Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (Google eBook)

Elizabeth Jacoway

Simon and Schuster, Jan 9, 2007 - History - 496 pages

In September 1957, the nation was transfixed by nine black students attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Governor Orval Faubus had defied the city's integration plan by calling out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school. Newspapers across the nation ran front-page photographs of whites, both students and parents, screaming epithets at the quiet, well-dressed black children. President Eisenhower reluctantly deployed troops from the 101st Air-borne, both outside and inside the school.

Integration proceeded, but the turmoil of Little Rock had only just begun. Public schools were soon shut down for a full year. Black students endured outrageous provocation by white classmates. Governor Faubus's popularity skyrocketed, while the landmark case Cooper v. Aaron worked its way to the Supreme Court and eventually paved the way for the integration of the south.

Betsy Jacoway was a Little Rock student just two years younger than the youngest of the Little Rock Nine. Her "Uncle Virgil" was Superintendent of Schools Virgil Blossom. Congressman Brooks Hays was an old family friend, and her "Uncle Dick" was Richard Butler, the lawyer who argued Cooper v. Aaron before the Supreme Court. Yet, at the time, she was cocooned away from the controversy in a protective shell that was typical for white southern "good girls." Only in graduate school did she begin to question the foundations of her native world, and her own distance from the controversy.

Turn Away Thy Son is the product of thirty years of digging behind the conventional account of the crisis, interviewing whites and blacks, officials and students, activists and ordinary citizens. A tour de force of history and memory, it is also a brilliant, multifaceted mirror to hold up to America today. She knows what happened to the brave black students once they got inside the doors of the school. She knows how the whites' fear of "race mixing" drove many locals to extremes of anger, paranoia, and even violence. She knows that Orval Faubus was only a reluctant segregationist, and that her own cousin's timid tokenism precipitated the crisis.

Above all, Turn Away Thy Son shows in vivid detail why school desegregation was the hottest of hot-button issues in the Jim Crow south. In the deepest recesses of the southern psyche, Jacoway encounters the fear of giving black men sexual access to white women. The truth about Little Rock differs in many ways from the caricature that emerged in the press and in many histories -- but those differences pale in comparison to the fundamental driving force behind the story. Turn Away Thy Son is a riveting, heartbreaking, eye-opening book.

What people are saying

Review: Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation

User Review  - Elizabeth - Goodreads

As recommended by Ed from the U of C alumni bookclub.

Review: Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation

User Review  - Jodi - Goodreads

I had the pleasure of hearing Terrence Roberts, one of the "Little Rock Nine", share his experiences and two things really stuck with me. 1. There were over 100 students who signed up to go to Central ...

Contents

• introduction: 1
• chapter: 9
• Jim Johnson: 28
• Archie House and the Establishment: 46
• Amis Guthridge: 66
• Virgil Blossom: 84
• interregnum: 101
• Brooks Hays: 130
• Faubus Hays and Eisenhower: 147
• The Little Rock Nine: 183
• Robert R Brown and the Civic Elite: 195
• Minnijean Brown: 214
• Richard C Butler: 242
• Wiley Branton: 267
• Vivion Brewer: 291
• Everett Tucker: 310
• Gaston Williamson: 328
• conclusion: 338
• A Bang and a Whimper: 349
• afterword: 359
• Acknowledgments: 459

Popular passages

Page vii - When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou...‎

Page vii - ... neither shalt thou make marriages with them ; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.‎

About the author

Elizabeth Jacoway grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she lived through the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957-59, but failed to question what was happening in her community. Her eyes were opened by graduate study in history at the University of North Carolina, where she earned a Ph.D. She has spent the past thirty years investigating the Little Rock crisis, interviewing every available participant, including members of her own family, while teaching at the University of Florida, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Lyon College. Married and the mother of two grown sons, she lives in Newport, Arkansas.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation
• Author: Elizabeth Jacoway
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2007
• ISBN: 1416548289, 9781416548287
• Length: 496 pages
• Subjects: History / General; History / United States / 20th Century; History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)