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Orval Faubus had thus staked his political future on his claim that there would be violence in Little Rock. Almost single-handed he had created the reality of violence from its myth. After withdrawing his National Guard, he had taken off for the Southern Governors' Conference at Sea Island, Ga., stopping on the way to see the Georgia-Texas football game at Atlanta. ("He's really lapping up the glory," said one of his fellow governors. "There were 33,000 people at the game, and every time they cheered a play, Faubus stood up and bowed.") The next night Faubus cavorted in the Silver Room of Sea Island's Cloister Hotel, signing autographs, sipping bourbon and Seven-Up, and dancing. Orval Faubus was the life of the party. The night wore on—and the dawn approached when he would get violence in Little Rock.
"There's a Nigger." Monday morning in Little Rock came bright and crisp. At 6 a.m., on the day that Judge Davies had ordered integration to begin at Central High School, about 70 cops stood idly swinging billy clubs behind sawhorse barricades. These were the men that Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann, former insurance agent turned well-meaning—but sometimes ineffectual—public servant, had said could preserve the peace in Little Rock. (Police Chief Marvin Potts apparently was not so sure: he judiciously stayed in his office.) But right at the beginning the Little Rock cops made their first and greatest mistake: they let a crowd begin to gather. It was small at first, and quiet. Asked one man in grey working clothes of another: "What're you doing here?" Came the reply: "Just came by to see what's doing."
While the cops watched with kindly detachment, the crowd grew. Some roughnecks began drifting in. The police uneasily tried to make friends. "Do you think I like this?" asked one. "I'm just trying to do my job." An old man turned his dry, grassfire eyes on Central High School, worked his bare gums in pleasure over the time "we burned a nigger in '27." A fat ex-schoolteacher named Arthur Bickle looked around at the crowd's hooligans, chortled his satisfaction: "They've separated the men from the boys."
Perhaps most important of all, James ("Jimmy the Flash") Karam, head of the Arkansas State Athletic Commission, was on the scene from the beginning. Karam, once a third-string halfback at Auburn (he is fond of recalling his days as an "All-American"), turned professional strikebreaker (he bossed a goon-staffed outfit called Veterans Industrial Association Inc.), then became a Little Rock haberdasher and a near, dear friend to Governor Orval Faubus. Last week, while his wife was with Orval and Alta Faubus at Sea Island, Jimmy Karam moved purposefully around the crowd outside Central High School, whispering here, nodding curtly there, ducking into a gasoline station to make telephone calls.