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In her controversial essay "Reflections on Little Rock," originally written for Commentary magazine but published in the 1959 volume of Dissent, Hannah Arendt questioned the wisdom of the NAACP for placing children on the front lines during the 1957 school integration crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. Insisting on her "sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed or under-privileged peoples," Arendt nonetheless faulted the desegregation effort for having contributed to recent social trends "abolishing the authority of adults." Civil rights leaders were denying both "their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children" and their "duty of guiding them into it." ¹ Arendt's critique of the NAACP's tactics and strategy derived from her general fear, reiterated throughout her writings during the 1950s, that a failure to distinguish properly between the political and social realms of human behavior gravely threatened political freedom. ² The chief error of what she termed "forced integration" was that [End Page 157] it confused the political realm with the social realm and thus failed to recognize that what "equality is to the body politic—its innermost principle—discrimination is to society" (FLW, 51). The point she drew in her reflections was that forcing "parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of the rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association" (FLW, 55).

Predictably, Arendt's comments did not strike a positive note among liberal readers. Not only had Commentary found the article problematic when Arendt originally submitted it (and consequently attached conditions for publication that led Arendt to withdraw it [FLW, 313–15]), but Dissent, in agreeing to publish it, had insisted on preceding "Reflections" with a disclaimer ("We publish it not because we agree with it—quite the contrary!") and on following it with two essays, by David Spitz and Melvin Tumin, respectively, attacking Arendt's arguments. ³ In deference to Arendt, Dissent also agreed to give her space in a subsequent issue to reply to her critics, and in her response, Arendt elaborated her argument in the following way:

The point of departure of my reflections was a picture in the newspapers, showing a Negro girl on her way home from a newly integrated school; she was persecuted by a mob of white children, protected by a white friend of her father, and her face bore eloquent witness to the obvious fact that she was not precisely happy. The picture showed the situation in a nutshell because those who appeared in it were directly affected by the Federal Court order, the children themselves. My first question was: what would I do if I were a Negro mother? The answer: under no circumstances would I expose my child to conditions which made it appear as though it wanted to push its way into a group where it was not wanted. ⁴

Arendt focused on the news photograph of a young black girl being taunted by white teenagers and adults in an attempt to make vivid the charge she had leveled in her original essay: The desegregation crisis in Little Rock represented the triumph of mob rule—the "sorry fact" that "the town's law-abiding citizens left the streets to the mob, that neither white nor black [End Page 158] citizens felt it their duty to see the Negro children safely to school." ⁵ Her elaboration amounted to a reiteration of her main charge that school desegregation, as pursued in Little Rock, had devolved into the evacuation of all legitimate authority, particularly parental authority, from the scene of the crisis.

Arendt's critics were not confined to the pages of Dissent, and of these critics perhaps the most significant was Ralph Ellison, who took advantage of several occasions to mention what he felt was Arendt's severe misreading of the Little Rock events...