Little Rock Moves Ahead

Little Rock's school board ordered a small but significant advance in the integration of the city's schools. In addition to assigning three Negro pupils again to Central High, scene of the 1957 riots, the board admitted the first three Negro youngsters for classes at Hall High School.

In making the assignments, the board ignored the "solution" to Little Rock's school problem that Governor Orval Faubus offered earlier in the week. Faubus suggested that the board 1) designate two of Little Rock's four high schools (Hall and the all-Negro Horace Mann) for integration; 2) "ask all parents who wish their children to attend integrated schools to come forward and so state"; 3) assign half these children to each of the two integrated schools, though segregating them by sex--all boys, white and Negro, in one, all girls, white and Negro, in the other. The Governor's "solution," which the Arkansas Gazette called a "bad political joke," would have sent hundreds of Negro students to Hall, the high school located in the well-to-do Pulaski Heights area that has consistently voted against Faubus. But it would also have left Central a segregated school. Because this would clearly have violated the federal court order to deny no citizen entrance to a public school because of color, Faubus could hardly have expected the school board to take up his suggestion. But its rejection by the school board, as Faubus might also have foreseen, could only add to the troubles that face Little Rock as it prepares to reopen its schools next month.

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