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LITTLE ROCK, Ark.-When Diane Zook, the chair of Arkansas' State Board of Education, banged her gavel to bring the afternoon meeting into order on October 10, every seat in the cramped boardroom was filled. Nearly every inch of paint on the wall had been covered by a body before the fire marshal, concerned about capacity, ushered those standing out of the room. The crowd spilled into the overflow areas in a wave. Sixty-two years after the world watched Little Rock struggle to desegregate its schools, history seemed to be repeating itself.

Nearly five years ago, in January 2015, the state of Arkansas assumed control of Little Rock's public schools. At the time, six of the schools in the district had " chronically underperformed " on state exams regularly for several years; 22 superintendents had passed through the district in 32 years, creating a sense of instability. The state gives a letter-grade assessment to every public school, which is based on a combination of state-exam results and other metrics, such as graduation rates. Because of that instability, and the handful of 'F'-rated schools, the state believed the best way to steady the district was to take it over.

Legally, the state can take over a school district for a maximum of five years. For Little Rock, that deadline is rapidly approaching. To prepare, the state board came up with a plan that would return limited local control to Little Rock School District. The community would hold elections for a local school board, but the newly elected board would only be responsible for the schools that had not received an 'F' grade. The "failing" schools, which all have high minority populations, would still be under state control. The board's plan would effectively divide the district by race.

It was a shockingly brazen proposal in the town that holds a rarified place in the collective national memory over the fight for school integration. Less than a lifetime ago, the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School became a nationwide story. On September 4, 1957, three years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate facilities were inherently unequal, nine black students attempting to integrate Central High School were met by a mob, and the state National Guard. Governor Orval Faubus had declared a state of emergency and deployed troops to block the students' entrance. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered federal troops into the city to keep the peace and ensure desegregation. And now, in 2019, the state had proposed a plan that many residents argued amounted to an attempt to codify separate and unequal schools in the city.
Read: How segregation has persisted in Little Rock
School districts across the country have been resegregating. The number of students attending intensely segregated schools-those where 90 percent or more of students are nonwhite-has more than tripled since 1988, according to a 2019 report from the UCLA Civil Rights Project. "Segregation is expanding in almost all regions of the country," Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor who led the study, said in a release. "Little has been done for a generation." But the fact that resegregation was on the table here in Little Rock, where the struggle for integration is such an iconic part of the city's history, makes that fact strikingly clear.

Just before Zook gaveled the October meeting into order, I turned to an employee who had worked at the State Board of Education for three years. "Is it usually this packed?" I asked him. He laughed, and told me that there were typically about 20 people at state-board meetings, a far cry from the more than 100 bodies packed into the room and the untold more gathered outside. Then he pointed to the bottom of an agenda sheet. "Those four items," he said-a discussion of the state of Little Rock's schools, their ratings, the plan for how they would be governed, and what that governance would look like-"that's why all these people are here." The question of school integration had mobilized Little Rock 62 years ago; the same question, 62 years later, had mobilized it in the opposite direction.

The tensions over the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock did not leave when the news cameras did. Official desegregation and actual integration are fundamentally different things, and the latter became more difficult as the makeup of the city began to change. Residential segregation in the city has intensified since the '50s, as white families have fled the majority-black south and southwest parts of the city for North Little Rock. Locals note the divide at I-630. The schools north of that road tend to have more resources and more white students, and fare better on state assessments. The schools that are south of it tend to have more black students, and score lower on the state ratings.

As Alana Semuels wrote for The Atlantic in 2016, the fight over segregation in Little Rock's public-school system looks different now than it did in 1957. It's not a question of whether students of different races can go to school with one another, but whether they ever will. "What's stunning about today's methods of avoiding integration is that they are, by and large, legal, but they nevertheless leave black students stuck in schools that are separate and unequal," Semuels wrote. The students south of I-630 are still left with less.

Then, in 2014, Little Rock elected a majority-black school board for the first time. It made sense; at the time, two out of every three students in the Little Rock School District were black, according to a University of Arkansas database. And the two newly elected school-board members had focused their campaigns on addressing the district's inequality. But before they had a chance to do so, the local board's power was taken away. A few months after the election, on January 28, 2015, the Arkansas State Board of Education voted to take control of the Little Rock School District.

"They believed that the state could offer some more stability and bring some more healing to the Little Rock School District," Anika Whitfield, one of the co-chairs of the education advocacy organization Grassroots Arkansas, told me. With the takeover, the argument for local control of public schools had been turned on its head. Typically, conservatives argue that more local control is better-but here, a conservative-led state board was advocating for top-down intervention.

