© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
G-0012, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Vivion Lenon Brewer grew up in an affluent white family, unaware of the plight of blacks in Little Rock, Arkansas. During her later tenure in Washington, D.C., she became very ill. While recovering, she drew close to a fellow employee—a black woman from whom she gained new insights about the destructive impact of racism and segregation in the United States. When she moved back to Arkansas, Brewer sought to reduce the poverty and illiteracy that plagued blacks in the South. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus chose to close Little Rock public schools rather than integrate them. Brewer, along with several other prominent local women, including Adolphine Terry and Velma Powell, organized the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC). The group initially proposed a mission to alleviate racial tensions between blacks and whites. However, in order to garner the support of other prominent and forceful local Arkansas women, the WEC founders reconfigured the original mission to one centered on reopening the public schools. The women, unlike men, were unharmed by the Faubus machine's economic intimidation tactics; they were able to engage in effective and dedicated strategies to open the public schools. While the WEC experienced remarkable success, Brewer does recall some difficult realities the group had to address. She explains the purposeful omission of black women from the Committee, in order to permit the WEC activists and the larger white community to gradually accept racial integration. Many frustrated white segregationists viewed WEC members as disregarding their racial heritage. Brewer describes the palpable fear the women activists regularly felt. After the WEC disbanded in the early 1960s, Brewer continued her activism by organizing educational programs for black children in the low-income Scott community of Little Rock. She concludes the interview with an assessment of contemporary race relations in Little Rock.
In this interview, Vivion Lenon Brewer explains how her awareness of racial disparities caused her to support school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. She discusses her leadership in pushing politicians to reopen the closed public schools during the 1958-1959 Little Rock school crisis.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I wondered if you could say, first of all, what do you think were the factors in your background that prepared you to step forward and play a leadership role at the time of the Little Rock crisis?
From the standpoint of leadership or interest? From the standpoint of
interest, I'm sure it was the development of my concern for the black
people. This had started in Washington, because there was the beginning
of a critical time there. 1 But when we
came back here, I was so impressed by the poverty and the illiteracy
particularly, that I felt all of a sudden as though I'd walked into a
new world, because I had grown up here, and I can well remember riding
through the country with my father when he would come to look at
property and thinking that all the Negroes looked so happy. 1 Mr. and Mrs. Brewer were living in Washington while Mr. Brewer
was a legislative aide to his uncle, Senator Joe T. Robinson of
Arkansas. 2 Mrs. Brewer has written the story of the Women's Emergency
Committee to Open Our Schools; the unpublished manuscript,
entitled The Embattled Ladies of Little Rock,
has been deposited with her papers in the Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
What had happened to you in Washington to cause you to take a second look?
Here?
Yes.
Well, I had a long time of illness when I was in Washington,they reacted. Her son married a white
girl, and she went through the most dreadful trauma over this. It
awakened me to the fact that the Negro has his
problems, you see, and I began to be much more aware of the racial
problem.
Did you interact with her as a friend?
Oh, yes.
So that was probably the first time.
Yes, she became a very close friend. She was with us for ten years, I guess. She stayed with me all day, so often just the two of us alone, and we became very close. And then when Joe and I moved back here, we had this . . . You may have noticed the little house.
Yes.
Well it, in the beginning, during the 1920's and 1930's, was the
caretaker's house when the larger house was used only for summer
recreational purposes, but it had been vacant for some time. When we
decided to make this our permanent home, we had to have help in planting
and clearing and all sorts of ways. We had a series of couples who lived
there, all of them off of the plantations, 2a and it horrified me that none of them could read or
write. 2a The Brewers owned 5 acres in the area made up of very large
plantations.
And you had never been aware of anything like that before.
Never. And so I began to be interested in the Negro schools and what was
happening in them. And I began to go into their
Oh.
And all of these things together, you see, made me very, very aware of the racial problem.
And also hadn't there been a black girl or some black girls at Smith?
Yes, yes. One in my class. I was the Class of 1921, and she was a brilliant girl, later became a New York attorney. And her son was prominent in the government. She has since died. But I never did know her. It just happened that we just weren't thrown together at all. In fact, she entered very little into any of the activities at Smith, and I don't know why this was true because I never did know her. I don't know whether it was her choice, or whether it was just what transpired.
