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The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African-American students who enrolled in September 1957 at the formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional, was put to the test by their attendance at the school.

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Desegregation of Schools

In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America's public schools was unconstitutional.

Until the court's decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, or Jim Crow laws, requiring African American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate "with all deliberate speed."

Little Rock Central High School

In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.

The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.

Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: The Capital Citizens Council and the Mother's League of Central High School.

Who Were the Little Rock Nine?

Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African American newspaper.

Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations.

The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.

Orval Faubus

On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African American students' entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students' own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if Black students were allowed to enter the school.

The Mother's League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Ronald Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.

Elizabeth Eckford

The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.

Elizabeth Eckford's family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone.

The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.

Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely in the United States and abroad, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention.

Ronald Davies

In the following weeks, federal judge Ronald Davies began legal proceedings against Governor Faubus, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to persuade Faubus to remove the National Guard and let the Little Rock Nine enter the school.

Judge Davies ordered the Guard removed on September 20, and the Little Rock Police Department took over to maintain order. The police escorted the nine African American students into the school on September 23, through an angry mob of some 1,000 white protesters gathered outside. Amidst ensuing rioting, the police removed the nine students.

The following day, President Eisenhower sent in 1,200 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and placed them in charge of the 10,000 National Guardsmen on duty. Escorted by the troops, the Little Rock Nine attended their first full day of classes on September 25.

Numerous legal challenges to integration continued throughout the year, and Faubus repeatedly expressed his wish that the Little Rock Nine be removed from Central High.

Although several of the Black students had positive experiences on their first day of school, according to a September 25, 1957, report in The New York Times, they experienced routine harassment and even violence throughout the rest of the year.

Melba Patillo, for instance, was kicked, beaten and had acid thrown in her face. At one point, white students burned an African American effigy in a vacant lot across from the school. Gloria Ray was pushed down a flight of stairs, and the Little Rock Nine were barred from participating in extracurricular activities.

Minnijean Brown was expelled from Central High School in February 1958 for retaliating against the attacks. Harassment went beyond the students: Gloria Ray's mother was fired from her job with the State of Arkansas when she refused to remove her daughter from the school. The 101st Airborne and the National Guard remained at Central High School for the duration of the year.

Ernest Green

On May 25, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, became the first African American graduate of Central High.

In September 1958, one year after Central High was integrated, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools for the entire year, pending a public vote, to prevent African American attendance. Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration and the schools remained closed.

Other than Green, the rest of the Little Rock Nine completed their high school careers via correspondence or at other high schools across the country. Eckford joined the Army and later earned her General Education Equivalency diploma. Little Rock's high schools reopened in August 1959.

Did you know? Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. attended graduation ceremonies at Central High School in May 1958 to see Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, receive his diploma.

Little Rock Nine Aftermath

Several of the Little Rock Nine went on to distinguished careers.

Green served as assistant secretary of the federal Department of Labor under President Jimmy Carter. Brown worked as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity in the Department of the Interior under President Bill Clinton. Patillo worked as a reporter for NBC.

The group has been widely recognized for their significant role in the civil rights movement. In 1999, President Clinton awarded each member of the group the Congressional Gold Medal. The nine also all received personal invitations to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009.

Jefferson Thomas became the first of the Little Rock Nine to die when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 67 on September 5, 2010. After graduating from Central High, Thomas served in the Army in Vietnam, earned a business degree and worked as an accountant for private companies and the Pentagon.

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Little Rock Nine - Definition, Names & Facts | HISTORY

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The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine Black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

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Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the state's National Guard to block the teens' entrance the night before their first day in Central High classrooms on September 2, 1957. It was for the safety of the nine students, according to Faubus.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were illegal. The case, Brown v. The Board of Education, has become iconic for Americans because it marked the formal beginning of the end of segregation.

But the gears of change grind slowly. It wasn't until September 1957 when nine teens would become symbols, much like the landmark decision we know as Brown v. The Board of Education, of all that was in store for our nation in the years to come.

The "Little Rock Nine," as the nine teens came to be known, were to be the first African American students to enter Little Rock's Central High School. Three years earlier, following the Supreme Court ruling, the Little Rock school board pledged to voluntarily desegregate its schools. This idea was explosive for the community and, like much of the South, it was fraught with anger and bitterness.

On September 2, 1957 the night prior to what was to be the teens' first day in Central High classrooms, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the state's National Guard to block their entrance. Faubus said it was for the safety of the nine students.

