They were told to keep it quiet, and they did.

Two years before the Supreme Court made
integration the law of the land and five years before Central High
exploded across the national news — in fact, before any other school in
the state, as far as they know — the nuns of Fort Smith’s St.
Scholastica monastery invited a couple of girls who’d recently
graduated from an all-black Catholic grammar school to enroll in their
previously all-white girls high school.

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At the time, the nuns honored the
request of the bishop when he gave them permission to admit the black
students, and didn’t speak publicly about it. Now, though, the Fort
Smith Historical Society is making sure future generations will be able
to hear the story of St. Scholastica from the women who were there.
Society members are interviewing the surviving nuns from that era — now
mostly in their 80s and 90s — and preserving the interviews on DVD.

The project grew out of a similar
effort to videotape interviews with local World War II veterans, said
Joe Wasson, a historical society member who’s interviewed several of
the nuns.

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St. Scholastica’s new director of
communications, Maryanne Meyerriecks, “got the bright idea that if
World War II vets were valuable, perhaps 100-year-old nuns would also
be valuable,” Wasson said. “Of course we were delighted.”

Even after all these years, Wasson said, the sisters were at first hesitant to talk on the record about their experiences.

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“There was not everybody jumping up and
down going ‘Yay, some strange guy’s going to come out here with a
camera,’ ” he said. “They’ve lived a very quiet life out of the public
eye. But they are warming up now that they see nobody has died from the
experience.”

The integration of St. Scholastica
didn’t happen on someone else’s orders: The sisters simply decided,
after a long process of studying and talking about social justice
issues, that it was the right thing to do. Several of them had taught
at St. John, the Fort Smith Catholic grammar school that served black
students, and had seen first-hand the despair those students felt when
they realized they couldn’t continue their educations at a Catholic
school because of their race.

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(Catholic schools in Little Rock didn’t
start integrating until the mid-1960s, after all-black St.
Bartholemew’s High School closed.)

The nuns discussed it at length among
themselves, and with St. Scholastica’s white students and their
parents. If there was much resistance within that community, the nuns
from that time who are still living don’t remember it.

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Finally, in the summer of 1952, the
bishop gave the nuns permission to admit black students. Two girls —
Helen Weavers, a freshman, and Shirley Williams, a sophomore — enrolled
that fall. Williams was elected class treasurer, and went on to become
a doctor.

“Everybody said we were going to lose
students,” said Sister Norbert Hoelting, 94, who was a teacher at St.
Scholastica then and still lives in the monastery. “We didn’t lose a
student, not one.” (Our efforts to locate the women who integrated the
school have been unsuccessful.)

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Among the six nuns Wasson has
interviewed so far is Sister Consuella Bauer, an elf-sized 92-year-old
he describes as “my favorite human being on Earth.” Meeting her today,
bent and dependent on a walker, it’s hard to imagine Sister Consuella
doing something as audacious as informing the bishop, a decade after
St. Scholastica began teaching black girls, that she would no longer
abide by his dictate — born out of concerns about interracial dating —
that the girls not be allowed to attend the school’s prom, even though
they helped decorate the gym beforehand.

Tiny as she is, though, it’s also hard to imagine anyone saying no to her.

Her memories of those days can be a
little cloudy, but when she talks about them her voice is precise and
her words are unflinching.

“I thought it must be very hard for the
black students to be good enough to be part of the work but not
civilized enough to be part of the entertainment,” Sister Consuella
said of the prom issue. Then the principal of St. Scholastica, she
wrote the bishop a letter telling him her plans — and mailed it late
enough that he wouldn’t have time to intervene. She never heard back
from him about it, and from then on, the school’s dances were
desegregated too.

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There were other worries, too: How to
break down the social taboos that kept the white girls from inviting
the black students to socialize at their homes (eventually, girls on
the social activities committee made the bold move). How white parents
would react about a black boarding student (there was only one, Sister
Consuella said, and nothing happened). There was the time the ticket
agent at the “white” counter at the Fort Smith train station refused to
sell Sister Consuella — who in those days wore a full ankle-length
habit and head covering — a ticket for a black student, telling her
she’d have to buy it at the “black” counter. (“That tore me up,” she
said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed that we’d treat our young people
that way.”) And the time when Sister Consuella and other members of a
Catholic interracial council were overtly ignored when they sat down
together at a local restaurant. (When they finally got up to leave,
Sister Consuella said with a giggle, they made as awful a racket as
they could scraping their chair legs on the floor.)

Other than the occasional comment from
a city bus driver when he’d let the girls off at the school, though,
there was never any fallout from simply opening St. Scholastica’s doors
to black students, Sister Norbert said.

“I guess you always kept hoping the
other shoe wouldn’t drop,” she said. “We went through the first two
coming in, and nothing happened.”

After the first two, there were others:
Carmelita Gilliard, Areletha Miller, Sandra Edwards, more whose names
the sisters can’t recall now without looking them up.

And the students of St. Scholastica
continued to be active in racial justice issues. In 1968, the year the
school was to close for good, students joined in a protest with
students from Fort Smith’s other Catholic high school, the co-ed (and
by then integrated) St. Anne’s, against the bishop’s official
prohibition of interracial dating.

Part of a letter Sister Consuella wrote
the bishop in support of the students is preserved in an official
history of St. Scholastica:

“I feel in conscience bound to tell you
how I really and truly feel about this,” she wrote. “I think the time
has come, in fact is long past already, when the matter of who dates
whom can no longer be legislated. I think those who protest have a just
grievance.”  

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