Did it strike you as unusual? Do you remember thinking that it was unusual to have a black girl at Smith?
Not that, necessarily, but the thing that struck me was how brilliant she was. This made its real impression, you see.
Yes, I think it would, coming out of your background.
I don't think you would say that you had a typical Southern childhood or grew up in a typical Southern family. Don't you think you had considerably.
No, my parents both came from Iowa, you know.
Yes.
So they were not really typical Southerners.
Yes.
And this is just one little point aside that may interest you. When I got into the Women's Emergency Committee and I was receiving so many phone calls, you know; all of them sort of amused me, except I had the strangest reaction when they would attack my parents.
Well, I guess so.
As people who were outsiders, who didn't belong here, you know.
. . . but you were still an outsider. But you had been born and grown up here.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
And your father was the president of the People's Bank?
Yes.
And then you went to the public schools in Little Rock . . .
Yes.
. . . and then went to Smith. Now were there very many girls from Little
Rock who went away to Northern schools? 2b My father was mayor of Little Rock from 1903-08 when he
resigned to give more attention to the bank business. In 1902 he
had founded the Peoples Savings Bank, the forerunner of the
present First National Bank in Little Rock.
Very few. There'd been a few. Well, of course, Mrs. Terry 3 was one of the first, you know, and there was
one friend of my mother's——much younger than my
mother, but older than I am——who had gone to
Smith, and she was really why I went to Smith. 3 Mrs. David D. Terry (Adolphine Fletcher Terry) had attended
Vassar (1902).
Oh, I'm sure. I have never seen a more beautiful campus.
Well, the thing is, I believe in children going as far away from home as they can go. And you see, being that far from home, I didn't come home at Christmas.
Oh, you didn't!
I stayed with my roommate, for instance, or one of my friends, and so
here was this long period. And my parents always said that I cried all
the first year wanting to come home, and after that they couldn't get me
to come home.
And then I was terribly, terribly lucky in the business world. Of course, I would like to think I would have done as well if it hadn't been in the bank owned by my father . . .
Where did you go to law school?
In Little Rock, at night. I went to night school (Arkansas Law School) while I was working and passed the bar, so that I felt . . .
That is just most unusual, that your father encouraged you, in that day and age, to develop all these abilities and skills.
Yes. Well, this was one of the things that I look back on as very
exciting to me in those days, that when I was first elected as a vice
president of the bank, my picture was in the New York
Times.
Oh, was it?
Yes, that's right. So you had had a lot of experiences, then, which prepared you to take an independent stand and to be articulate and . . .
And let's say as an administrator, you see, because I was used to handling things, taking responsibility. Now you say "articulate"; I'm not.
Oh, you don't think so.
And this is a throwback to my father, I think. He never liked publicity. It really annoyed him when he was given publicity, and this rubbed off on me. And as a consequence, when I knew I was going to be quoted, it bothered me very much.
I used to worry and worry: "Am I saying the right thing? Am I saying something that will . . .
Oh, yes. I know what you mean.
. . . not be interpreted as I want it to be?" And so forth.
Well, what it has made me do, which was one of the things about the Committee which is rather interesting, is that I am one who needs to think a thing through. If somebody asks me to make a talk and will give me time to organize my thoughts, I enjoy doing it. But if I'm called upon as an extemporaneous, it bothers me.
Right.
The girl with whom I worked most closely in the Committee, Irene Samuel,
is just the opposite. She's impulsive, wants to get everything, right
now, done, and so there was such a contrast that we
sort of held each other.
Yes, it sounds like you made a good team.
You see, she pushed, and I pulled.
A very good combination, just by luck.
Yes, it was.
Well, probably all these experiences that you had had, which really put you outside the mold of the traditional Southern woman or Southern girl, certainly, made it more possible for you to take a different look at this taboo area of race relations and come to an independent judgment.
I'm sure that's true. And probably because I came back from being away for so long.
I didn't realize you were away for ten years.
We were gone for fifteen. 4
4 October 1930 to March 1946
Oh. Well, yes.
And we've laughed about this, because it wasn't too long after we came
back that all this happened, you know——ten years
or so——and we've always said we came back to get
into trouble.
One person has never been given the credit she should have been given.
