ABSTRACT
Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, seemed an unlikely place for thegravest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. It was a New Southcommunity of 107,000 – a quarter black – in which both races lived next to each other with few incidents. Pressed by the local NAACP and professor Georg Iggers, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, the city desegregated its library, parks, zoo, buses, hospitals, juries, and police force with little resistance. Harry Ashmore’s Arkansas Gazette, one of the region’s most respected newspapers, endorsed these integration initiatives. Still, there were limits to desegregation because the city’s swimming pool, hotels, theaters, restaurants, drinking fountains, and toilets remained racially divided throughout the 1950s.