On September 4, just 24 hours after a federal judge ordered the Little Rock Nine to begin attending Central High immediately, a belligerent mob, along with the National Guard, again prevented the teens from entering the school.

Sixteen days later a federal judge ordered the National Guard removed. Once again on September 23, the Little Rock Nine attempted to enter the school. Though escorted by Little Rock police into a side door, another angry crowd gathered and tried to rush into Central High. Fearing for the lives of the nine students, school officials sent the teens home. They did, however, manage to attend classes for about three hours.

Finally, 52 years ago today, on September 25, 1957, following a plea from Little Rock's mayor, Woodrow Mann, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent U.S. Army troops to the scene. Personally guarded by soldiers from the National Guard soldiers and the Army's 101st Airborne, the Little Rock Nine began regular class attendance at Central High.

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The "Little Rock Nine," as the nine teens came to be known, were to be the first African American students to enter Little Rock's Central High School. Three years earlier, following the Supreme Court ruling, the Little Rock school board pledged to voluntarily desegregate its schools.

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Sixty years ago, nine teenagers braved violent protests to attend school after the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional – but racial segregation in the United States is still alive and well.

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Minnijean Brown Trickey didn't intend to make a political statement when she set off with two friends for her first day in high school. She was, after all, only 15. "I mean, part of growing up in a segregated society is that it's a little sort of enclave and you know everybody," says Trickey, who is African American. "So, I was thinking: 'Wow! I can meet some other kids.'"

Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, seemed to have a lot going for it. "The black school was kind of far away and there was no bus," she says. "We went to get new shoes and we were really trying to decide what to wear. So we were very teenage-esque about it, just totally naive."

It was September 1957, the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, and nine black pupils little guessed they were about to plant a milestone in the struggle for civil rights to follow those of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Alabama later the same year.

Brown v Board of Education, the landmark 1954 supreme court ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional, should have meant she and fellow pupils could take their places at Central High. But Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, in the deep south, remained defiant and used the national guard to block their enrollment. The African American children were left in limbo for three weeks.

On the first day of term, the national guard were there to stop the nine entering Central High, where all 1,900 attendees were white. Three weeks later, on 25 September, the group braved a hostile white crowd, climbed the school steps and were escorted to class by US army troops. They became known and revered as the Little Rock Nine.

Eight of the nine are still living and will return to Little Rock on Monday to mark the 60th anniversary of the US's first major battle over school segregation. A day later, several will be in Washington to speak at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It will be a moment to reflect on how far the US has come in unravelling educational apartheid - and whether, in recent years, progress has stalled or even reversed.

The share of "intensely segregated" black schools has trebled over the past 25 years, according to research by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which warns of a "resegregation" taking hold. Trickey, who turned 76 earlier this month, asks bleakly: "What kind of country doesn't see education for all children to be the primary value? I think the US has two values: segregation, which they do so well, and violence."

Speaking by phone from her longtime home in Canada, she can still remember vividly the combination of segregation and violence that left her "whole body shaking with fear and shock" as a teenager six decades ago.

On 23 September 1957, the group did get into the building with police protection. But an angry mob of more than a thousand white people had gathered in front of the school, chanting racist abuse such as "Go back to Africa".

"I really think that we were afraid to look at the mob; at least I was," says Trickey. "So we just heard it and it was like a sports event, that sound, the roar, but it was a roar of hatred, and just thinking about it makes me shake."

She says of her young self: "I'm nobody. I've never been hated. I've been loved all my life. I'm beautiful. I'm smart. I just can't believe this. So I kind of describe it as having my heart broken. Of course, you know as an 'American' even living in a segregated society you do all the anthems and the pledges and you're hiding under the desk from the Russians, and so brainwashing works well. So the heartbreak was: 'I'm supposed to be living in a democracy. What? These people hate me. They don't know me. They want to kill me.'"

The mob started a riot and police decided to remove the students for their own safety. "At about 10am they said: 'You've got to come down to the office,' and we went down into the basement. They put us in these cars and the cops driving the cars were shaking. They had the guns and sticks and they were scared. 'Oh wow, this is scary.' Some of us were told to keep our heads down.

"Melba Pattillo Beals [another of the nine] says she overheard a person saying: 'Once you drive, do not stop.' So they quickly drove us out from the side, then later we watched TV and could see the mob was going to go inside."

