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Turn
Away Thy Son
Little Rock, The Crisis that Shocked the Nation
Elizabeth Jacoway
Understanding
the key players
“A
lucid and revealing key to events of a half century ago.”
—Kirkus Review
“An absorbing and surprising account that reveals our
nation at its best and worst. It is also a balanced and scrupulously
fair story.”
—Booklist
“What we hear in this marvelous, insightful and courageous
volume is the voice of a native southern liberal judging her
own community honestly and harshly.”
—Stanley N. Katz, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“Jacoway enlivens her text with a host of moving anecdotes
and colorful characters.”
—Alex Lichtenstein, Chicago Tribune
“This is a mesmerizing and brave book, a story with
complicated layers and meaning for all Americans, a heroic
saga of progress and its
consequences.”
—Ken Burns, director of Jazz and The War
In September 1957 nine black children tried to integrate Arkansas’s
Little Rock Central High School in accordance with the Supreme
Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Claiming he was acting to keep the peace, Gov. Orval Faubus
used the Arkansas National Guard to keep them out of the school.
After a lengthy standoff, President Eisenhower called in the
101st Airborne and reluctantly, slowly, but forcibly began
to integrate the school. The standoff became a rallying cry
for Southern segregationists and a marker of the country's
shame.
The accounts that have been so mythologized over the years
leave people embarrassed and angry, yet the myth is a cardboard
cutout of the full story. Turn Away Thy Son, told
from the point of view of sixteen key participants, brings
the nine students, their tormentors, the school administration,
the governor, and the press to vivid life. It shows the truth
about Little Rock, beyond the caricatures to the fundamental
driving forces that made school desegregation the hottest
of hot-button issues in the Jim Crow South.
Elizabeth Jacoway grew up in Little Rock,
two years behind the class of the Little Rock Nine. After
earning her PhD at the University of North Carolina, she returned
to Arkansas and has studied southern history and the desegregation
crisis ever since. Her previous publications include Understanding
the Little Rock Crisis and Southern Businessmen and
Desegregation. Turn Away Thy Son was originally
published by Free Press in 2007.
March
6 x 9, 496 pages, 33 photographs, index
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-878-3 | 1-55728-878-X |
