Davis Fitzhugh’s Choice to Speak Up About Little Rock

Davis Fitzhugh was a white farmer who purchased an advertisement in The Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock integration crisis. The ad included the infamous photo of Elizabeth Eckford being berated by a mob of segregationists and a caption that read, “If you live in Arkansas, study this picture and know shame. When hate is unleashed and bigotry finds voice, God help us all.” This excerpt from the book Elizabeth and Hazel (2011) explores Fitzhugh’s choice to purchase the ad. ¹

Who was Davis Fitzhugh? And why had he taken it upon himself, at his own expense, to convey such a message, one that could subject him to harm or harassment and which, at the very least, few people would have wanted to hear … ?

The picture demanded reflections, Fitzhugh explained [to an interviewer], because it captured a catastrophe. “I thought 50 years of progress had been destroyed in one afternoon,” he said. What progress? “Progress in allowing a Negro person a sense of dignity, progress in a lack of bitterness. … And economic progress, progress in the schools. Not much, but some … ” As the events in Little Rock unfolded, he said, he assumed some white people … would speak up. But no one had come forward. So he had …

Fitzhugh, it turned out, was not your typical southerner. His mother had studied at the Sorbonne [in Paris] and campaigned for women’s suffrage and birth control; he’d gone to high school in Chicago, met his wife in Chile, and studied short-story writing at Columbia, where he’d had several black classmates. During World War II—he had enlisted while mayor—he had first commanded a company of black soldiers in Texas, then helped reestablish local governments in newly liberated German towns. It was that experience that helped prompt his ad. “I tried to find out from people how they could stand by and see Jews persecuted and murdered,” he explained. “They’d say they felt guilty, but didn’t know what they could do; that it was dangerous to do anything. This is something like the feeling I feel here now, something of the same evil spirit, the same inability to act. It almost seems ridiculous to think that this could be, here, yet it is. And I ask myself: what do you do? What do you do next? What do we all do next?”

… Local reaction to Fitzhugh’s gesture fell into what for [interviewer Harold] Isaacs had become a recurrent pattern throughout the Little Rock story: “politely not noticing the unpleasant.” … Ninety percent of his friends simply ignored the ad, said Fitzhugh. … They chalked it up to his eccentricity. “They see me as a turncoat, I think, but they’d never say so to me,” he said. “Some pool hall elements in town cussed me out on the street, but wouldn’t stop and talk when I tried to do so.” The few who complimented him looked around first, or took him behind something, before doing so. Only the preacher’s wife had praised him openly—actually, to Fitzhugh’s wife, interrupting her bridge game. The three other women at the table kept playing, saying nothing.

• 1David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 72–78.