09/06/2026
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Orval Faubus locked 3,665 children out of school in September 1958 and never lost a night's sleep over it. What made him angry was the school board cancelling the football season along with the classes. Stopping football, he said, would be cruel to the children.
He was not joking. He put it in writing.
Cancelling football, Faubus decreed, would be "a cruel and unnecessary blow to the children."
Three thousand six hundred and sixty-five of those children had no school to go to when he said it, because four days earlier he had shut every high school in Little Rock for a full year.
On Friday, September 12, 1958, the Supreme Court threw out the delay Little Rock had been granted on desegregation and told the city to keep going.
Faubus signed his answer the same day.
His legislature had spent a hasty special session that summer writing him the power to close any school threatened with integration, and he used it before the ink on the ruling was dry. Central High, Hall High, Little Rock Technical and Horace Mann were all ordered shut.
They had been due to open the following Monday. Textbooks were already bought.
Faubus said he was doing it to preserve the peace of the community.
The elementary schools opened on schedule that month. The junior highs opened on schedule too, segregated, exactly as they had always been.
Only the four senior highs stayed dark, because the senior highs were the only place a federal court had ordered Black children admitted.
On the Monday those doors should have opened, Superintendent Virgil Blossom and the school board did the obvious thing. If the high schools were closed, then the bands, the pep squads and the football games belonged to closed schools, and they announced all of it cancelled.
By Tuesday morning the governor was in the newspapers, and he was furious.
Not about the children. About the football.
He accused the board of cancelling the season deliberately, as a stunt, to turn public feeling against him. Then came the line about the cruel and unnecessary blow, and the board was left trying to work out what he actually wanted.
Board president Wayne Upton wrote him a telegram that same day, and the Arkansas Gazette printed it on the front page on the seventeenth.
Upton's message was almost polite in its bewilderment. The board's only motive, he wrote, had been strict compliance with a proclamation closing the high schools, which the board had presumed was meant to close the things high schools do.
Then he asked the governor to advise him immediately as to which high school activities the proclamation had been intended to cover.
That exchange is the whole year in one telegram.
A city could not work out whether closing a school closed its football season, and the man who had closed the school was the one insisting it did not.
The answer came back in the shape of a season. Football went ahead.
Eleven days after the doors were locked, Little Rock was asked to put its name on it.
On Saturday, September 27, 1958, the city voted to keep its high schools closed rather than desegregate them, 19,470 to 7,561.
The ballot asked voters to be for or against racial integration of every school in the district. Under Faubus's own closure law, a vote against it meant the high schools stayed dark.
The wording was chosen for that reason, and so was the timing. The record is blunt about it, that the ballot language and a Saturday morning election were arranged by Faubus and the segregationists to produce exactly the result they got.
That is not one man in a governor's mansion. That is a city, on a Saturday, choosing this by nearly three to one.
Six weeks later Faubus was returned to office for a third consecutive term, something only one governor in the history of Arkansas had ever managed.
He had locked the children of an entire city out of school and the state rewarded him for it. By then the football season he had rescued was most of the way through.
Thanksgiving Day fell on November 27 that year.
Central High and Hall High had never played each other. Hall was new, only its second season, and the two schools had been circling a first meeting for a while.
They played it at Quigley Stadium, which is not a neutral field across town. It sits on Central High's own property, immediately west of the school building, bounded by Park Street on one side and West 16th on the other.
Five thousand people came. They sat a few hundred feet from Central High's locked classrooms, on ground that belonged to the school, to watch a game between two high schools that had not held a class since the previous May.
Hall came in undefeated and pointed at a state championship. Central beat them seven to nothing and took it off them, and El Dorado went home with the title instead.
The crowd went home too, to Thanksgiving dinner, in a town where thousands of teenagers had no school to go back to on Monday.
The scoreboard worked. The lights and the concession stands worked.
Everything on that campus worked except the classrooms, and the people paid to stand in those classrooms were still on the payroll.
The district had 177 high school teachers and administrators under contract, and a contract is a contract. They had to appear for work in schools that had no students, and most of them were soon sent out as substitutes in the junior highs and the elementary schools, teaching other people's children because their own had been locked out.
Oliver Elders had just arrived in Little Rock to coach basketball at Horace Mann, the Black high school on the east side. He never fielded a team.
He talked later about walking into the gymnasium in the mornings out of habit, the way you walk into a room you have entered every day of your working life.
He said it was like a snow day, that particular hush after all the students have been sent home early.
Except a snow day ends. This one went on every morning from September to June, and Elders said what it left him thinking was, my goodness, what are we doin'.
Down the corridor, Leon Adams taught music at the same school, and he wanted people to be clear about what had actually been shut.
Horace Mann was barely three years old and fully accredited, and families out in the county paid tuition to send their children into the city to attend it. It was one of the best schools available to a Black child in the state.
Adams put the only question that mattered to him very simply. Where were their students supposed to go.
Maud Woods taught at Horace Mann too, and by that spring the legislature had come for her personally.
Act 10 required every public employee in Arkansas to sign an affidavit listing every organization she belonged to and every one she gave money to. Act 115 fired any of them found to hold NAACP membership.
The teachers found the one answer the law had left open.
Woods said the joke was on the state, because a law can stop you joining and it cannot stop you giving. So she quit charging things at the stores, and every time she wanted to buy something she handed that money to the NAACP instead.
That is what resistance looked like in a building with no children in it. The district, for its part, still had to find those children a school year somewhere.
Its one attempt put fifteen white teachers on the three Little Rock television stations to broadcast lessons early in the mornings. Sophomores on KATV, juniors on KTHV, seniors on KARK.
