Finding the Lost Year: What Happened When Little Rock Closed Its Public Schools
By Sondra Gordy
()
About this ebook
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’s capital on a path that has played out for the past fifty 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. Drawing on personal interviews with over sixty 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.
“Fifty years ago segregationists trying to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High inadvertently broke up one of the country’s greatest football dynasties. . . . Wait a minute. . . . Who said you can’t have a high school football team just because you don’t have a high school? Canceling football, Faubus decreed, would be ‘a cruel and unnecessary blow to the children.’ O.K. then, everyone agreed. Play ball!”
—“Blinded by History,” Sports Illustrated
Related to Finding the Lost Year
Related ebooks
History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Reading, Writing, and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClass Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhite World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An Epitaph for Little Rock: A Fiftieth Anniversary Retrospective on the Central High Crisis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInterpretations of American History, 6th Ed, Vol.: Since 1877 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hollywood Hates Hitler!: Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHidden Black History: From Juneteenth to Redlining Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRethinking America's Past: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSchool in the Civil Rights Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship: Fifty Years of the Rhetoric Society of America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerica in the Teens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe World Sixties Made: Politics And Culture In Recent America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMississippi: The Long, Hot Summer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTroubled Pasts: News and the Collective Memory of Social Unrest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe United States: A Brief Narrative History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA People's War on Poverty: Urban Politics and Grassroots Activists in Houston Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerica and Its Sources: A Guided Journey through Key Documents, 1865-present Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBattle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seeds of the Sixties Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Making of Middlebrow Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Living Through the Civil Rights Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Ethnic Studies For You
The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salvation: Black People and Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conspiracy to Destroy Black Women Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Encyclopedia of the Yoruba Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Cherokee Herbal: Native Plant Medicine from the Four Directions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Self-Care for Black Women: 150 Ways to Radically Accept & Prioritize Your Mind, Body, & Soul Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Worse Than Slavery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Rednecks & White Liberals Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5No More Lies: The Myth and Reality of American History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wretched of the Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5James Baldwin: A Biography Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Finding the Lost Year
0 ratings0 reviews