She is Velma Powell, who is the wife of J. O. Powell, who was the Dean
of Men at Central High School. She had lived for a year in the Terry
home. At the time all of this trouble arose, she was the secretary for
the Arkansas Council on Human Relations. The year 1957-58, when black
children were in Central for the first time, she, of course, had
firsthand knowledge of all the dreadful things that happened. And
. . . and decided she'd do something.
She was so concerned about the community, the curfews . . .
And about the blacks, you see, because her interest had always been in racial problems. Everything else——all kinds of problems——but very much so concerned in racial problems. And so her first thought was that we might organize a group of women such as the group that had fought lynching and finally brought the antilynching laws into being.
Now hadn't Mrs. Terry been a member of that earlier group?
She had known them. Now whether she actually belonged or not I don't
know, but they had had a meeting in Hot Springs at one time, and I know
she attended that. I'm assuming she was a member, but I don't really
know. But this was her thought. And I had known her ever since I came
home from college, because I had joined the American University Women's
group, one of the earliest ones in Arkansas 5 This was a large dinner held in May 1958 to celebrate Ashmore's
receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial leadership
during the Little Rock crisis.Gazette dinner. 5
Oh, that's right.
At that time, Joe and I were really the ones that said,
Now the story behind that was that someone (Mrs. Terry) had suggested,
"Let's have a dinner for Harry Ashmore," and someone
had said, "No one would come"?
And her idea had been that maybe have a dozen people at the Country Club,
you know, and Joe and I said, "No, if we're going to do it,
let's have it at the Marion, 6 and we
will wager three hundred would come," and we had eight
hundred. 6 Little Rock's largest hotel and convention center at that
time——the Marion Hotel.
Eight hundred? Oh, my word, I didn't . . .
The place was crowded. People stood out in the lobby and couldn't get in, up in the balcony.
This was after he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
That's right. And it was for that reason the dinner was given, to honor
him. 7 The initial meeting was held in the fall of 1958, shortly after
Governor Faubus had closed the schools.
Why? What happened?
Mrs. Terry had said, "Now look, you've got to take hold of this and be Chairman," so I'd spent the weekend planning committees and thinking what we could do. I remember one thing, I wanted very much to ask Marian Anderson to come here for a concert. Just a lot of things. And I began to see the whole group just flutter. And finally one woman who had two children out of school (by that time you see, Faubus had closed the schools) rose and cried out, "But what do we do about the schools?"
Now the chronology on this is that you all called this initial meeting very soon after Faubus closed the schools.
The very next week.
Yes.
And she said, "My boys are out of school, and that's what I'm interested in. This is what I want to do." And it immediately dawned on me that we couldn't hope to do what we first thought we wanted to do.
That's right. You couldn't be that straightforward.
That's right, and we had to go around the mountain.
Yes.
So then we changed all of our tactics and organized the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools.
And so the full title was Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools.
Which was a terribly cumbersome name.
Yes.
But it said . . .
It said what you were about.
Yes. And lots of people later advised us to change that name, but I felt, when you have a momentum, if you start changing things you're going to lose a lot of it. So I kept insisting we stick with it, and in the end we were known as the WEC. It lost all that long name anyway.
Are these crop dusters that we're hearing out over the lake?
They're probably defoliating. They're getting ready to pick the cotton.
Yes. Is cotton picked in various stages? I seemed to notice a number of cotton plants as I drove by that seemed to have a lot of cotton left on them, but they had . . .
They'll pick again. They defoliate first, and of course they all use machinery now, which is the basis for so much of our poverty, you see. And this usually will get the top part of the cotton, and then they'll come in again. And once in a while they still use human hands to pick, but not very often; it's usually machine.
Oh, I can smell the stuff now. So you're confronted down here every day with the problems of poverty and illiteracy.
Oh, yes, we live right in the middle of it. After I left the Women's
Emergency Committee 8 I began to work
in the Negro schools in the Scott community . . . 8 Mrs. Brewer resigned from the presidency of the WEC in 1960 in
order to devote more time to her husband, who was in poor
health, and also because the Committee was turning increasingly
to political activity, supporting candidates, not issues
reflecting the goal of public education. Mrs. Brewer believed
this to be a mis-use of her committee's energies and
talents.
Oh, you did.
