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ADOLPHINE FLETCHER TERRY GREW DESPONDENT. The resistance by vocal, organized citizens to school integration roiled Little Rock. She regretted that influential and prominent community leaders remained on the sidelines. Characteristically, she did not hold her fire. Her status as a member of one of the city's leading families as well as her involvement in the twentieth century's signal reform movements invariably assured her a hearing. After Terry made clear her views on this school crisis, the Arkansas Gazette hailed her as the "one of Little Rock's most esteemed civic leaders." Nevertheless, she could not shake the dread that her beloved city would meet calls for equality and opportunity with evasion and delay. "I cannot bear to see my town ruined by the stupidity (or is it the cupidity?) and indifference of its citizens."1
This cry of anger or despair came not in 1957, amid the agonies of the Central High desegregation crisis, but thirteen years later. And among those Terry blamed for bolstering segregation in 1970 was an erstwhile ally from that earlier conflict. William F. Rector feared school integration plans that breached the boundaries between black and white neighborhoods threatened the value of his suburban real estate holdings. He fought doggedly against such plans and those who supported them. Although forgotten in the midst of the commemorations of the 1957 crisis, the victories won by Rector and his allies obstructed integration for many years afterward and decisively influenced the subsequent development of the Little Rock schools.
Through the years, memory, public commemorations, and popular accounts of Little Rock school desegregation have shaped a portrait of a singular catastrophe, framed by disruption and reconciliation, separated from historical developments and forces. Yet, Adolphine Terry well understood that the re-opening of the Little Rock high schools in 1959 had not resolved the crisis nor set in motion the extinction of a dual education system. In the ensuing decade, the school board, first through a pupil assignment plan and then a "freedom-of-choice" approach, had without apology sustained largely single-race classrooms. The district leaders insisted such policies did not harm basic rights as long as those rare students who wished to apply to a school where they would be in a small minority were permitted to do so. While...