The crisis was cause for Washington to intervene. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st airborne division. The soldiers escorted the students single file into the school for their first full day of classes and dispersed the demonstrators. The US's racial shame had been exposed, shown on TV and reported in newspapers around the world. "Negroes escorted into school," reported the Manchester Guardian, noting that two white protesters clashed with the soldiers and were injured.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at progressive thinktank Century Foundation, says he regards it as a turning point for the country: "We were accustomed to having schools segregated by race. We in essence had a system of apartheid in our schools that had been widely accepted in the south. The Little Rock Nine were an incredibly courageous group of African Americans that stood up and said this system of apartheid, which had been struck down by a supreme court decision, could not stand.

But although 25 September is the date people remember, troops remained at Central high school for the rest the school year and the Little Rock Nine ran the gauntlet of hatred every day. They were taunted, assaulted and spat upon by their white counterparts; a straw effigy of a black person was hung from a tree. They were kept apart in different classes so they could not vouch for each other's claims.

"It's the going back: that's the bravery, that's the courage," Trickey says. "It's the going home and saying: 'Wow, they're not stopping me, I'll go back no matter what.' There is no courage at the outset: the courage kicks in later."

Trickey was first suspended, and then expelled, for retaliating against tormentors who went unpunished. She was invited to New York to live in the home of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, social psychologists whose groundbreaking work showed the negative impact of segregation on African American children, and finished her secondary education. She eventually became an activist, environmentalist and social worker with a spell in the Bill Clinton administration.

Beals became a journalist and author and lives in San Francisco; Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the nine, became a property broker in Denver; Elizabeth Eckford served in the army, became a probation officer and lives in Little Rock; Ernest Green served in the Jimmy Carter administration and worked for Lehman Brothers in Washington DC; Gloria Ray Karlmark worked as an aerospace research technician and lives in the Netherlands and Sweden; Terrence Roberts became a psychologist and management executive in Pasadena, California; Thelma Mothershed Wair had a career as a teacher and worked with young offenders and the homeless, then moved back to Little Rock; Jefferson Thomas fought in Vietnam, became an accounting clerk with the defence department and died in Columbus, Ohio, from pancreatic cancer in 2010.

The nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by Clinton in 1999 and have met for reunions, particularly on anniversaries. "We're on conference calls and we're giggling and we say about ourselves that, when we get together, we become teenagers again," says Trickey.

But the legacy of Little Rock is non-linear, and cause for both optimism and caution. While significant strides were made towards desegregation in the 70s and 80s, a series of decisions by the supreme court between 1991 and 2007 authorized the termination of cross-district bussing, local court supervision of desegregation plans and limited use of race-based admissions. An interplay of race, class and geography is at work, including the middle class's ability to self-replicate by buying homes near the best-funded schools.

The Civil Rights Project at UCLA reported last year a "striking rise" in double segregation by race and poverty for African American and Latino students concentrated in schools that "rarely attain the successful outcomes typical of middle-class schools with largely white and Asian student populations". The year 1988 was the "high point" of desegregation for black students in terms of the share of students in majority white schools, it found, but since then the proportion of "intensely segregated nonwhite schools" (those with 10% or less white students) rose from 5.7% to 18.6% of all public schools. There is little sign Donald Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, regard this as a priority.

Speaking from the steps of Central high school for the 40th anniversary in 1997, Clinton warned: "Segregation is no longer the law, but too often separation is still the rule. Today, children of every race walk through the same door, but then they often walk down different halls. Not only in this school, but across America, they sit in different classrooms, they eat at different tables. They even sit in different parts of the bleachers at the football game."

The Little Rock Nine could be forgiven a sense of frustration at such uneven progress. "It's all institutional and it's all centuries old," says Trickey, "so we're seeing the result of policies that have been made over time. It has become more visible because the people who are running the country now are profoundly intentionally ignorant."

After the first black US president was succeeded by a man supported by white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, Trickey sees history coming full circle. "People went into their basements and pulled out the old signs that they used in Little Rock, in Selma, across the country. "Integration is a sin", "Integration is an abomination against God", "Integration is communism". They're using the same ones they used 60 years ago. But there will be young people like the Little Rock Nine who are gonna keep going; I'm trying to train as many of them as I can."

The US capital offers one glimpse of the wider trends. New research by the Albert Shanker Institute shows that, in Washington DC, 86.1% of the typical black student's peers are also black, and more than half the private school student population is white compared with less than 10% of public school.