. . . because I felt this was where I could do more good. I'm sure you
know——I think I made it clear in the
manuscript——why I did leave. It was not only for
Joe, who needed me very much, but it was because I could see that we
were becoming nothing on earth but a political pressure group. And I'm
just not interested in that . . .
Soon after you left, didn't the Women's Emergency Committee then disband?
Not immediately. It just sort of wavered. There were still meetings, but nothing really was being done.
And you left in '62?
In '60.
'60. And then I believe they disbanded in '63.
Yes. Was it '2 or '3? It may have been '63, because it did just sort of linger along and really was a political arm. Both Irene Samuel and Pat House, who headed it at that time, loved politics, and this was great to them . . .
Well, this whole experience had politicized a lot of women, hadn't it?
There's no doubt about it.
Like you were saying a little while ago, you had been somewhat naive
about the workings of the government * up until your experience; I'm sure that this was a wrenching
experience which caused many WEC members to take a new view of the world
around them, too. * particularly civil service.
I'm sure it was the awakening of many women, not only politically but to all of the just causes in a community.
That's right.
And it's been very thrilling to me that . . . I don't know many of the women in the WEC, and of course we ended with hundreds and hundreds of them, who have not been active one way or another.
That's been my impression. As I've looked around the community today and seen the women who are really committed and actively involved in the important issues of our time, they had their beginnings in the Women's Emergency Committee.
That's very true.
And they seem to have proliferated out all over the community . . .
Mm-hm, it's very true.
. . . into all kinds of things.
I was told that Sarah Murphy——have you talked with her?
Not yet; I will.
She, I'm told, did an article on this very subject. I never did see it. But I'm sure she would have it.
Yes, I'll have to ask her for that and be sure to include that.
Yes.
The Embattled Ladies of Little Rock?
Yes, and also it's at Columbia.
Oh, it's at Columbia, too.
Also. Because I felt that I wanted it where scholars could see it.
Yes.
And if I felt it wouldn't be talked about here, you know, I'd be glad to publish it.
But it would be.
Yes, it would be.
I ran across a number of things this summer, just small details, that I
could tell would create some consternation
Yes.
. . . in Little Rock. And also, you've had a number of interviews other than this one. You had an interview with the Columbia Oral History, the Eisenhower Administration Project, and have you had others?
At Smith, of course. I'm sure you saw the one from which they took an
excerpt to include in the book called College.
No, I did not see that, and I didn't . . .
Well, it's a very small excerpt, and I was embarrassed
Oh, I remember that story. Yes.
Well, of course, it was the effect of college; there's no doubt about that. And I think that's what they were trying to bring out.
Would you like to tell that story
Well, I had grown up . . . My mother was a staunch Baptist, and I went to church every time the doors opened, and I was really a leader in the young group at the church, in what they called the Baptist Young People's Union. I taught Sunday school; I went to church. When I was twelve years old, a minister came and stayed at our home, had a revival. And through pressure from him, I joined the church and was baptized, and I've often thought of what happens to young people in religious organizations, because I am convinced I had what amounted to a sort of fit.
Oh?
You know, you lose your own mental powers. You're completely under [unclear]
And so the members of the church learned that I was enjoying the Bible as
literature (laughed)
You know what happens when you send girls off to those schools.
What a shame. Isn't that silly?
I'm not sure I ever put it into these words. There was a good deal of
pressure for me to make a debut, and I wouldn't do that.
Well, you were being given options in your life that you weren't being
forced to be the Southern lady, anyway, so that
probably wasn't such a big issue.
That's right.
What kind of a woman was Mrs. Terry? How would you describe her?
I think one thing that has never been said about her is that she had the
most marvelous sense of humor. She let us have all of our meetings (WEC)
at her house, you know, and she always sat in on them. She never went to
the office. She had nothing to do with the administration of the
Committee. But she always sat there, and as we would discuss what we
ought to do, we'd get a little despondent about the way things were not happening, and she always had something funny and
cheerful to say that would get us laughing and get us over the hump. She
had a wonderful mind, and certainly there never was a more dedicated
humanitarian. Until her final days her main interest was the racial
problem. Of course, she did all sorts of things for the city and the
state, but this was her central interest.
Did you know that a black child grew up in her family?
Mm-hm.
That surprised me. I went to see her a few years ago, and she told me the story about how her mother had been independent enough to bring a black child into their home and raise it.
