“A mockery for education”? Little Rock’s Thomas J. Raney High School during the Lost Year, 1958-1959

A Rhode Island newspaper lampooned Raney as a ramshackle, over-crowded bam with a misspelled name disgracing its building and a pig on its grounds.2 For their part, historians from J. W. Peltason to Elizabeth Jacoway, Karen Anderson, and Tony Freyer have generally been more preoccupied with the legal and political machinations preceding Raney's establishment, treating this effort to provide for the education of white youth in the absence of public schools as an incidental misstep in Gov. Orvai Faubus's long campaign against perceived enemies in Pulaski Heights and Washington, D C. Sondra Gordy's Finding the Lost Year remains the only study specifically about education during the 1958-1959 school year but includes Raney as just one of Little Rock's several responses to the closure of the city's high schools in the wake of the federally enforced desegregation of Central High the preceding year.3 By contrast, this article concentrates solely on Raney's (at the time) unique ethos and practical operations. The laws empowered the governor to withhold state funds from integrated schools, remove officials not complying with state laws, and, subject only to confinnation by popular vote, close schools faced with forced integration or threats of violence.4 When, on September 12, 1958, the Supreme Court mied as predicted, Faubus immediately signed the bills into law and shuttered Little Rock's four senior highs.5 Within five days, the PSC had been chartered with his physician and "crony," Thomas Jefferson Raney, as chainnan and five other members chosen by the governor: Cued by a district court's opinion that its case warranted trial by a three-judge panel, the NAACP appealed directly to the Eighth Circuit, which ruled that leasing the public schools (and, indirectly, their staffs) was nothing less than another attempt to evade integration, leaving the PSC unexpectedly homeless and bereft of a fundamental resource. "11 Maintaining an average daily attendance of 683, the school quickly expanded its curriculum to include vocational subjects, acquired a librarydeemed sufficient to its purpose, a cafeteria to supersede the vending machine that had initially served as the only on-campus catering, a student government, a fortnightly newspaper (the Rebel Rouser), and the clubs, societies, and committees befitting the extracurricular activities of a typical comprehensive high school.