DC Scholars public charter school, which opened in 2012, is just five miles from the dome of the US Capitol and the most powerful legislative body in the world. The school's bright, colourful walls include photos of the "scholar of the month!", a table showing percentages of students who improved their maths and reading scores and a series of university pennants including Harvard and Yale. There are 512 pupils, of whom 31% have disabilities - for example, learning disorders or ADHD - which is treble the national average. The student body is 100% African American.

Tanesha Dixon, principal of the middle school, explains this as being largely down to geography: "We are east of the river. This is a very black community. We have middle-class children and lower-class children; not every student is a 'latchkey kid' or from a broken home. We have a diversity because the black experience is not a monolithic experience."

She adds: "I'm not even thinking of the colour of their skin; I'm thinking of the quality of the education they're getting. The fact we've been able to provide a high quality of education east of the river every day is one of the reasons I keep coming to work."

Asked how the Little Rock Nine would react if they visited, Dixon says: "I would hope they would be shocked in a very good way, amazed at the calibre of discussion that schools are having. I would put my school against any in the city to read, write and do arithmetic. It's kind of cool to be a nerd here. Kids of colour are going to a school where they have access to great teachers and great resources."

The debates remain complex, progress uneven, the answers elusive. Justin Reid, director of African American programmes at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, says: "Little Rock was definitely a flashpoint in the civil rights movement and inspired activists, but it also galvanised many southern states in how they attacked integration efforts. They did it in a quiet, subversive way; they didn't want the media attention that was attracted in Little Rock. You saw legislators think carefully: how can we block integration?"

He adds: "I think the Little Rock Nine would have to be disappointed. We're regressing. The peak time for integration was the 70s and 80s. We now live in a society where there is more segregation than ever before."

Speaking by phone from Little Rock, Ernest Green, now 75, admits he is "disappointed" but insists he is also "pleased" by the evolution of the past 60 years.

"The US is still segregated by housing and employment, which are the two pillars we still have to struggle with," he says. "But I believe our experience will act as an inspiration to many young people. It may inspire some on the other side: there's probably a crowd that wants to go back to slavery, but we won't let them.

"I survived a year of Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor, in 1957. If we pace ourselves according to what Trump wants, obviously we'll go backwards. The idea is to continue the fight and push for equity in this country."

Green recalls a little-remembered line from Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in Washington in 1963, in which the civil rights leader argued that America had defaulted on its constitutional promise to citizens of colour, like a check that comes back marked "insufficient funds".

But King refused to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt.

"Dr Martin Luther King said the US had given black people a bad check; we're still waiting for the check to be honoured."

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Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation

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Minnijean Brown Trickey didn't intend to make a political statement when she set off with two friends for her first day in high school. She was, after all, only 15. "I mean, part of growing up in a segregated society is that it's a little sort of enclave and you know everybody," says Trickey, who is African American.

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They made history as the first black students in the United States to integrate an all-white school. Little Rock will honor the students who became known as the Little Rock Nine this month as the city commemorates the 60th anniversary of that pivotal moment in the civil rights movement.

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'I Had a Right to Be at Central': Remembering Little Rock's Integration Battle

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Sixty years ago, a group of nine students walked into a school and changed America. "I had a right to be at Central," one of them tells TIME

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They were subjected to constant verbal and physical harassment for the remainder of the school year, with Pattillo having acid thrown in her face, Ray being pushed down the stairs, and Brown being expelled for retaliating after a group of girls threw a purse full of combination locks at her. Brown's mother was even fired from her job because she refused to allow her daughter to drop out of school.

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The Lasting Impact of the Little Rock Nine

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On September 25, 1957, nine Black students courageously started their first full day at an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, amid an angry mob of students, pro-segregationist groups and a defiant governor.

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The nine African American students arrived on the second day of school, accompanied by a small interracial group of ministers, after being warned by the Little Rock board of education not to attend the first day of school. In front of the school, they were confronted by a large white mob who began shouting, throwing stones, and threatening to kill the students.

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Little Rock Nine, group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. The group-consisting of Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, and Thelma Mothershed-became the centre of the struggle to desegregate public schools in the United States, especially in the South. The events that followed their enrollment in Little Rock Central High School provoked intense national debate about racial segregation and civil rights.

During the summer of 1957, the Little Rock Nine enrolled at Little Rock Central High School, which until then had been all white. The students' effort to enroll was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which had declared segregated schooling to be unconstitutional.