I remember she said, "She is a member of the household."
I think that's great. That explains a lot . . .
It does.
. . . about her concern and her willingness to abandon the traditional Southern racial attitude.
Mm-hm.
Well, she seems to have been a great moral influence who was able to use her influence without expending all of her energies in administrative details.
This was partly because she had a knack of getting other people to do things.
She really did. As I travelled around this summer, I found letters from Mrs. Terry in every collection, lighting a fire under somebody saying . . .
And if some problem would arise, she'd go right to the phone and call
someone, you know. "Let's get them to do
something." And I remember a few
times——not too many, but a few
times——when she entertained people in her home
during the time of all this crisis, anybody saying to her,
"Why, Adolphine, I wouldn't want them in my house."
She said, "You use everybody you can."
Oh, is that amazing. Somebody in one of the interviews I
That's great, that she was able to do that and have such influence. How about Harry Ashmore? How would you describe him? What kind of a man is he?
Well, of course, I am very fond of Harry. We disagreed strongly at one time.
Oh?
I think you read that in the manuscript. I've never said this to Harry except the night it happened, and I've never brought it up again, but it was our feeling about Bill Fulbright.
Oh, yes.
Because I felt that Bill could have helped us enormously if he had just come down and said anything. He didn't need to stay. If he'd just made a strong statement. But he stayed out of it entirely, and Harry said he'd advised him to. He said, "If you just stay out of things, you can be the Secretary of State." And I remember saying to Harry I didn't agree with him one bit.
Those priorities were not in line.
Mnm-mm. I just didn't think so. So occasionally we didn't agree. But
Harry has the most wonderful gift for words. I envy him tremendously,
the way he expresses himself. I'm very interested that
Yes, I'm delighted.
. . . and particularly interested because the last time I saw him he
said, "Why, I'm not doing a chronological history." He
said, "I'm trying to paint the image of the state."
This was a little curious to me.
He's doing an essay, I think, on Arkansas.
I'll be very intrigued to see what our image is.
Well, apparently he's getting close to finishing now. It's supposed to be
done by the end of the year or so. We'll see what happens to that.
Only through his editorials. I think actually . . . Maybe this says something: the night he was notified that he received the Pulitzer Prize, mutual friends of ours went to see him, and they were the only ones there, which says that while Harry had a lot of friends——I don't mean to imply anything else——and certainly there were many of us who admired him very, very much, I couldn't say that he really led except with his writing.
Well, the position of the Gazette was always ten paces
ahead of the community. And that, I think, says a lot about Mr.
Heiskell, that he was willing . . .
Definitely.
. . . to allow Ashmore to take that position.
It does.
Okay. What were the primary activities of the Women's Emergency Committee? What did you all do?
It became absolutely necessary that we win elections. There was just no
other way we could control anything, because Faubus was constantly
trying to get the legislature to pass new laws and get the wrong people
on the school board. That first election, which we lost, said we had to
either integrate * The ballot read: all the schools or not integrate any of the schools. Even the way it was on the ballot,
* of course, was so rigged that
it was impossible to fight it.FOR racial integration of
all schools within the school district AGAINST
racial integration of all schools within the school district
But you had just organized at that time.
Yes. We had only a couple of weeks. In fact, he moved the election up,
and he moved it to a day when there was a football game in Fayetteville.
Also, didn't you feel that you made a very good showing,
Well, yes, but the vote was decidedly against it. But the very fact that we were doing something, you know, because those of us who felt so strongly about this had really been ill with worry over what was going on. And if you can get up and tackle a problem, then you feel better.
That's right. It had been a whole year now that Little Rock had been just in complete chaos, and now you were taking the bull by the horns.
No body doing anything.
Why? Why did the men remain silent?
Afraid. I'm sure they were all afraid. And in the end, I think the most
important thing we did was to write that Little Rock
Report.
Yes.
Because it's a sad thing that it's true, but it's when the pocketbook is hit that you get some reaction. And we really, for the first time, proved to the men that they were losing business, that the state was losing its best citizens, that we weren't getting any new people in, that the industries were all going down, that the whole picture was of the city and probably the whole state just being destroyed.
And the WEC ladies went out and interviewed businessmen all over the community, and compiled all this information.
