THE LONG SHADOW OF LITTLE ROCK
Inscribed first edition of this memoir recounting the 1957 Little Rock Crisis by the activist and journalist who "led the battle" for school desegregation — an association copy owned and annotated by one of the only white ministers to walk with the schoolchildren that fateful day, the Rev. Dunbar Ogden.
Very good in good jacket.
Price: $5,000.00
THE LONG SHADOW OF LITTLE ROCK
"[Ogden] never suspected that the white citizens of Little Rock would turn on him. He was, after all, a minister and a Southerner. But that day, when he saw the stored-up hate in the mob and their contorted faces, when he heard them screaming not only for the blood of the nine Negro children but for his and all connected with him, he realized how vicious was the system under which he had lived all his life. 'I became aware of where segregation led. I had to make a decision,' he told me later." — Daisy Bates
In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ruled school segregation unconstitutional, Daisy Bates, of the local ARKANSAS STATE PRESS newspaper and President of the Arkansas NAACP, became an organizing force behind the Little Rock Nine: helping to hand-pick the students, arranging for their protection, and the like. Among those she called to help in that effort was the Rev. Dunbar Ogden, a white minister of the nearby Central Presbyterian Church. Bates asked if Ogden could convince other white ministers to walk with the children, as both an act of solidarity and security. Bates would write (in this book) of Ogden: "When I talked to him that night, he was momentarily hesitant [but] [t]he next morning, when the children assembled to go to school, Mr. Ogden was there to walk with them." Ogden was one of only a few white clergy who joined the Little Rock Nine as they made their way past a sea of hostile spectators towards Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957.
Though the students were turned away that day by then-governor Orval Fabus, they were eventually successful after President Eisenhower ordered members the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock. Like many involved in the effort, however, the Rev. Ogden paid a heavy price. Again, as Bates describes in this book: "Ogden had become a traitor [...] Members of his church stopped attending services, stopped giving financial support, and finally forced him to resign."
Eventually Ogden relocated to West Virginia, where he continued to work both as a minister and a civil rights worker. It is also where Bates (or more likely, given the lack of personalization in the inscription, her publisher) sent Ogden this inscribed copy of THE LONG SHADOW. Ogden appears several times throughout the book and in several of those places he has briefly annotated the text. An important memento of civil rights solidarity.
The Object
First printing. New York: David McKay Company, (1962). 8'' x 5.25''. Original orange cloth, lettered in black to spine. In original unclipped ($4.75) orange and black photographic jacket, designed by A|D Associates. Illustrated in black and white. xviii, 234 pages. Inscribed by Bates on front fly leaf: "Best Wishes from the author. / Daisy Bates / Little Rock, Ark. / Nov. 30, 196 [sic]." Penciled ownership inscription: "Please return / to / Dunbar Ogden / 502 Kanawha Blvd. W. / Charleston, W. Va." Jacket with noticeable rippling to panels, light edgewear. Book with few small pieces of tape to front and rear paste down, likely formerly holding down previous mylar cover, spots of offsetting to endpapers and cloth likely from same, underlining and minor marginalia penciled to a couple leaves, else sound.
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