The "giants in white gloves"--women who fought to reopen Arkansas schools after they were closed by segregationists 50 years ago--will be remembered this weekend. Some see the group's work mirrored today by the Katrina group, Women of the Storm.
Work has been hectic recently for Janet Perkins, Deep South coordinator for the Equal Voice for America's Families campaign, a Seattle-based initiative to advocate for social change among poor and working families, funded by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
On Sept. 6 her group staged a conference in three cities--Los Angeles, Chicago and Birmingham, Ala.--to unveil the group's family-issues platform for presentation to the next U.S. presidential administration.
But on Sept. 13, Perkins, based in Little Rock, Ark., will take her current-day activism to a symposium back home to reflect on the historic activism of an advocacy group 50 years ago: the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools.
In 1958 nearly 1,300 local white women--most well-to-do wives of young, professional men--stood up to segregationists and the Little Rock political establishment in the name of public education as the city was becoming ensnared in one of the country's ugliest and prominent clashes over racial integration.
"It is important for there to be conversation for how we can continue to do work for women," said Perkins, 57, who first learned of the Women's Emergency Committee in the 1980s, when she worked for the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a social justice organization. "How we can learn from mistakes and how we can make change in women's lives. We still have a lot of work to do."
Little Rock Central High School Museum historian Laura Miller, on the planning committee for this weekend's observances, said the event--which begins on Saturday with a symposium on women as agents of change and runs through Tuesday--is a chance to call women to greater grassroots activism.
Miller said the weekend will include Anne Milling, founder and executive director of Women of the Storm, a nonpartisan group of women from Louisiana who formed in January 2006 to address unmet community needs after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005.
'Modern-Day Equivalent'Women of the Storm has worked with legislators to rebuild communities on the Gulf Coast and Miller says she considers them a "modern-day equivalent of the Women's Emergency Committee."
The Women's Emergency Committee received its most recent blasts of commemoration in 1996, when Sandra Hubbard premiered her documentary about the group--"The Giants Wore White Gloves"--at the Hot Springs (Arkansas) Documentary Film Festival and in 1998, when then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was keynote speaker at their 40th anniversary commemoration in Little Rock.
After Orval Faubus, the state's Democratic governor at the time, shuttered four Little Rock public high schools in September 1958, rather than comply with a federal mandate to racially integrate, 48 women came together for the first meeting of the Women's Emergency Committee.
The year before the closures, Faubus called units of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent desegregation, and the school board advised the African American students to stay away from school. Images and stories of white mobs waving hateful signs and screaming epithets on the grounds of Central High were transmitted across newswires worldwide. President Eisenhower sent the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to escort the students inside Central for the first time, and the federal troops spent much of the school year on campus.
The schools' 1958-59 closure is now known as the "lost year" when students who couldn't afford private education and couldn't leave Little Rock went without schooling. Of the 3,600 students affected by the schools' closure, approximately 600 did not find education elsewhere.
'The Men Have Failed'Women's Emergency Committee founder Adolphine Fletcher Terry organized women specifically because business and community leaders--overwhelmingly male--were doing too little to protest the closed schools. "The men have failed," Terry is quoted as saying when she visited local newspaper editor Henry Ashmore in late summer of 1958. "It's time to call out the women."
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