Breaking the Silence: The Little Rock Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1963 by Sara Alderman Murphy, Patrick C. Murphy (Editor)

From the Publisher

The Little Rock Central High School integration crisis did not end in 1957 when President Eisenhower sent a portion of the 101st Airborne Division to protect nine black students. The turmoil was entering its second year in 1958 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus invoked a hastily passed state law to close the high schools rather than obey the federal court orders that would integrate them. A group of respectable, middle-class white women, faced with the prospect of no schools as well as the further loss of their city's good name, turned militant. Led by Adolphine Fletcher Terry, a prominent, "old family" civic leader in her seventies, they quickly put together the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), a highly effective organization that bombarded the city with ads, fliers, and statements challenging Faubus's action. Forty years later, Sara Murphy, a key member of the WEC, recounts the rarely told story of these courageous women who formed a resistance movement. With passion and sensitivity, she reconstructs the challenges and triumphs of that battle, which issued from the mutual link Southern white women shared with disfranchised African Americans in their common goal for full citizenship.

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