Warned by the Little Rock board of education not to attend the first day of school, the nine African American students arrived on the second day accompanied by a small interracial group of ministers. They encountered a large white mob in front of the school, who began shouting, throwing stones, and threatening to kill the students. In addition, about 270 soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard, sent by Arkansas Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus, blocked the school's entrance. Faubus had declared his opposition to integration and his intention to defy a federal court order requiring desegregation.

The confrontation in Little Rock drew international attention to racism and civil rights in the United States as well as to the battle between federal and state power. Television and newspaper reporters devoted substantial coverage to the "Little Rock Nine," as the African American students were called.

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Governor Faubus, and Little Rock's mayor, Woodrow Mann, discussed the situation over the course of 18 days, during which time the nine students stayed home. The students returned to the high school on September 23, entering through a side door to avoid the protesters' attention and wrath.

They were eventually discovered, however, and white protesters became violent, attacking African American bystanders as well as reporters for northern newspapers. The students were sent home, but they returned on September 25, protected by U.S. soldiers. Despite Eisenhower's publicly stated reluctance to use federal troops to enforce desegregation, he recognized the potential for violence and state insubordination. He thus sent the elite 101st Airborne Division, called the "Screaming Eagles," to Little Rock and placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal command.

The Little Rock Nine continued to face physical and verbal attacks from white students throughout their studies at Central High. One of the students, Minnijean Brown, fought back and was expelled. The remaining eight students, however, attended the school for the rest of the academic year. At the end of the year, in 1958, senior Ernest Green became the first African American to graduate from Little Rock Central High School.

Governor Faubus was reelected in 1958, and, rather than permit desegregation, he closed all of Little Rock's schools. Many school districts in the South followed Little Rock's example, closing schools or implementing "school-choice" programs that subsidized white students' attendance at private segregated academies, which were not covered by the Supreme Court's decision. Little Rock Central High School did not reopen with a desegregated student body until 1960, and efforts to integrate schools and other public areas throughout the country continued through the 1960s.

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Little Rock Nine | Names, Significance, Facts, & Segregation

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Little Rock Nine, group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. The group became the center of the struggle to desegregate public schools in the United States, and their actions provoked intense national debate about civil rights.

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She was initially relieved to see the Arkansas National Guard surrounding the school as a mob of enraged whites shouted epithets and threatened to lynch her. The guardsmen, however, refused to let her pass as she approached. She realized the soldiers weren't there to protect her at that point.

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In 1957, federal troops were called in to help nine black students integrate Little Rock High School in Arkansas.

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Bates was tasked with preparing the "Little Rock Nine" for the violence and intimidation they would encounter both inside and outside the school. She taught the students nonviolent tactics and became involved with the parent organization at Central High School.

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Imagine showing up to your first day of school and being greeted by an angry mob and the National Guard. On September 4, 1957 nine African American students arrived at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. They made their way through a crowd shouting obscenities and even throwing objects. Once the students reached the front door the National Guard prevented them from entering the school and were forced to go home. The students returned on September 29 th. This time they were protected by federal troops. The students were able to enter the school, finally integrating Central High School. This group of students became known as the "Little Rock Nine."

Many schools in the South refused to admit black students, even though the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision decreed school segregation unconstitutional. Despite resistance Civil Rights organizations worked to enroll black students in segregated schools. In Arkansas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) recruited young girls and boys to integrate schools. Daisy Bates was the president of the Arkansas NAACP chapter. She was an expert organizer. Under Bates, the NAACP sued the Little Rock school board. Then she and her husband recruited nine students to integrate the all-white Central High School.

Bates took on the responsibility of preparing the "Little Rock Nine" for the violence and intimidation they would face inside and outside the school. She taught the students non-violent tactics and even became actively involved with Central High School's Parent organization. When the students were barred from entering the school the first time, Bates created a strategy to protect them from protestors.

Although the Supreme Court deemed segregation unconstitutional, the Arkansas governor refused to let the students enter. This clash between state and federal authorities culminated with President Dwight D. Eisenhower sending federal troops to protect the "Little Rock Nine." With the protection from the federal troops the nine African American students were able to attend Central High School.

By Arlisha Norwood, NWHM Fellow

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Imagine showing up to your first day of school and being greeted by an angry mob and the National Guard. On September 4, 1957 nine African American students arrived at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. They made their way through a crowd shouting obscenities and even throwing objects.

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Essay that traces development of the topic and the impact on schooling today 

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Essay that traces development of the topic and the impact on schooling today 