In September 1957, nine black teenagers broke the color line (the separation of black and white students) at a public high school in Little Rock,
Arkansas. The youths had voluntarily transferred to the formerly allwhite Central High School. Their transfer was part of a city plan to comply with a 1955 Supreme Court ruling that school boards desegregate
(stop separating the races) as quickly as possible. (See Desegregation of Public Schools.) These nine brave teenagers, who knew they would have
to face an angry white crowd to get to their new school, were soon called
the Little Rock Nine. The region’s segregationists—people who aimed to
keep the races separate in schools and other public places—led by
Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus (1910–1994), were preparing to stop
them at any cost.
Governor defies federal courts
Governor Faubus had tried to get a federal court to delay school integration. He argued that the delay would avoid racial violence, but the courts
did not support him. Faubus then ordered the Arkansas National Guard
to bar black students from Central High. On September 4, 1957, the
president of the state branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Daisy Bates (1914–1999),
led eight black students to the school, but they were turned away by
guardsmen at bayonet point (a bayonet is a pointed blade fixed to the
end of a rifle). The ninth student, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford (1941–), walked alone; a white mob jeered, cursed, and threatened her
as she narrowly escaped injury. Ten days later, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower (1890–1969; served 1953–61) invited Faubus to be his
guest at his summer home in Rhode Island and urged the governor to
stop disobeying court orders. A federal judge ordered the withdrawal of
Arkansas guardsmen from Central High. Faubus, however, remained
defiant.
Federal troops brought in
On September 23, the Little Rock Nine were escorted into Central High
by the local police. A mob of several thousand white segregationists had
gathered at the school to stop the children from entering. In a frightening scene, the police were forced to evacuate their charges from the
school to protect them from the violence. The mob situation was so
threatening the next day that the Little Rock mayor Woodrow Mann
(1916–2002) sent President Eisenhower an urgent request for federal
troops. Eisenhower did not support desegregation himself, but he reluctantly federalized the Arkansas National Guard (put them under the
management of the federal, rather than the state, government) and dispatched U.S. Army troops to protect the students. The following morning, more than one thousand soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division
accompanied the Little Rock Nine into Central High.
Army troops stayed in Little Rock for more than two months to
keep mob violence in check, and the National Guard units remained
until the school year ended in May 1958. Even so, the Little Rock Nine
suffered constant harassment by angry segregationists inside and outside
the school. One of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown (1941–), lost
her temper after repeated verbal and physical provocations and was
expelled in February 1958 for exchanging racial remarks with a white girl
(who remained a student in good standing).
Continued defiance
One year later, in September 1958, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that school desegregation must proceed in Little Rock. Faubus
responded by shutting down all of the city’s public schools for the
1958–59 school year. The Little Rock Nine did not go to school that
year. Only in August 1959, after the Supreme Court outlawed Faubus’s
scheme, did the public high schools reopen on an integrated basis.
Painful victory
The prolonged ordeal of the Little Rock Nine did not bring immediate
gains for the civil rights movement. President Eisenhower never
endorsed the Supreme Court’s call for school desegregation. In an opinion poll taken in late 1958, Americans selected Governor Faubus as one
of their ten most admired men. That fall, he won reelection by a landslide, and he remained virtually unbeatable in Arkansas politics for
nearly ten years. Faubus was just one of many white southern politicians
of that era who rose to national prominence because of their defiant
opposition to school desegregation.
By 1960, only 6.4 percent of southern black schoolchildren (and 0.2
percent of those in the Deep South) attended classes with whites. Still,
the Little Rock Nine received international acclaim for their courage in
seeking racial justice. Ernest Green (1941–) was the first black student to
graduate from Central High in May 1958. Whatever the personal cost,
he knew when he received his diploma that he had achieved a major victory in the movement for civil rights.