Troops Enforce Integration: Little Rock Opens

Nine Black teenagers walked through the front doors of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 25, 1957, escorted by paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division with fixed bayonets. The students had been blocked, threatened, and mobbed for three weeks. Now the United States Army stood between them and the white segregationists who had vowed they would never attend. The Little Rock Nine, as they became known, were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls. They had been selected from a larger pool of volunteers by NAACP leader Daisy Bates based on their academic records and their ability to endure harassment. Nothing could have fully prepared them for what they faced. Inside the school, the soldiers could not be everywhere. White students spat on them, tripped them in hallways, poured hot soup on them in the cafeteria, and shoved them down stairs. Minnijean Brown was suspended and eventually expelled after retaliating against her tormentors by dumping a bowl of chili on a boy who had been harassing her. Segregationist students wore buttons reading "One Down, Eight to Go." Ernest Green became the first Black student to graduate from Central High in May 1958, with Martin Luther King Jr. in attendance. Governor Faubus responded by closing all of Little Rock's public high schools for the entire 1958-1959 school year rather than continue desegregation, a move known as the "Lost Year" that disrupted the education of over 3,000 students of both races. The courage of the Little Rock Nine transformed the national debate over civil rights. Their ordeal, broadcast on television and printed in newspapers around the world, exposed the violence underlying segregation to an audience that could no longer look away. Each of the nine went on to distinguished careers in government, journalism, finance, and education. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded all nine the Congressional Gold Medal.