Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation. By Elizabeth Jacoway. (New York: Free Press, 2007. xvi, 477 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-7432-9719-6.)

Abstract

Elizabeth Jacoway's Turn Away Thy Son provides a passionate and riveting account of the crisis of Little Rock, one of the nation's more notorious school desegregation conflicts, from multiple perspectives within the community. Each chapter is organized around a key personality in the saga, which began with nine students trying to attend Central High School and ended with the reopening of Little Rock's public schools after a two year federal and state standoff. Jacoway combines biography with social and political history to support not only her contention that “white fear of miscegenation” was the foundation for the massive resistance to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but also her argument that racism will continue to be a guiding force in the United States until white people come to terms with that fear (p. xiii). She draws her analysis from key autobiographies, biographies, document and oral history collections, as well as from her own extensive primary research, oral history interviews, and critique of the secondary literature. Yet Jacoway's thesis does not propel her narrative, instead it merely splashes on the deck occasionally until she returns more forcefully to it in the afterword. This limitation, however, does not detract from the value of Jacoway's work which, from an “insider” perspective, provides a unique analysis of class and gender conflicts among white southerners and how those intragroup dynamics shaped opposition to desegregation. In particular, being a native of the area with family ties to several white power brokers, Jacoway is able to gain insight into the complicated forces that shaped the motives and behaviors of several characters in the story, such as an upper-class white matriarch who organized white women to push for the reopening of the public schools, and the son of a confederate and school board member who supported token desegregation in an effort to prevent full-scale desegregation. For example, Jacoway exposes the tensions between the interests of esteemed white business leaders, politicians, journalists, working-class parents, staunch segregationist school leaders, and fired white teachers, revealing the complex relationships among those in Arkansas who were prepared to end public education to save segregation and those who were not. Jacoway also sheds light on the struggles of the African American plaintiffs, the physical and emotional trauma experienced by the Little Rock Nine in their daily life at school, and on forward-thinking civil rights leaders who, at times, grudgingly took the back seat to white leaders in hopes of achieving some progress toward desegregation. Digging under the surface politics allows Jacoway to question traditional interpretations of the Little Rock crisis, enhancing our appreciation for the importance of this civil rights struggle a half century later.