A week later, a small theater on Long Island opened a revival of the musical South Pacific. The nurse Nellie Forbush, having already confessed, "I'm a little hick!," got around to mentioning that she was from Little Rock. The audience booed and hissed so furiously that the show was stopped for three minutes. (Time magazine, September 23, 1957)

The Long Island crowd pretty well summed up the national view of Arkansas's capital and the thugs who were presumed to populate it. If any New Yorker knew better, he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. Indeed, the whole world-outside the once Confederate States of America-was in no humor to cut Little Rock any slack, not in 1957 or for many years afterward.

I've sometimes wondered whether poor Nellie would have provoked such anger if Rodgers and Hammerstein had kept her hometown as James Michener had it in Tales of the South Pacific-not Little Rock but the fictional little town of Otolousa, Arkansas. Or whether theatergoers would still have been outraged if they had considered that by the end of the story Nellie would come to her senses and face down her race prejudice, suggesting that perhaps Little Rock could summon the same courage-as indeed it did in a short time.

Maybe none of that would have made any difference. The die was cast for Little Rock and for Nellie when those first photographs of white louts attacking fresh young African-American kids on the streets of the Arkansas capital went flashing around the world. Little Rock's racial tumult was on the front page of the New York Times twenty-five times that fall, second in prominence only to the Soviet Union's launching of the satellite Sputnik.

The city of Little Rock itself was one of the victims that fall, but fifty years later that still has not penetrated the stubborn national memory. The rest of the country back then was not really interested in knowing that the mob at Central High represented only a tiny fraction of the city's white population-that, in fact, some of its members had come from as far away as Mississippi. Even now, mention Little Rock anywhere in the world and the invariable response is "Isn't that where they rioted over school integration?" Well, yes, it is, but...

Little Rock had taken several steps toward equal rights for black citizens before World War II. It had integrated its hospitals, buses, libraries, and parks. It held the segregated line on hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and water fountains. It finally integrated all facilities in 1963, after years of demonstrations and court rulings.

The eruption of ugly racism at Little Rock's Central High School in 1957 interrupted a trend toward racial moderation in Arkansas. Outlandishly enough, that eruption was touched off by a popular hill-country governor who had been perceived as a racial moderate, maybe even as a closet integrationist. If Nellie's parents in the little country town of Otolousa had existed outside of James Michener's imagination, they probably would have voted for Orval E. Faubus in the 1954 election and again in 1956. After he curried favor with the segregationists by using the National Guard to block the integration of Central High, who knows whether the Forbushes (Forbush is one of several spellings of the governor's name, by the way) would have supported him in the next election in 1958? If they had, they would have been part of a landslide victory for their distant cousin.

The state might have been relatively progressive on race during the 1950s, but the dominant view of white people there was pretty much the same as that of white people across the South. Ensign Nellie Forbush would have been abnormal if she had arrived on that Navy base in the Pacific miraculously free of prejudice. Here's the way Michener described Nellie's reaction when Emile de Becque introduced her to his mixed-race children, the offspring of a Polynesian mother:

Her entire Arkansas upbringing made it impossible for her to deny the teachings of her youth. Emile de Becque had lived with the nigger. He had nigger children. If she married him, they would be her step daughters. She suffered a revulsion which her lover could never understand. (p. 123)

She was the sort of person that Lieutenant Joe Cable's song was aimed at in the musical:

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate...

How many Long Island theatergoers would have noticed that the guilt-ridden singer, who was condemning the same quality in himself, was from Philadelphia? And how many would have gone on to reflect that the South did not enjoy sole ownership of American racism?

World War II would change Nellie, as it would many other Americans. She had joined the Navy hoping to go to strange places and meet people different from herself. She got more than she bargained for. But she came to terms with her past and overcame it. Back in Arkansas, the same changes began to take place.

Before the war, during the years when Nellie was growing up, few Little Rock citizens of either race paid much attention to the steadily building challenges to the old racial order. Most of those challenges were met in the relative obscurity of the courts. Then came the war and the cultural-exchange programs, you might call them, that American soldiers engaged in. Soldiers of both races came home from the war with their eyes peeled open. Like Nellie, they had seen people who were different.

Little Rock spent all of September 2007 in a very public commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Central High's integration. Speakers traced the whole story: federal troops restoring order; the ordeal and triumph of the nine black kids (all of them, now gray and full of success, back home for the event); the eventual more or less successful integration of the city's schools; and, shining through the entire celebration, Central High School itself-one of the nation's best in spite of everything, still sending large numbers of its graduates to the Ivy League every year. Central is now thoroughly integrated numerically, but like many other schools in America it is still noticeably self-segregated in the cafeteria and the parking lot and even in the classrooms when the teachers get tired of fighting it.

Nellie Forbush's town, half a century later, is utterly American. Nobody takes any notice of the integrated restaurants, restrooms, water fountains, and schools. Some of the big evangelical churches are racially mixed. The worst fear of the white supremacists has come to pass without rending the national fabric: interracial couples are seen in small but growing numbers all over Arkansas, frequently with the dreaded proof of miscegenation, the mixed-race children, all walking the aisles of the Wal-Mart stores. And American democracy, despite the prophecies of doom, keeps shambling along. Even in Little Rock.

Roy Reed, now retired, was a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette and the New York Times, and a professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal.

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