On this Day: Arkansas National Guard Bars ‘Little Rock Nine’ from School

The students—Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Minniejean Brown, Gloria Ray, Thelma Mothershed and Melba Pattillo—had previously attended segregated schools for black students in the area. Several of them were turned away by National Guardsmen on one corner of the campus. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford arrived alone at the north end of the campus, and was met by an angry mob before being directed away by the Guard.

The incident was to become a symbol of the widespread, and often violent, resistance to desegregation efforts in the U.S.

The Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. As schools across the South prepared to integrate, the Little Rock School District had planned a gradual desegregation that would begin at Central High School.

On Sept. 2, 1957, Faubus announced that he had called on the state National Guard to prevent violence at Central. Local officials advised black students who had registered there to skip the first day of classes on September 3, but a federal judge ordered the school board to proceed with desegregation the next day. Faubus ignored the federal order and enlisted the guardsmen to block the students’ entrance, and they were forced to return to their homes.

A few days after the incident, the guardsmen were removed in response to a judge’s order. The students were able to enter Central for the first time on September 23, while a mob outside of more than 1,000 people chanted “Two, four, six, eight … We ain’t gonna integrate!” The Little Rock police, fearing for the nine students’ safety, sent them home later that morning, where they remained until September 25, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to accompany them to school. The Nine remained under federal protection for the rest of the year.

On the 50th anniversary of the event, seven of the nine black students described their ordeal and its aftermath to The New York Times. Carlotta Walls LaNier spoke in an audio interview about getting respect from her white classmates: “I just never really found anyone, not that I was looking for it, but I didn’t find anyone to stand up and defend any of us, because of what might happen to them or their family. I think they respected me, even those hoodlums, thugs that harassed me, had some sense of respect, because they couldn’t get to me.”

Decades after the Little Rock incident, segregation and inequality in the American school system live on. In 2007, Time magazine wrote, “American schools are still nearly as segregated as they were 50 years ago. Almost three-quarters of African-American students are currently in schools that are more than 50% black and Latino, while the average white student goes to a school that is 80% white, according to a 2001 study by the National Center for Education Statistics. Similarly, a 2003 study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard found that 27 of the nation’s largest urban school districts are ‘overwhelmingly’ black and Latino, and segregated.”