White
Violence and Mobs
The importance in gaining an understanding of white violence when reading Melba Beals' autobiography cannot be underestimated because of the emphasis on mob reaction to her experience and treatment she received from individual students and teachers.
Mob violence in the Southern States
has had a long and sordid history. The worst form of violence, the lynch
mob took a heavy toll on Blacks in the 1890's and 1920's. Gail Williams
O'Brien lists in her article Return to "Normalcy": Organized
Racial Violence in the Post-World War II South the number of
lynchings. Between the years 1882 and 1953, there were 3432 lynchings of
blacks by white Southerners1. Violence against Blacks was a
feature of Southern society. O'Brien argues that racial violence was
'long a means of "keeping blacks in their place" - a place of economic
dependence, political impotence, and social and culture subservience'2.
It was a preventive measure and took on all forms and location was not a
limitation. During the Wars and immediately in the aftermath of the First
World War, there were race riots in major cities ranging from East St. Louis,
Houston to Detroit; Harlem and Los Angeles3. These riots were
not on the scale of the Little Rock mob, but nevertheless those mobs were not
insignificant, nor were they after any less than the forced removal of the black
students. Individual black students were attacked, Beals' account
describes vividly, that in order to get to class, they were spat upon and slapped.
This treatment was atypical of what normally happened in the South. In
the South, violence of a more extreme form was visited upon those who did not
fit the stereotype. Organisations like the Ku Klux Klan were non-discriminatory
with their violence; they attacked those they classified as 'immoral' or
'troublemakers'4. These targets weren't limited to blacks
only, but also against Catholics and Jews. The brutality at Little Rock
was not anywhere near the extent of the Klan. The Klan carried out its
activities more secretively whereas mob violence was more commonplace for
events that were in the public domain. The court-ordered
integration was such an event that brought the public
out in defiance of the court order. Beals' description of the
crowd is frightening from her point of view but a comparative analysis of
atrocities committed by white Southerners from the Civil War onwards, shows
them to be relatively minor. One must, however, look at the events of
Little Rock from the perspective of a teenager; a black teenager in a sea of white hatred. The
violence was scary for her, and eventually could only be quelled by a show of
Federal force, in which an elite paratroop division was sent in to keep the
peace.
1 Gail Williams O'Brien, Return to "Normalcy": Organized
Racial Violence in the Post-World War II South, in Ted Gurr (ed.), Violence
in America, vol. 2: Protest, Rebellion, Reform, SAGE Publications, Newbury
Park, 1989, p. 233.
2 Ibid., p. 232.
3 Ibid., p. 233.
4 Ibid., p. 234.
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