Little Rock Nine (1957): Integrating Central High School

The Little Rock Nine were nine Black teenagers who, in September 1957, tried to enrol at the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus used the state’s National Guard to keep them out, and a hostile crowd besieged the school, until President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to escort them inside. The crisis was the first great confrontation between a state and the federal government over the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against school segregation.

Background: Brown v. Board and the Blossom Plan

On 17 May 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional. A second ruling in 1955 ordered desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed”, a vague phrase that many Southern authorities treated as permission to delay.

Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, was regarded as relatively moderate. Its school board, under superintendent Virgil Blossom, adopted a plan for gradual integration beginning at the senior high level. Central High, a large and well-regarded school, would admit a small number of Black students in September 1957, with lower grades to follow over several years.

Across the South, however, resistance was hardening. In 1956 most Southern members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto” condemning the Brown decision, and segregationist groups such as the Capital Citizens’ Council organised in Little Rock. School officials screened dozens of Black applicants and in the end only nine students went forward.

The nine were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls. Most were 15 or 16 years old, and all had been attending the city’s segregated Black high school, Horace Mann.

Their adviser and protector was Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and co-publisher, with her husband L. C. Bates, of the Arkansas State Press newspaper. Her home became the students’ meeting point and was repeatedly attacked by segregationists. NAACP lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, handled the legal battle in the federal courts.

The governor blocks the door

On the evening of 2 September 1957, the day before the school year began, Governor Faubus announced on television that he had ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High. He claimed this was to prevent violence, but the guardsmen’s orders were to keep the Black students out. Faubus, a moderate on some issues, faced re-election pressure from segregationists, and historians widely view his decision as politically calculated.

Federal District Judge Ronald Davies ordered integration to proceed. On the morning of 4 September the nine tried to enter. Elizabeth Eckford, whose family had no telephone, did not receive the message to gather with the others and arrived alone. She walked the length of the school frontage through a jeering crowd, was turned away by the guardsmen, and sat on a bench at a bus stop until a white reporter and a white woman helped her leave. Photographs of the 15-year-old surrounded by screaming adults appeared around the world.

Mob rule on 23 September

For almost three weeks the Guard kept the students out. Eisenhower met Faubus at Newport, Rhode Island, on 14 September, but the meeting settled nothing. On 20 September Judge Davies ordered the governor to stop using the Guard to obstruct integration, and Faubus withdrew the troops, leaving the city police in charge.

On Monday 23 September the nine slipped into Central High through a side door. Outside, a crowd of around 1,000 people gathered, attacking several Black journalists and threatening to storm the building. By late morning the police judged they could not guarantee the students’ safety and drove them out in police cars. Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann, sent a telegram to the president asking for federal troops.

Eisenhower sends the 101st Airborne

Eisenhower had been reluctant to involve himself in desegregation, but he regarded defiance of a federal court as intolerable. On 24 September 1957 he signed Executive Order 10730, which placed the roughly 10,000 men of the Arkansas National Guard under federal command and ordered regular army troops to Little Rock. Around 1,000 to 1,200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division’s 327th Airborne Battle Group flew in from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that same day.

That evening the president addressed the nation on television and radio. He stated that “mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts”, and stressed that the troops were there to uphold the law rather than to take sides on segregation. It was the first time since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War that federal troops had been sent into the South to protect the civil rights of Black Americans.

On 25 September the nine students arrived at Central High in an army station wagon, surrounded by paratroopers with fixed bayonets, and attended their first full day of classes. Each was assigned a soldier as an escort inside the building.

A year inside Central High

The arrival of troops ended the mob scenes but not the ordeal. The 101st Airborne was withdrawn by the end of November 1957, leaving federalised Arkansas guardsmen, who often did little to intervene. Inside the school, a minority of white students waged a campaign of kicking, tripping, spitting, threats and verbal abuse, while many others looked away. Melba Pattillo later wrote that acid was thrown in her eyes; Jefferson Thomas was knocked unconscious.

Minnijean Brown was suspended in December 1957 after spilling a bowl of chili on two white boys who had been taunting her, and was expelled in February 1958 after a further confrontation. She completed her schooling in New York. On 27 May 1958 Ernest Green, the only senior among the nine, became the first Black student to graduate from Central High. Martin Luther King Jr. sat quietly in the audience.

Cooper v. Aaron and the Lost Year

In 1958 the Little Rock school board asked to postpone integration for two and a half years because of the disorder. The case reached the Supreme Court, which met in a special session. On 12 September 1958, in Cooper v. Aaron, all nine justices ruled that state officials could not nullify or delay the Brown decision, declaring that the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution was binding on the states.

Faubus responded by closing all four of Little Rock’s public high schools. A local referendum on 27 September 1958 backed the closure, and for the 1958–59 school year, known locally as the “Lost Year”, thousands of Black and white students had to find other schooling or none. A campaign by white moderate women and business leaders eventually removed segregationist members of the school board, and the high schools reopened in August 1959 with a small number of Black students. Carlotta Walls and Jefferson Thomas graduated from Central High in 1960.

By the numbers

Legacy

The Little Rock crisis showed that the federal government would, in the last resort, use force to uphold court orders on desegregation, a precedent repeated at the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the University of Alabama in 1963. Yet it also showed how effectively state leaders could slow integration: Faubus was re-elected comfortably in 1958 and went on to serve as governor until 1967, and most Southern schools remained segregated until the late 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and federal funding rules forced the pace.

Television and press photographs made the crisis a world story at the height of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union used the images to attack American claims of freedom. That international embarrassment was one reason Washington took civil rights more seriously. Alongside the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott, Little Rock helped make the struggle against segregation a national issue.

The nine received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1958 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. Central High, still a working school, became a National Historic Site in 1998. In 2005 a bronze memorial called Testament, showing the nine students, was unveiled at the Arkansas State Capitol.

Timeline

• 1954, 17 May: Supreme Court rules school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.
• 1957, 2 September: Governor Faubus orders the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High.
• 1957, 4 September: Guardsmen turn the nine students away; Elizabeth Eckford faces the mob alone.
• 1957, 20 September: Federal court orders Faubus to stop obstructing integration; the Guard is withdrawn.
• 1957, 23 September: The students enter the school but are removed as a mob gathers outside.
• 1957, 24 September: Eisenhower signs Executive Order 10730 and sends in the 101st Airborne.
• 1957, 25 September: The nine attend classes under military escort.
• 1958, 27 May: Ernest Green becomes Central High’s first Black graduate.
• 1958, 12 September: Supreme Court rules in Cooper v. Aaron; Faubus closes the high schools.
• 1959, August: Little Rock’s high schools reopen with integration.

Why it matters

Nine teenagers walking into a school became a test of whether the United States would enforce its own Constitution. Their courage under daily abuse, and the president’s decision to back a court order with troops, established that states could not simply defy desegregation, even though full integration would take many more years.