One Sunday morning in November, Harold Isaacs of MIT was picked up at his hotel in Little Rock by a World War II buddy of his named Frank Newell. Isaacs, who had chronicled the fighting in China, India, and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, was now covering another battle, one which to him represented the front line in the Cold War. Imagine, marveled Newell, who now sold insurance: a foreign correspondent in Little Rock! How, Isaacs asked him, did all the attention make him feel? “Embarrassed,” Newell said. “Embarrassed and ashamed.” “Newell used most of the key words: appalling, terrible, shameful, humiliating,” Isaacs later wrote. For the next eight days he canvassed the local gentry. Years later, his remarkable unpublished notes of those self-lacerating interviews read more like something out of Spoon River than Little Rock.
Newell took him to the Little Rock Club, the favorite and extremely segregated watering hole of the squirearchy at 4th and Center, where, even on a Sunday morning, folks were drowning their shame in drink. Though they had little idea how wretched life was becoming for the Little Rock Nine—the newspapers reported next to nothing about it—they knew that both inside and outside Central, the segregationist rabble was winning. “Faubus unleashed the idiots,” lamented Harry Ashmore, the publisher of the Gazette, who, as Isaacs put it, “stand[s] out like a monument in Little Rock, where nobody stands very high.” Publicly, the city’s most respectable figures conspicuously agonized; “handwringers and head-holders,” Isaacs called them. But with the livelihoods of many of them dependent upon the bigots—they could always take their business to Memphis—they felt paralyzed. All felt too timid to speak out, except in their cups at the Little Rock Club to Harold Isaacs, a Jew who, had he lived in town, would not have been allowed to join.
Harold Isaacs (Courtesy of Arnold Isaacs)
“If you find any people with any decent convictions in this town, you’ll find that they are also gutless. Gutless! Gutless!” a “Joseph Cotten–like” lawyer named Downey told him. A “half-crocked” businessman kept repeating the lyrics from South Pacific—“you’ve got to be taught, to hate and fear”—while his wife tried repeatedly to shush him up. “Compulsive talking” was a leitmotif, Isaacs learned: if they gabbed enough, people seemed to feel, maybe they could wiggle out of their predicament. Officially, Isaacs got only a few minutes with Faubus, but two hours later the governor was still yakking as Isaacs edged his way to the door. “‘Moderation’ in Little Rock seemed to cover everything from a rather weary and non-virulent pro-segregation to a timid and covert pro-integration,” Isaacs wrote. “It was not a banner to rally an army. It was rather a ragged shelter under which all sorts of people could huddle in the storm while doing nothing.” Newell gave him the local definition of moderate: saying “Negro” rather than “nigger.”
Isaacs did not limit his interviews to the “moderates.” The lawyer for the segregationist Mothers League, thirty-eight-year-old Griffin Smith, vouchsafed that the restaurant in the Hotel Marion, Little Rock’s finest, wouldn’t serve blacks in his lifetime. “This is not what the goddamn niggers want,” a cabdriver said while taking him to Central. “They want to go everywhere, the cafes and hotels and all. Pretty soon they’ll push white people out of everywhere—they’re too many of them.” Wesley Pruden, a local pastor and another segregationist leader, told Isaacs that the NAACP was paying the black parents to keep the Nine in Central. “They’d take their children out in a minute if they could,” he said. Isaacs learned that newsboys delivering the Gazette were terrified, and that because his daughter had said something favorable about integration, the bread made by a baker named Meyer was being thrown out into the street. Of the clergymen he interviewed, only the Rev. Dunbar Ogden, pastor of the local Presbyterian church and the sole white minister who, on that first day, had accompanied the black children to school, supported school desegregation. He found Ogden to be a tortured man, badgering, even begging, Isaacs to judge him. “I could not undertake to help Ogden wrestle with his soul,” Isaacs wrote. “But I was relieved to find him struggling anyway. I wouldn’t have wanted not to have met in Little Rock at least one preacher of the Gospel who at least showed an awareness of what it called upon him to be.”
The Jewish owners of the downtown department stores, politically moderate on most things, were running for cover, Daisy Bates told Isaacs. Having a Jewish reporter on the story, let alone one from the New York Times, let alone one who had publicly consoled one of the black girls, made them uneasy: “One of the Jews here called the Times and said, ‘Why don’t you send a white man down here to cover this story?’” she recalled. The South wasn’t ready for desegregation, one Jewish merchant, Sam Strauss of Pfeiffer’s, told Isaacs. Isaacs asked Strauss how Jewish attitudes towards blacks in Little Rock differed from Hitler’s anti-Semitism. “It’s a question of color,” Strauss replied. “Down here, we have our own customs…. The more this kind of thing gets stirred up, the more anti-Semitism you get.”1
One night at the Dunbar Community Center, Isaacs met seven of the Nine, including Elizabeth—“smaller than she looked in those historic photographs,” he noted. “I looked around at them and thought them lucky,” he wrote. “However each assimilated the experience, he or she was having at this early stage a chance for a finest hour. They had written themselves into history.” Elizabeth told him of the letters she’d been receiving. “I’ve gotten many trying to apologize for what happened,” Elizabeth said. “I’d say two-thirds are from the United States and about a third from all sorts of foreign countries.”
It had rained torrentially for much of Isaacs’s stay in Little Rock, giving the place an almost biblical feel. One night at the Little Rock Club, he announced to his new acquaintances that this was in fact the Second Flood, and that this time Noah was a black man. “No one around me thought this was funny and, indeed, I hadn’t meant it to be,” he wrote. It rained still more on the day he was to leave—enough for him to worry he might not be able to flee what he called this “flat and ugly city.” Before his plane finally took off, Isaacs scribbled a few last words in his notebook. “There are only nine heroes in Little Rock,” he wrote. “It’s a war of nerves, and the nerves are the nerves of the nine youngsters, sweating it out day after day inside Central High School. On their nerves, the whole issue hangs, and the issue is a great one.”