OPINION
LR Central at 70
The city of Little Rock has finished — deservedly — in its “Reflections on Progress” observance the heroic limelight of the 60th anniversary of the desegrega- in which they are tion of Central High School and the people now cast, but they most affected managed to put well-placed haven’t forgotten asterisks on the notion that this was a story the lonely, scary, MAX all about racial progress. violent 1957-58 BRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com “We’re not stupid,” the unsinkable Min- school year or that nijean Brown Trickey told me last Sunday their battle was night at the Clinton Presidential Center, meant to open doors for others. where she and others of the Little Rock Ernest Green, the first black Central Nine were in the audience for a Bill Clin- graduate, noted the “Progress?” headline ton talk opening an exhibit about his friend on the Arkansas Times cover story about Nelson Mandela. Trickey reads the Arkan- the coming observance. He said he’d make sas Times from afar. She’s well versed on it progress with an ellipsis. The story is the state takeover of the majority black still being written and those reviled in past school district and ouster of the majority years have counterparts today, he noted, black school board. She’s aware of lin- specifically mentioning Colin Kaepernick. gering problems and the persistence of The most moving moment was Gloinequality in education. For good measure, ria Ray Karlmark’s recollection of her she repeated the comment at Monday’s concern about whether anyone would official ceremony at Central High. sign her yearbook. “Becky,” with whom Other remarks — some oblique, some she’d exchanged notes, surreptitiously did. pointed — demonstrated the Nine weren’t Then a second female student did, writgoing to be anybody’s PR tool. They basked ing, “In a different age, we might have
Stifling dissent
W
henever Donald Trump in his serial bouts with failure decides he must re-energize his base of white nationalists by doing things like demonizing black athletes who protest discrimination, the mainstream press falls for it and gives him maximum space and time. We’re addicted. Who could pass up the president’s words at an Alabama political rally: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired’?” The president called on NFL owners to fire protesting athletes and on fans to boycott games when owners don’t fire them. The sentiment is not new. We have heard such mutterings for decades, at least since two Olympians raised their fists in the black-power salute during the national anthem at the 1968 Summer Games. But it is supposed to be a higher-order event when the president of the United States sets out to enforce conformity and suppress disobedience of patriotic customs. A few remember the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and the Reichstag power to disregard the constitution in order to enforce conformity and stop dissent.
But Donald Trump is no Hitler or even Vladimir Putin, however much he might like to be and despite his being the first president to openly urge the suppression of dissent. Presidents James Madison and Woodrow Wilson warned of the dangers of trying to stifle dissent in times of national ERNEST DUMAS crisis. We have been through far more serious threats to the First Amendment than Trump’s ravings, even though he talked emptily last year about changing the laws to roll back freedom of the press and speech. Here in Arkansas, we have our own history of Trumpian suppression, and not merely two centuries of stifling protests of unequal access to justice and civil rights. It would not be Arkansas if it did not also involve religious freedom, in our own macabre ways of interpreting the establishment clause in matters involving the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance. Joe Johnson, a farmer who tried to scratch out a living for his eight kids on 39 hillside acres near St. Joe in Searcy County, went into town in 1941 to get commodities to feed his brood. The commissary clerk
been friends.” So, then, is the age different? Carlotta Walls LaNier hinted that President Trump, fresh off his racially influenced attack on protests against police brutality by professional athletes like Kaepernick, seemed to represent a return to the bad old days. Bill Clinton was careful, but he and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates both referenced Republican incursions on the right to vote and other troubling current events. It might not be time to put on party shoes to celebrate, Clinton said, but the time to “put on marching boots.” Thelma Mothershed Wair, in words read by her grandson, expressed concern about the proliferation of charter schools here and their potential harm to conventional public schools. She echoed similar remarks by Judge Wiley Branton, son of a civil rights pioneer, at a panel on the crisis earlier in the week. The words were spoken in the presence of Governor Hutchinson, who extolled the Nine but made no specific reference to Little Rock schools today, with his education commissioner, Johnny Key, sitting nearby. The Hutchinson-controlled state board of
education has shown no interest in returning local autonomy to the majority black district. It has shown whole-hearted support for charter school proliferation, for both unproven and demonstrably secondrate private organizations. Mayor Mark Stodola also passed up a chance to stand up for the Little Rock School District. So why does my headline say “Central at 70”? Because I worry. I hope that many of the surviving eight live into their mid80s for another decennial honor. But given the present political climate — and the animus toward conventional public schools, particularly those in the city of Little Rock and particularly its local teachers union (another hero, unsung today, of the school crisis) — you have to wonder if there’ll be a Little Rock School District in 2027. Instead, it just might be an amalgamation of unaccountable, publicly inscrutable charter schools. Even today, the Walton billions backing the charter school explosion employ a lobbyist who’s long tried to wreck Central High School as a center of high-achieving high school graduates. It is a time for marching boots.
suspected he was taking the government foodstuff to the hated Jehovah’s Witnesses, who would not salute the U.S. flag. Johnson said he fed only his family. Prove it, she demanded, by saluting the flag. Pearl Harbor was at hand, but war fever was already strong. Johnson refused and recited Psalm 115 about paying homage to inanimate objects rather than God, the text that formed the basis of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ belief that honoring inanimate objects violated holy writ. He stalked to the door, took off his hat and made a little speech about Psalm 115. While making gestures with his free hand, Johnson apparently brushed the flag. Not only was he denied food for his family, he was hustled to jail for desecrating the flag. A 1919 act of the legislature made it a crime to desecrate the flag. His appeal, based on grounds that he was denied the constitutional right to observe his religion, went to the Arkansas Supreme Court. It would have none of it. The majority said he got his just desserts because the demands of a political society, like honoring the flag, overrode his religious freedom. Everyone could benefit from reading the dissent by the chief justice, Griffin Smith, and his longtime colleague, Justice Tom Mehaffy. Smith said he personally found Johnson’s views about the Bible mawkish, “but while to me it appears vapid, to him it is real.”
While he strongly disagreed with the farmer, the judge wrote, “the fact remains that we are engaged not only in a war of men, machines, and materials, but in a contest wherein liberty may be lost if we succumb to the ideologies of those who enforce obedience through fear, and who would write loyalty with a bayonet. … Witch hunting is no longer sanctioned. The suspicions and hatreds of Salem have ceased. Neighbor no longer inveighs against neighbor through fear of the evil eye.” Arkansas didn’t much agree with Justice Smith. Jehovah’s Witnesses were mistreated, often violently, for their refusal to honor the flag. The Arkansas Selective Service called Witnesses “lower down than a snake” and ordered them drafted in spite of their conscientious-objector claims. A mob broke up a Witness gathering on Little Rock’s Asher Avenue and cheered when several Witnesses were shot and others were beaten with pipes. Police arrested the remaining Witnesses for disturbing the peace. School kids who refused to recite the pledge of allegiance were expelled. Kathleen Cannon met worse at Cane Hill. The principal beat her with a rubber hose and threw her down the school steps. The Cane Hill School Board praised the principal. The U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1940 had condoned punishing the Witnesses for disrespecting the flag, reversed itself in 1943 when things in Arkansas and elsewhere got out of hand.
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arktimes.com SEPTEMBER 28, 2017
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