Turn Away Thy Son

Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked a Nation is a 2007 nonfiction book written by Arkansas historian Elizabeth Jacoway and published by The New Press (and released as a paperback by the University of Arkansas Press the following year). The book retells the story of the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County), analyzing the events through the prism of a Southern white fear of miscegenation, with Jacoway asserting that “beneath all the rhetoric about states’ rights, constitutional government, and the lovely southern lady, lay the threat that people of color represented to white male control of their ‘bloodlines,’ or in other words, of white women.” Turn Away Thy Son was awarded the 2008 Booker Worthen Literary Prize.

In interviews, Jacoway recalled that the research for the book encompassed thirty years, starting in 1976 when she was teaching at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Jacoway assembled her history by conducting more than fifty interviews with key players in the Central High crisis, including members of the Little Rock Nine and segregationist “Justice Jim” Johnson, and by sifting through a variety of public and private manuscripts, including interviews conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This resulted in a book that presents the crisis step-by-step as it unfolded. Jacoway also views events through the larger framework of class, observing that Virgil Blossom, the leader of the school board (and the uncle of the author), “did not consider the views of the [white] blue-collar workers who lived around Central High School” when the decision was made to decide what school to desegregate first.

Reviews of Turn Away Thy Son were mixed, and the book has often been met with divided opinions. Kirkus Reviews described the book as a “lucid and revealing key to events of half a century ago,” while Publishers Weekly called it “informative but dully written” and “a numbing mass of detail that entombs the drama and its personae. The oral histories add verisimilitude, but the day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, detail is frequently tedious.” Although praised for being a “native daughter” of the South willing to tackle the subject of Central High, Jacoway was also criticized for how she presented Governor Orval Faubus and Harry Ashmore, editor of the Arkansas Gazette. Jacoway depicted Faubus as a well-meaning moderate who was trying to navigate a path between the segregationist masses of Arkansas and the federal government’s mandates for desegregation. Meanwhile, Jacoway asserts that if Ashmore “had not been so convinced that Faubus was operating strictly from political motives, the Little Rock situation might have ended very differently,” a statement that many reviews regarded as an effort to exonerate Faubus. However, the book also included a back-cover blurb by Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, describing Jacoway as “balanced in her presentation of the various points of view.”

For additional information:
Elizabeth Jacoway Little Rock Crisis Collection (BC.MSS.10.48). Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. Central Arkansas Library System, Little Rock, Arkansas. Finding aid online at https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/findingaids/id/11267/rec/1 (accessed July 25, 2024).

Jacoway, Elizabeth. Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation. New York: The New Press, 2007.

Williams, Helaine. “Elizabeth Jacoway.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, February 4, 2007. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2007/feb/04/elizabeth-jacoway-20070204/ (accessed July 25, 2024).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas