Conflict Theory and Political Warfare: Reflections From Little Rock

Empirical Applications of Conflict Theory in U.S. Prekindergarten–12 Education

Table 1 summarizes theoretical frameworks that explain how educational systems perpetuate social injustice through mechanisms like class reproduction, tracking, and the hidden curriculum. Applying these frameworks allows for a critical analysis of the structural barriers in U.S. P–12 education. For example, Bowles and Gintis (1976), Oakes (1985), and Apple (2004) collectively show how curriculum and tracking reinforce social hierarchies. Additionally, Collins (1979) identifies credentialism as a gatekeeper to advancement.

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Table 1.

Contributions: Conflict Theories as Applied to Educational Institutions.

Theorist	Key Conceptual Framework	Dimensions of Social Stratification	Application to P–12 Education	Role of Educational Institutions	Example/Case Study Mentioned	Mechanism of Inequality (Inferred)
KARL MARX	Reproduction of the capitalist relation/ correspondence principle	Class (economic)	Schools sustain class structures through curriculum, discipline, and resource allocation to ensure systemic disparities remain intact.	A tool for maintaining social inequality and preserving the power of the dominant class	Systematic underfunding of Black schools in Little Rock	Resource control and exploitation of labor within a capitalist framework
MAX WEBER	Multidimensional approach to social stratification	Class, status, and party	Educational contexts shape access to quality schooling (class), exclusive networks (status), and policy influence by school boards (party).	Arenas for broader struggles over resources, recognition, and authority	Political warfare surrounding desegregation efforts in Little Rock	Social prestige (status) and political organization (party) alongside economic capital
C. WRIGHT MILLS	The power elite	Political, economic, and administrative elites	Elite actors influence educational policy to maintain segregation and inequality despite legal mandates for equity.	Public institutions subject to elite control and state-sanctioned violence	Resistance of elites to civil rights reforms at Central High School	Established elite control of institutional direction and policy-driven obstruction of reform
RANDALL COLLINS	Credentialism	Group competition/status recognition	Institutions position specific credentials as gatekeepers to economic and social advancement.	Battlegrounds for broader struggles over resources and social recognition	The experience of the Little Rock Nine seeking quality education	Credentialism used as a gatekeeping mechanism to maintain social hierarchies
GEORG SIMMEL	Generative potential of conflict/group identity	Group affiliations and social units	Institutional conflict shapes identities and fosters solidarities among marginalized students and their allies.	Sites where group identities are forged through conflict between students, teachers, and administrators	Solidarity fostered among the Little Rock Nine	Group competition and the generative/destructive consequences of institutional conflict

The desegregation of Central High School serves as a case study for these dynamics, illustrating how conflict theory can illuminate the interplay between structural inequalities, institutional practices, and individual experiences. For example, the underfunding of Black schools illustrates Marx's (2024) theories on resource allocation, while political resistance reflects Weber's (1978) focus on status and power. Furthermore, Simmel's (1955) analysis of group dynamics helps explain the solidarity of the Little Rock Nine, and Mills’ (1956) elite power theory contextualizes the broader political forces that sustained resistance to reform.

A Moral and Legal Precedent

Black families and communities have long valued education as an indispensable instrument of liberation and social advancement (Peoples & Foster, 2024). Ms Carlotta, the youngest member of the Nine, recounted how she and her family viewed education as essential to their identity and progress as Black Southerners:

Education is the key to success. Period. We (as students) were encouraged to get all that you could, to do as well as you could in school and the next step would be to go off to higher education. Not everyone could do that financially so some would pursue skills in labor and might start businesses. This is what kept families going and many (Black people) became teachers, doctors, lawyers. Those that had the opportunity to go to school, went to school and remained there to develop their companies etc. (For example) Sidney Williams was the first quarterback at University of Wisconsin. He became a patent attorney in Kalamazoo, Michigan. (As another example) many students had to get up early to come to Little Rock to go to school. Blacks who lived in other towns in Arkansas would come to Little Rock looking for a home to stay in so they could go to high school at Dunbar (an all-Black high school). Members of our families took kids in so they (these kids) could do that. You know, my grandfather built Central High, and he was very proud of his work, but his son could not attend the school he built, and he couldn’t imagine a time when I would be able to attend.

Furthermore, Ms Carlotta's account highlights the unrealized legal precedent of Brown (1954/1955) and foreshadows how the Supreme Court would later disregard the deeper inequities of segregated schooling as expressed by Black students, families, and communities. As Ms Carlotta stated, “I don’t get a buzz sitting next to White folk”—that the goal was never mere proximity to whiteness but rather access to an education due to them as American citizens and students. While Brown led to notable and considerable changes related to (some forms of) access for Black students, it also set a precedent that introduced new barriers, ensuring that full access to educational resources and related benefits remained withheld. As Ms Carlotta recalled:

We had excellent teachers with excellent education. They were creative. For example, I’ll never forget my mother telling me that one teacher, her English teacher could pass for White. So, when they were studying books like Gone with the Wind, that teacher, because she could pass for White and get into the theatres that we couldn’t, would go to the theater and see the movie and come back and discuss this with students. Fast forward to Central, some teachers were good, bad, and some that didn’t want to teach me. There was one teacher, a Spanish teacher, who should’ve retired before I got there, and she did—that October. She did not want to teach me. Many of us had these experiences. For example, there was a teacher that asked Terry, “Why are you staying here? Why don’t you just go back to your old school?”

Black educators consistently supported Black students and provided access to equitable education in ways that most White educators could or would not. This contradiction—between the moral precedent set by Black students and families as compared to the legal precedent set by the Supreme Court—reflects a deliberate refusal by dominant groups to address the deeper failures of Plessy (1896). Instead, Brown (1954/1955) offered only physical proximity to whiteness and stolen resources without a structural exchange to secure educational justice. Setting legal precedents that fail to address root causes exemplifies how dominant groups restrict competition for resources and maintain power imbalances while projecting an illusion of progress—securing strategic advantages in ongoing political battles.

Policy Violence Through Local Funding Structures

Federal agencies and legislation—notably the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937—delegated operational control to local authorities, institutionalizing segregated housing and barring Black citizens from the burgeoning suburbs (La-Brina, 2021; Schneider, n.d.). Even the service and sacrifices of Black World War II veterans failed to disrupt this “policy violence.” Although the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) was framed as universally accessible, it proved functionally ineffective for many Black veterans, who were systematically denied the home loans routinely granted to their White counterparts (Blakemore, 2025; Ware, 2021). Reinforced by redlining practices, these mechanisms effectively weaponized housing policy to pool resources for White benefit, cementing a persistent and structural hindrance to housing equity (Bell & Segal, 2025).

Relative to the educational landscape, this pooling of resources, through inaccessibility to loans and other practices for housing choices, resulted in underfunded schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods. As Ms Carlotta stated:

We had great teachers in junior high school. What we didn’t have was the latest books and materials. My father would often talk about how we (Black citizens) had to pay taxes but that the government didn’t give the tax dollars to Black people. Whites benefitted from taxes paid by us, including the poll tax.

Beyond tax mandates, the shift toward local control of school funding established a system of inequitable resource distribution that persists today (Allegretto et al., 2022; Kenyon, 2007). From a conflict theory perspective, the ruling class has historically leveraged these disparities to maintain social dominance (Mishra, 2013), systematically obstructing Black economic progress. This deliberate withholding of resources reflects a power imbalance where majority-White policymaking dictates the quality of education based on racial hierarchies.

These resource hierarchies were not merely socioeconomic accidents but were actively reinforced and mediated through the American legal system. While Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) codified “separate but equal,” the Brown (1954) strategy focused on physical desegregation rather than the funding inequities inherently responsible for the subpar experiences of Black students (Legal Defense Fund, 2026). By favoring nonspecific equality rhetoric over “but equal” financial mandates, the Supreme Court allowed pre-Brown disparities to persist (Black & Crolley, 2022).

This failure to address fiscal foundations of inequality solidified a durable precedent for local control, later championed in San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) and Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which characterized local governance of education as a “deeply rooted” American tradition (Epstein et al., 2022). By prioritizing local governance, these rulings enabled policymakers to restrict resources through district-level policy, hardening segregation into a permanent institutional framework. Ultimately, desegregation reconfigured systemic inequity rather than dismantling it. The locus of institutional violence shifted from explicit exclusion to structural neglect, ensuring that the redistribution of resources continued to favor White students while depriving Black students of equitable opportunities.

School Practices as Policy Violence

Following desegregation mandates, dominant groups escalated strategic warfare through white normative school policies that deepened academic disparities for Black students (White & Tefera, 2024). Beyond persistent funding inequities, the massive resistance movement—designed to uphold inequality and power imbalances through political rhetoric and manipulation (White, 2022)—further restricted access to resources and fueled a narrative portraying desegregation as harmful to “American” education. Tactics such as school closures, pupil placement laws, and other forms of intimidation targeting Black communities became staple practices (Skiba & White, 2022).

In Skiba and White's (2022) Ever since Little Rock: The History of Disproportionality in America's Schools, authors recount the experience of Minnijean Brown-Trickey who,

became the first Black student to be suspended from a majority white school and, only 2 months later, the first Black student in a white-dominated school to be expelled … She received a vastly different level of consequence than the two White students who were involved in the same incidents, a phenomenon that has been repeatedly replicated. Although she could not have known it at the time, Minnijean Brown-Trickey's experience has served as the paradigm for the use of exclusionary discipline for Black students from that moment on. (p. 4)

Since the rise of desegregation in schools, Black male students, in particular, have been disproportionately funneled into private prison systems through the preschool-to-prison pipeline (Skiba & White, 2022). Key entry points into carceral systems include zero-tolerance policies, disproportionate discipline, and biased special education practices (White et al., 2021). In a society where Black citizens struggle to access educational and other resources, those who have interacted with carceral systems face considerably more obstacles in attaining such capital.

Despite strategic legal efforts, Black citizens have yet to capture a rightful share of educational and other resources that could be leveraged for redressing current power imbalances. Without the educational resources to balance economic and social power dynamics, Black citizens do not have the instruments needed to fully exercise social change—an essential step in dismantling historical and contemporary barriers and recalibrating the hierarchy of citizenship.

Beyond Policy Violence

On December 17th, after a semester of … harassment, Minnijean was attempting to get to her seat in the cafeteria, carrying her tray with a bowl of chili. She was confronted by a group of White boys who had been harassing her for days. On this day, they set a ring of chairs between her and her chair and began taunting, encircling, and trying to trip her. For some time, she stood stock still, but finally tipped her tray, dumping her bowl of chili down the front of one of the boy's shirts. As a result of the incident, Minnijean was suspended, while the boy was sent home to change his clothes … After Christmas break, Minnijean returned to Central High. In the following weeks, she had a bowl of hot soup dumped on her by one of the boys involved in the chili incident. While leaving school one day, she was kicked in the back so viciously that she had to remain at home for several days until she could sit without pain. On February 6^th, she was being followed to homeroom by a White girl who for a period of 2 weeks had continually harassed her, stepping on the back of her shoes, kicking her in the legs, and calling her “nigger” repeatedly. As they entered the classroom, the girl hit Minnijean on the back of the head with her purse. Minnijean turned and screamed, “Leave me alone, White trash!” Since she was on probation after the first incident, she was expelled for the remainder of the school year, while the White girl received no punishment. Minnijean Brown-Trickey never returned to Central High, moved to New York and … began school at New Lincoln High School. (Skiba & White, 2022)

As Ms Carlotta's overall reflections illustrate, the harm endured by Black families in segregated Arkansas was a product of administrative design, not merely overt exclusion. Violence was embedded into schooling via mandates that ensured racial isolation, staffing decisions that drained resources from Black schools, and supervision practices that favored containment over empowerment. These bureaucratic barriers forced families into extensive support networks and profound sacrifices to navigate a system designed to diminish them.

Beyond policy design, this “educational” experience was enforced through systemic physical violence. Such acts functioned as tools of coercion and power maintenance (Christie et al., 2001), where the state penalized Black self-defense while granting impunity to White perpetrators. This dynamic reflects the ruling class's ability to leverage ideological control (Gramsci, 1971) and social stratification (Weber, 1978) to incite nonelite actors to defend dominant interests. The desegregation of Central High School epitomizes this political warfare: the state-sanctioned intimidation faced by the Nine serves as a definitive example of physical conflict used to suppress Black opportunity and reinforce existing hierarchies through terror.

Forcing a Limited Engagement of Conflict Strategies

Dominant groups deploy conflict strategies to secure power imbalances while stripping oppressed groups of the tools for resistance. By controlling educational resources, they curtail economic mobility and foster dependency, effectively obstructing Black citizens’ capacity to challenge systemic inequity. Political exclusion—enforced through gerrymandering, restricted voting, and exclusionary school districting (Tuck, 2009; Richards, 2014; Stephanopoulos, 2017)—further prevents marginalized communities from engaging in conventional political processes (Young, 2002). These hurdles are compounded by a legal system whose bureaucratic complexity acts as a gatekeeper, obstructing justice and insulating discriminatory practices from challenge (Fuchs, 2023).

During the era of “massive resistance,” segregationists leveraged media control and propaganda to marginalize liberatory viewpoints (White, 2022). Today, this legacy persists through meritocratic ideologies that prioritize individual effort over structural equity (Arrow et al., 2000). By reframing success as a matter of personal talent rather than a product of systemic access, these narratives erode collective action and disguise the mechanisms of collective dominance, successfully undermining organized resistance.

Enduring Inequities: The Unfinished Struggle for Educational Justice

By the time Ms Carlotta graduated from Central High School, Little Rock's population had dropped from 120,000 to 90,000 citizens—a loss of 30,000 residents in just three years (as stated by Lanier). She recalled that desegregation at Central High School had a profound economic impact: “Cooperations left. Fed Ex didn’t want to come and chose Memphis as their headquarters instead. Little Rock did not begin to experience any kind of economic revitalization until Bill Clinton's governorship.” Ironically, the 40th anniversary celebration of the desegregation of Central High School—the very event that moved segregationists to wreck the city's economic resources and mobility—ultimately helped reinvigorate a community that might have prevented an economic downturn had its White citizens appreciated and capitalized on the benefits of 1957's desegregation efforts.

Although the Brown v. Board of Education (1954/1955) implementation mandated physical desegregation, this implementation failed to rectify systemic funding inequities. Today, Black students and underresourced communities still face upwards of a 16% per-pupil funding gap compared to predominantly White districts (EdTrust, 2022). This disparity persists because public school budgets rely heavily on local property taxes, ensuring that districts with lower property values cannot match the resources of wealthier districts (Black & Crolley, 2022)—even as research confirms that robust funding is a primary driver of graduation and college attendance rates.

The desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School epitomizes the systemic hoarding of educational resources through anti-Black policy. Resistance extended beyond mere classroom integration; it represented a strategic effort to preserve White socioeconomic advantages. By leveraging local funding controls to stifle Black economic and political progress, the White establishment turned Little Rock into a flashpoint—demonstrating the lengths to which state systems would go to maintain racial hierarchy within American education.

While overt resistance characterized the 1950s, sophisticated modern mechanisms operated through more bureaucratized forms of exclusion, including school district gerrymandering (Richards, 2014), racially disproportionate disciplinary practices (Skiba & White, 2022), and certain “school choice” initiatives (Buras, 2011)—all of which siphon resources from underfunded Black communities. Little Rock remains a stark reminder of this enduring struggle. Amid today's political turbulence, advocates for educational justice must vigilantly monitor how these conflict strategies and harmful policies perpetuate systemic inequities against Black students and their families.

Conflicts over education and historical narrative are inextricably linked to the struggle for democratic possibility. Because education both reflects and dictates a community's future, dismantling systemic barriers requires acknowledging their historical roots. The stakes are high: addressing these modern manifestations is essential to creating an equitable landscape that empowers all students and realizes the broader promise of democratic ideals.