Little Rock’s Social Question

• Published date: 01 August 2013
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591713497316
• Author: Jill Locke
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

497316PTX41410.1177/0090591713497316Political TheoryLocke
research-article2013
Article
Political Theory
41(4) 533 –561
Little Rock’s Social
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713497316
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Arendt on School
Desegregation and Social
Climbing
Jill Locke1
Abstract
This essay interprets Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “social question”
through a reading of her controversial essay “Reflections on Little Rock.”
I argue that Arendt’s social question refers to social climbing and not
simply poverty, as she initially suggests. The social-climbing framework
illuminates “Little Rock” in two ways. First, it explains why Arendt opposed
mandatory school desegregation, which she saw as black social climbing,
that is, African American citizens and the NAACP using the US courts and
federal government to raise the status of African Americans to the level of
whites. Second, and more significant, it provides a framework for criticizing
“Little Rock” with Arendt’s own standards and criteria in mind. Reminded
by Arendt of the suspect politics of social climbing, we can see something
she did not: segregation was not “natural” association but an institution
established after the Civil War to protect white social climbing and social
advancement.
Keywords
Hannah Arendt, Little Rock, social question, school desegregation
1Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota
Corresponding Author:
Jill Locke, Gustavus Adolphus College, 800 W. College Avenue, St. Peter, MN 56082, USA.
Email: jlocke@gustavus.edu

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534
Political Theory 41(4)
For like the Revolution, Reconstruction was an era when the foundations of public
life were thrown open for discussion.
—Eric Foner
White children are to be received on precisely the same footing, and no other, with
blacks; that is to say, they are to occupy the same rooms, recite in the same classes,
and receive the same attention as the blacks. You cannot control public opinion
outside of the school; but, within its limits, you must secure entire respect from
every pupil to every other. You must not allow blacks, from their vantage point of
loyalty, to insult the whites; nor the whites to insult the blacks from any fancied
superiority.
—Edna Cheney, American Freedman’s Union Commission chair,
explaining that schools should not recognize
distinctions of caste or color (1866)
Ambition, Opportunity, Preparation, Personality
—Motto at entrance to Central High School,
Little Rock, Arkansas (1927)
In 1871, the US Senate convened to debate legislation titled “A Bill to Abolish
Separate Colored Schools,” which proposed outlawing school segregation in
Washington, DC. The constitutionality of race-based schools had been put in
question by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which required
equal protection of the laws. Senator Allen Thurman, a Democrat from Ohio,
took the floor to argue against the law and in favor of separate schools for
blacks and whites. He put the challenge as follows:
Now it is proposed that we shall go one step further and say not only that
Government shall exercise the power of taxing all men for the support of the
common schools, disregarding all political opinions of the parents and the children,
and disregarding all religious creeds too, but that it shall also disregard the marked
differences that the Almighty himself has stamped upon the people. Sir, what is
this but despotism?1
Thurman’s testimony reveals a post–Civil War preoccupation with visible,
racial differences between blacks and whites as proof of natural differences
that are—and must remain—beyond the legitimate reach of the law and the

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Locke
535
Fourteenth Amendment, in particular. As lawyers, politicians, and everyday
citizens strived to make sense of what a post–Civil War racial landscape
would look like and what political equality meant, they invoked the language
of social and political equality as separate entities. In the language of the era,
social equality was a loaded term—officially understood to mean the ability
for blacks and whites to enjoy the same social institutions but fraught with
anxieties about “race mixing” and the end of whiteness as a distinctive color
and racial marker.
Because of the degree to which the specter of “social equality” haunted the
post–Civil War era, many who were agitating to extend the Fourteenth
Amendment to social institutions often made clear that social equality was
beyond the reach of their goals. Mississippi senator Hiram Revels, the only
African American senator in 1871, spoke in support of the Washington, DC,
legislation abolishing segregation, but qualified this support by reassuring his
colleagues that mixed-race schools would not result in social equality.
Recounting an exchange that occurred during his recent lecture tour in the
state of Ohio, Revels explained how he had reassured an Ohio gentleman that
he had visited mixed-race schools in New England and seen no social effect:
“‘Go to the schools and you see there white children and colored children
seated side by side, studying their lessons, standing side by side . . . but that
is the last of it. The white children go to their homes; the colored children to
theirs; and on the Lord’s day you will see those colored children in colored
churches.’ . . . Mixed schools are very far from bringing about social equal-
ity.”2 Whether Revels’s reassurances are sincere or meant to diminish the
radical character of the DC bill is unclear from his speech, but it is possible
to note with certainty the power and ubiquity of the conversation about the
place of social equality in a country that had extended the franchise to African
American men. To cry out that something was sliding toward “social equal-
ity” was a way of putting the brakes on the egalitarian spirit of the times;
unsurprisingly, agitators and activists often sought to clarify that their
demands were legal or political and not social.
Hannah Arendt’s foray into debates about equal protection under the law
also turned on a preoccupation with social and political equality, which she saw
as separate phenomena that had become confused in the Brown v. Board (1954)
decision and the school desegregation that followed from it.3 The particular
case of desegregation provided Arendt with an opportunity to extend her con-
cerns about the rise of the “social” at the expense of practices of a properly
political or revolutionary character. These concerns grew out of Arendt’s
European context, where she became concerned with the political problems of
confusing (social) assimilation with political equality and equal rights. She
expresses her ambivalence about the American project in The Origins of

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Political Theory 41(4)
Totalitarianism as follows: “It is one of the most promising and dangerous
paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the
basis of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically.”4
Arendt extended her concerns about assimilation as a legitimate public project
to the question of mandatory school desegregation in the United States, which
she opposed on grounds similar to those of her critique of Jewish assimilation
in Europe. Some have argued that Arendt’s extensions of her concerns about
the social to school desegregation replicates the language and the logic of the
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, which—drawing on language reminiscent
of Senator Thurman’s—insisted that the law had no business promoting social
equality in the face of “visible,” factual difference.5 I, too, have been troubled
by the resemblance between Arendt’s argument in “Reflections on Little Rock”
(1959) and the Plessy opinion. But rather than draw a bright line connecting the
two in order to secure Arendt’s Plessy-quality guilt on issues of racial equality,
I first want to better understand her concerns about the social question and her
reasons for excluding it from legitimate politics and revolutions, while also
considering how Arendt’s presumptions and blind spots about the history of
racial segregation and its remedies are not hers alone.
To that end, this essay asks what the “social question” means for Arendt
and how a fuller understanding of it could illuminate “Reflections on Little
Rock,” Arendt’s most controversial text. I argue that in spite of Arendt’s ini-
tial emphasis on the social question as relating to the presence of poverty and
misery, the larger story of On Revolution and much of her other work sug-
gests that the presence of poverty and the misery it engenders are not at the
heart of the social question. Rather, what worries her is the preoccupation
with social climbing and social mobility, most especially the desire to devote
one’s life (or the life of the republic) to this social progress, to the neglect of
preserving an authentic revolutionary and political character.6 The social-
climbing framework illuminates “Little Rock” in two ways. First, it explains
why Arendt opposed mandatory school desegregation, which she saw as
black social climbing, that is, African American citizens and the NAACP
(National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) using the US
courts and federal government to raise the status of African Americans to the
level of whites. Second, and more significant, it provides a framework for
criticizing “Little Rock” with Arendt’s own standard and criteria in mind.
Reminded by Arendt of the...