the Lost Year is the first book to look at the unresolved elements of the school desegregation crisis and how it turned into a community crisis, when policymakers thwarted desegregation and challenged the creation of a racially integrated community and when competing groups staked out agendas that set Arkansas’ capital on a path that has played out for the past 50 years.

In Little Rock in 1958, 3,665 students were locked out of a free public education. Teachers’ lives were disrupted, but students’ lives were even more confused. Some were able to attend schools outside the city, some left the state, some joined the military, some took correspondence courses, but fully 50 percent of the black students went without any schooling. Few remember that while the schools were closed, the school’s highly successful football team continued to play. Drawing on personal interviews with more than 60 former teachers and students, black and white, Gordy details the long-term consequences for students affected by events and circumstances over which they had little control.

Grif Stockley, author of Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present, says “Gordy’s razor-sharp analysis of Little Rock’s ‘Lost Year’ is wonderfully balanced by first-hand accounts of the often devastating effects on those students who could least afford to lose a year of their lives.”

Sondra Gordy is professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. She produced a documentary about the topic, titled The Lost Year. A copy of the DVD can be ordered at www.thelostyear.com. She will be a featured speaker at the Arkansas Literary Festival, River Market District, Little Rock, April 16-19, and will give a talk and sign books at the Little Rock Central High National Historic Site, 2120 Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive, Little Rock, at 5 p.m. May 30.

Jim Crow America: A Documentary History is the “true” story of racism and segregation in American life. Edited by Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis this unique book provides readers with a wealth of primary source materials from 1828 to 1980 that reveal how the Jim Crow era affects how historians practice their craft.

The term “Jim Crow” has had multiple meanings and a dark and complex past. It was first used in the early 19th century. After the Civil War it referred to the legal, customary and often extralegal system that segregated and isolated African Americans from mainstream American life. In response to the increasing loss of their rights of citizenship and the rising tide of violence, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909. The federal government eventually took an active role in dismantling Jim Crow toward the end of the Depression. But it wasn’t until the Lyndon Johnson years and all the work that led up to them that the end of Jim Crow finally came to pass.

The book is chronologically organized into five sections, each of which focuses on a different historical period in the story of Jim Crow: inventing, building, living, resisting and dismantling. Many of the 56 documents and 18 images and cartoons, many of which have not been published before, reveal something significant about this subject or offer an unconventional or unexpected perspective on this era. Some of the historical figures whose words are included are Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell and Marian Anderson.

Catherine M. Lewis is associate professor of history and coordinator of the Public History Program at Kennesaw State University. She is the author of a number of books, including, with J. Richard Lewis, Race, Politics, and Memory: A Documentary History of the Little Rock School Crisis, published by the University of Arkansas Press, and The Changing Face of Public History, and Don’t Ask What I Shot: How Eisenhower’s Love of Golf Helped Shape 1950s America. J. Richard Lewis is a desegregation consultant, a former educator and academic administrator, and president of JRL Educational Consulting.