And it was a tremendous job, just a tremendous . . . And even putting the thing together was. Wasn't there a copy at Smith?
Yes.
It took you can't imagine how many hours. We would work not only at the office, but we'd take material to the homes, to make the graphs, you know, to get the percentages, work this out. One of the things that really tells something about the emotional spirit of that time is that when we did send girls, we had to be very careful to send girls with Southern accents.
Oh, is that right?
Yes. If we sent anyone who sounded at all an outsider, they were not received.
Isn't that silly?
But that's not too hard to believe.
Now that came out in the spring of '59?
Mm-hm, in '59.
I believe it did come out just a little bit before the purge of the teachers, didn't it? And it kind of really . . .
I don't believe it was completed, Betsy, until after that. I think we were working on it, but I don't believe it was really in shape to mail out until after that. Because that recall election was . . . Wasn't it May?
May.
It seemed to me it was. And I think it was later that we finally got the whole thing together. The first run of it I wouldn't let go out to school libraries, especially outside Arkansas. The girls thought I was crazy, that we ought to send it, but I didn't want it in the libraries when it was incomplete, incorrect. There were mistakes in it, and I just felt it was worth holding on to, so we used the first run locally among our own members.
Oh.
And had no trouble, of course, using it, getting it out. But corrected, we sent the later editions to every university in the country, the libraries, and many foreign countries sent for it. It was just wonderful.
The demand for it really surprised you, didn't it? And then didn't the Southern Regional Council publish a shorter one?
Yes, they did, and we used that a great deal, because a lot of people would read a shorter version when they wouldn't read the whole report.
I have wondered about this: I may be mistaken, but when I was reading the newspaper accounts from that period, the first announcement that I found of the findings of your group was in a Nashville newspaper. And it was then quoted in Little Rock as having been announced in Nashville. And I wondered if that was a ploy, or if that was just the way the information came . . .
What was that about, it was our report?
Yes, your charts and graphs.
No, that couldn't be true. You must have missed some of the early part of it, because the first thing, before we ever completed the report, we had a section of it that we thought was important enough to give to the press.
Oh, you did?
And I remember this very definitely, because Joe and I at that point felt we had to get away for a little bit, and we were taking a train to Chicago when the paper was brought to the train, and I said it was the best going-away present I ever had . . .
. . .
I must have. But I had the feeling in my mind that by the time of the recall election, the community had become pretty well aware of the economic impact of the Little Rock crisis.
Somewhat, but I think they had also become aware of what was happening to the schools.
Oh, yes.
You see, up until then it startled me that men didn't seem to think it
made any difference that the schools were closed. "Well, let
the kids stay out for a year or so; it's not going to hurt them, you
know." So that there was this feeling that was really behind
that recall election. And it's also interesting that the group of men
who decided to be active in this particular election didn't want us
at
Now we should clarify that. They didn't want you to publicly be a part of their group
That's certainly true.
. . . but they wanted you to work for them.
Which we did. And after the election——which was a success, of course——they disappeared.
The men disappeared.
Mm-hm.
Now for the purpose of the tape, we probably should say that that recall election came about because three members of the school board tried to purge forty-five teachers from the Little Rock public schools, and this created an outcry in Little Rock, and an election was held to recall those three members of the school board and at the same time to recall the other three members of the school board.
Yes, and both sides worked very hard to keep their "good
men" in
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
The segregationists called their group CROSS: Committee to Retain our Segregated Schools; the moderates called their group STOP: Stop This Outrageous Purge.
So, the men who stepped forward to head the STOP committee, came to the Women's Emergency Committee and said, "Help us win this recall vote."
If it hadn't been for our organization, they couldn't possibly have won that election, couldn't possibly. But they did supply the equipment, which we didn't have. And this is how we came by some very valuable equipment.
Mimeographing machines and things like that . . .
And they paid for any number of phones in the office, so that we could do phoning, you see, to the . . . And I'm sure you will remember that we had a code. We set up a card catalog of every voter, and for every one we had a code to say whether they'd be friendly or unfriendly or maybe, and the unfriendly ones, of course, we left alone. The friendly ones, we bombarded to get them out (to vote).
Who got together that system? Was that Irene Samuel?
