Yesterday we talked about U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Davies, who nullified a Little Rock injunction to stop the first integration of a southern high school. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus was determined to prevent integration on his watch. Saying he was trying to avoid bloodshed, he ordered 100 armed National Guardsmen to turn away nine African Americans who tried to enter Central High School on September 4, 1957. Faubus’s defiance of the judge’s court order was the first major test of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

The judge’s family back in North Dakota knew little of what Davies was experiencing – except that he was trying a big case. Tom, his 18 year-old son, was just starting UND when he first realized something was odd. The student advisor assigned to him was none other than UND President Starcher. He also thought it strange that many fraternities were trying very hard to pledge him. When the motor on his car went out, he called his mom in Fargo to ask what he should do. She gave him his father’s number in Arkansas, and when Tom finally got through, his father told him, “This is really not a good time to talk. Just get it fixed, and I’ll pay for it.”

“If you knew my father,” Tom says, “you’d know that something was really wrong if he told you to just get it fixed. He would’ve told you ‘go get a second job’ – not ‘I’ll pay for it.’”

For the next two weeks, Davies and Governor Faubus were deadlocked, and the nine students still weren’t in school. On September 20th, Davies ruled that Faubus used the National Guard to prevent integration, not to prevent violence, and the governor was forced to withdraw the troops. The situation was now in the hands of the Little Rock Police Department.

An agitated mob of 1,000 whites was outside Central High School, when the black students were hustled through a side door on the 23rd. The crowd learned the students were inside and, out of fear for their safety, the police had to evacuate them. President Eisenhower issued a special proclamation that evening, calling for opponents of integration to “cease and desist.”

It didn’t work. The next morning, Little Rock’s mayor sent the president a telegram asking him to send troops to maintain order. Eisenhower immediately federalized the 10,000 Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 members of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. The African American students finally entered the school – under heavily armed guard – the next day,

Although it would take years for the civil rights issue to cool off, a key step was accomplished in Little Rock. Davies could not abide intolerance. His inherent sense of right and wrong even led him to refuse a phone call from the President, because he wanted to avoid any sense of impropriety while he handled the case.

Years later, son Tom – now himself a judge – suggested that his father go back to Little Rock to see how it had changed. The older Davies smiled and said, “I tell you what. I’ll give you a ticket to go down there, and when you get into the station, yell, ‘I’m Ron Davies’ son!’ If nothing happens to you, then I’ll go.”

Judge Davies didn’t really believe the problem lay with the people of Little Rock – he felt outside agitators were to blame. And, when people pointed fingers at southern bigotry, Davies would remind them that North Dakota wasn’t without its own problems – that we couldn’t point fingers until we addressed racist attitudes toward our Native Americans.

 

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