Ladies of Little Rock: Black Femininity and Respectability Politics in the Fight to Desegregate Central High School (PB) (2026)

Ladies of Little Rock explores the agency and activism of middle-class Black women and girls who led the movement to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. Misti Nicole Harper argues that these ladies assumed this responsibility as part of a broader legacy of middle-class Black women who wielded respectability politics as social justice strategy. Black women such as Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas state chapter of the NAACP, and the six Black girls of the "Little Rock Nine" proved their politically savvy and imminent respectability in Little Rock and on the international stage. Black ladies threatened the precarious social position of working-class white women and girls whose lone claim to social privilege was their whiteness and who spearheaded massive resistance as a direct reaction to the challenge that middle-class Black ladies posed.