Well, Irene really set up the code, but the person, I think, who really
taught her to do this was Henry Woods. 9
9 Henry Woods was a law partner of former governor Sid McMath,
and a leader of Little Rock's liberal community.
Oh, is that right?
Mm-hm.
I never knew that. Well, that makes sense.
Well, he'd had lots of experience in elections, and he was one of the men who was really friendly to us.
And he was openly involved.
Yes, and his wife worked very hard in the Committee. She worked in the office a great deal.
Were there very many women who worked for your Committee whose husbands were not sympathetic?
Quite a lot. And some of them asked us not to send mail to their homes, because they . . . Well, unfortunately, I know of a few divorces that came from this period. But we tried, here again, in our membership list——which we always maintained we didn't have . . .
. . .
Well, now, do you think these women who were married to men who were not sympathetic with your point of view . . . You would assume that most people married people with similar attitudes. Were most of the women who worked for your Committee openly integrationists, or do you think most of them simply wanted to get the schools open?
In the beginning most of them simply, they were solely interested in the
schools. But they were willing to have the schools
That's right.
And as a consequence we dared not open our membership to them, but any of
the girls who had any sympathy for the black race were used in contacts
with members of the race to reassure them that at the time we were
working for the schools, we were really working for them, too. And as a
consequence, that final survey of our own membership was a real pleasure
to me, because a vast majority of the women said that desegregation of
the schools, of the restaurants, of anything, was perfectly all right
with them, by then. So it was a growing process. So we didn't completely
lose our first aim.
Yes. It's so hard for me to keep in my mind that "integrationist" was just such a horrible word at that time.
I don't think anyone can realize what an emotional time it was. In fact,
I look back on it and think we were all crazy. You
Just continuing harrassment.
Why would people feel so strongly? It was very, very difficult for me to understand.
Well, did you ever figure it out, why they felt so strongly?
Old, old prejudice.
You know, I have wondered if a part of it might not have been——of course, the root of it is racial prejudice——but I wondered if a part of it might not have also been the old issue of the North forcing the South once again to accept anything, but certainly to accept a way of life that the South . . .
That never occurred to me, Betsy, because actually, the most of our women were Southern women. Of course, there were . . . Well, I suppose hundreds of them really had moved in here from the North, but I don't think this had anything to do with it. I really think it was purely racial prejudice. Of course, in your generation it hasn't been anything like it was in mine, but in my generation we never knew blacks at all unless it was a cook or a maid, somebody of whom you were very fond, you know, but this was a great unknown, and people are afraid of things they don't know.
Very frightening; very true. Well, I have read time and again, I've read
people describe Little Rock as being surrounded by a
Well, there are two stories about that. I've often wondered why I didn't
have trouble, because I drove from here to the Heights, 10 and of course we didn't have the freeway then
and it took me across a very isolated country road. 10 W.E.C. headquarters was in the Pulaski Heights section of
Little Rock, 23 miles from the Brewer home.
. . . and he said, "well, I just didn't want anybody to recognize you."
Which I think he meant.
Yes.
In all sincerity, I think he meant it. Because the husbands of the women who did work in the Committee were frightened.
I wondered if they were.
They were, because when we first had our office, it was in the old
Capitol Hotel building, right on the main floor. And pickets would walk
up and down outside, you know, and stare in at us. And our husbands
absolutely refused to let us stay there over Sunday. They were
It's hard to know why people hate like this, but I think I can see that, after all, I was "a Southern lady," and if something had happened to me, my martyrdom would have done more harm to their cause than just letting me struggle along. It seems to me that's the only explanation for not having . . .
That's probably also a part of the explanation for why they felt such hostility toward you, because you were breaking the faith.
Mm-hm.
You were supposed to know better.
Well, I think I've quoted in the manuscript my favorite
letter——I did keep it, and I think it's at Smith,
if I remember correctly——that someone over in
Lonoke wrote——at least the postmark was
Lonoke——that "I've seen your picture, and
you look as if you're half
Negro——‘nigger,’ I'm sure
they said——and half-Jew."
Oh, heavens.
Oh, heavens. Well, did you feel like you had very much support from the community for your activities?
Oh, it was wonderful to be surrounded by those women. You can't imagine how they worked, Betsy.
How large was your membership?
Well, I would guess within the Little Rock area, about
Oh, my.
But women came in, you know,