Blossom did the arithmetic in public himself. Central High taught eighty-seven different subjects, and television could carry four.
English, history, science, mathematics. That was the school year.
There is a photograph in the Arkansas archive of a Black girl sitting at home that year, notebook open, taking notes off a television set while a white teacher held a class she was not allowed to attend in person.
The broadcasts were not the only scheme. A private corporation was set up to lease the closed public school buildings and hire the public school teachers, so that the same staff could teach the same white children in the same rooms under a private sign, and the federal courts stopped it.
White families had other doors, and they used them.
Private schools opened that autumn, and one of them, T. J. Raney High, charged no tuition at all, with the governor asking crowds from public platforms to fund it.
A girl who enrolled there said plainly why her family sent her. The other private school cost money and Raney did not, and without Raney she would not have gone to school at all.
Others went to Pulaski County, or to Texas, or Pennsylvania, or Germany. Some simply left for college a year early.
No private school opened for the students of Horace Mann. Not one.
L. M. Christophe, the principal there, offered his students a correspondence course, because it was that or nothing.
Everything else was road.
Grant Cochran was a Black sophomore who moved sixty miles out of Little Rock and in with his grandparents so that he could keep going to school.
His grandfather drove a school bus. He would run the rural route in the dark, drop his grandson at a highway, and Grant would wait there for a second bus to carry him the rest of the way to Menifee High.
Out the door at four or five in the morning. Back through it at six or seven at night.
Fourteen hours of a fifteen year old's day, most of it in the dark for half the year, spent on the errand of reaching a classroom that would let him in. Other families did not have a grandfather with a bus.
Almeta Lanum Smith was supposed to be a junior at Horace Mann, and her family had no car.
She and her sister got themselves to St. Peter's, a Black Catholic high school fifty miles down the road in Pine Bluff, and the only reason they got there was that a friend's father happened to be driving that way every day for work.
Her mother asked whether the girls could ride along. He said yes.
That is what a year of high school cost a Black family in Little Rock in 1958. A hundred miles a day and a neighbour's kindness, and if the neighbour had said no, that was the end of it.
Bowman Burns, a junior out of Horace Mann, did not go anywhere.
He took a job, because a job was the thing in front of him and there was no bus and no relative in another county.
He has been plain ever since about what that cost. He said he wishes he had found a way to keep going to school, because he would have graduated with his own class, and instead he graduated with the one behind it.
Another boy who should have started the tenth grade at Horace Mann that September did not attend school anywhere at all that year.
He was the oldest of eight children, living with his grandmother in the Granite Mountain housing project, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city.
Their mother had died that May. There was no money to send a fifteen year old boy to another town, and nobody was coming to offer any.
He was not counted as a dropout. He was not counted as anything.
Sondra Gordy spent years finding these people, more than sixty of them, teachers and students, Black and white, and sitting down with each one. Then she did the arithmetic nobody in Little Rock had wanted done.
Two thousand nine hundred and fifteen white students were displaced by the closure.
Ninety three percent of them found some form of schooling. Private schools inside Little Rock alone absorbed forty four percent, and another thirty five percent found public schools elsewhere in the state.
Seven hundred and fifty Black students were displaced.
Thirty seven percent of them found a public school somewhere in Arkansas. A few reached parochial schools, or went out of state, or started college early, or worked through correspondence courses.
Fifty percent of them got nothing at all.
Three hundred and seventy five Black children in one American city, in one school year, with no education of any kind.
Not a reduced year, not a hard year. None.
The following May, with the schools still shut, three segregationist members of the six member school board waited for the other three to walk out of a meeting in protest, then declared themselves a quorum and kept going.
In that session they refused to renew the contracts of forty four teachers and administrators. Thirty nine were white and five were Black.
Jo Ann Royster was in her second year of teaching at Central when she found her own name on the list. She said she was greatly surprised, then read the rest of the names and decided it was very good company to be in.
Nine months of locked doors had not moved the city. The firing of forty four teachers did it in three weeks.
A campaign calling itself Stop This Outrageous Purge went up almost overnight, and on May 25, 1959, the voters recalled the three men who had done it.
Thirty nine of the forty four got their jobs back. The new board reopened the high schools early, on August 12, 1959, to get ahead of whatever the governor might try next.
When Central High opened that August it admitted three Black students, and Hall admitted three. Six children, in a city of that size, a full two years after the 101st Airborne had come and gone.
Back in November 1958, while the schools were still dark, LIFE magazine had run a feature called The Lost Class of 1959. Hall High's class of that year still keeps a website about what happened to them, with an essay about how they scattered to Texas and Pennsylvania and Germany and nearly all of them found safe harbour somewhere.
They deserve to be remembered. They lost something real.
But there is no website for the half of Horace Mann that got nothing. No feature ran in November 1958 about the boy in Granite Mountain whose mother had died in May.
Little Rock has a National Historic Site for the autumn of 1957 and nine bronze figures on the capitol lawn.
For the twelve months that came directly afterward it has a nickname, and the nickname is Lost, which is the word you use for a set of keys.
Nothing about that year was lost. It was drafted in a special session, signed on a Friday, ratified at a ballot box, printed on the front page of the Gazette and carried out on schedule.
So the next time somebody says the Lost Year in front of you, hand them the rest of the sentence. Say seven hundred and fifty, say that half of them got nothing, and say that Bowman Burns had to collect his diploma standing beside the class behind his own.
Then say what the city kept running the whole time.
In four locked high schools, over ten months, with 177 teachers serving out contracts in rooms that had no students and 375 Black children getting no education of any kind, exactly one thing on the school calendar was restored after being cancelled, and it ran its full schedule and finished on time.
The football season.
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