March 17, 2008
Lyon College News Bureau

When nine black children desegregated Little Rock’s Central High School in September 1957, 13-year-old Elizabeth Jacoway paid little attention. At the time, she had no concept of the history she had lived through.

It was years later as a doctoral student that Jacoway began to realize the importance of the Little Rock Nine. It was then she determined she, along with the rest of the world, needed to know the truth about what happened 50 years ago.

Jacoway will talk about her book Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (Free Press, 2007) at noon March 25 in the Mabee-Simpson Library on the Lyon College campus.

Jacoway said her lecture will build from her childhood in Little Rock where her eyes were closed to the realities of racial inequalities, to her graduate study and approach to the research, to the arguments and conclusions crafted in the book and to the ways the book has been received.

“This is a story that deserves to be discussed, thought about, and understood,” she said. “It is a story that our nation needs to understand. America’s racial dilemmas seem intractable in large part because we have settled for the easy answers of half-truths and feel-good solutions.

“As we enter an era of remembrance of one of the most promising moments in our national experience – the Civil Rights Movement – we owe it to the pioneers who made huge personal sacrifices, and to the silent, unnamed thousands before and since who have suffered the consequences of careless thinking on the part of their leaders and scholars, to make a rigorous examination of those hope-filled days so that we may move toward more clear-headed insights and more just solutions for the future,” she added. “As one of the Little Rock Nine commented at a conference recently, only when we acknowledge the full truth about the past will be able to get about the business of reconciliation and healing.”

Jacoway was the visiting associate professor of history at Lyon College from 1990-1991 and joined the Lyon College Board of Trustees in 2001.

A native of Little Rock, Jacoway lives in Newport with her family. She received her doctorate in American History from the University of North Carolina, and is the author of five books and 17 articles. A frequent speaker at community events and professional meetings, Jacoway has served with many regional and national professional organizations, including the Little Rock Central High Museum Visitors Center, the Arkansas Women’s History Institute, and the Southern Historical Association.

Jacoway was an assistant professor at the University of Florida from 1972-1975 and an associate professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock from 1975-1978.

Dr. Elizabeth "Betsy" Jacoway