But stability did not follow. "Within the first year of the takeover, we had four superintendents," Whitfield said. When the state took over the district, six schools were failing its assessment; the state's 2019 data show that eight now are. After nearly five years, the state had not accomplished the fundamental goals of the takeover. Some residents of Little Rock were frustrated, but there was little they could do. When a locally elected school board is failing, members of the community can vote them out, Ali Noland, a parent in the district, told me. But when the school board consists of state-appointed officials, the same oversight is not possible. The relative feeling of powerlessness unified the community, Noland and other parents, elected officials, and advocates I spoke with told me. Black, brown, and white parents-wealthy and low-income families-all coalesced around the idea that they should have local control of their public schools.

Then at a special board meeting in September of this year, as the five-year deadline to relinquish control of the schools from the state's hands was approaching, the state board released its plan to return some control to the district. The plan created a tiered system. Schools that were rated as failing would operate under "different leadership" from the rest of the schools in the district, though it was unclear what exactly that meant. Only the top-rated schools in the district would be led by an elected school board. Each of the 'F'-rated schools, save for one, was south of I-630.
Read: Is school desegregation coming to an end?
The plan had been kept secret until the morning of the meeting, and advocates were furious. "We deserve one district, not a three-tiered district, not a segregated district, not a district with two leaderships," Vicki Hatter, a Little Rock-district parent, told the Associated Press. "We deserve one district, one full district, and a duly elected school board."

Mayor Frank Scott Jr., the first elected black mayor of Little Rock, stepped in with a compromise: a way out of seemingly indefinite state control, and out of the tiered system the state board was proposing. He suggested a transition period to complete local control. Under Scott's plan, a temporary board consisting of both state and city officials would oversee the entire district from January 2020 until November 2020, when a school-board election would be held; at that point, the locally elected board would reassume control of the district. Crucially, the temporary board would not be allowed to make any "consequential decisions," Scott told me.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson appreciated the mayor's input, and noted that a change to the plan the board had proposed was not off the table. Johnny Key, the state's education secretary, said he believed the mayor's proposal to be a "thoughtful approach to a very difficult issue." But several advocates believed that it did not return the district to local control fast enough.

At the state board's October meeting, both Scott's plan and the state's plan were on the agenda. "The decisions that they're making are concerning the futures of our most precious assets-and that's the students of our school district," Scott told me the day before the meeting. Judging by the overflowing crowd that showed up, the community agreed on the stakes.

The night before the board meeting, more than 2,000 people gathered outside Central High School for a candlelight vigil. Organizers had brought 1,000 candles, but quickly ran out. They sang, chanted, and swayed. Videos of the event went viral on Twitter.

Inside the boardroom the next day, the air-conditioning fought against the number of people in the room, many of them wearing red shirts reading We Support #OneLRSD or The Second Little Rock Crisis. After a lengthy presentation about the condition of some of Little Rock's failing schools and a brief discussion of Mayor Scott's plan, Chad Pekron, a lawyer whom Hutchinson had appointed to the state board in July, began to speak. Before the public-comment portion of the meeting, Pekron wanted to address the state board's proposal for a tiered school district.

"There's a significant role for the state to play in the schools, and in other schools in the state," Pekron said, explaining that the state is obligated to ensure that schools within its borders are "equitable and adequate" under the law. He spoke slowly and reservedly; this seemed to have been weighing on him. "I don't think we can accomplish what we want to for students as long as it's this going on," he said. "It's us versus you. That's not going to help the students." So he offered a motion: To return the district to unified local control "under a framework of state support for the schools that really need it." The audience applauded as Zook banged her gavel for order, but the cheering was tentative. Pekron's proposal sounded like a gesture toward goodwill with the community, but it was also confusing. What did "state support" really mean, for instance?

What exactly the new plan would look like, and how much the community would be involved in its implementation, was still up for debate. For the next hour, advocates, teachers, parents, and politicians stood to deliver comments. Many people said Pekron's motion seemed to address most of their concerns. The motion passed unanimously, and when it did, there was a pause in the room followed by more hesitant clapping. The plan was, at least, a step back from the one that would have segregated the district. But there had been little assurance that residents' voices would be heard in conversations about transitioning control of the school district back to the community.

As quickly as some goodwill had been gained by Pekron's motion, though, it was lost. The board's next agenda item was a surprise motion that had been tabled at the previous board meeting. As the September meeting was winding to a close, Sarah Moore, one of the state-board members, had offered a motion to derecognize the teachers' union, the Little Rock Education Association. It was the kind of consequential decision that Mayor Scott's plan would theoretically have blocked, and the kind that local residents were concerned the board would continue to make under the tiered system.

The tabled motion was brought back to life at the October meeting, and the board pressed ahead with it as the audience shouted protests that the members had not heard public comment on the matter. Zook ordered a vote to derecognize the teachers' union as the bargaining entity for the school district. One by one, each board member voted yes. The room was a swirl of anger and confusion. Just like that, any sense that the community and the board were on the same page was gone. As the next agenda item was raised, about personnel-policy committees, Ali Noland used her scheduled public-comment time to speak on the teachers' union instead.

"You just ceased recognition of the LREA without any additional public comment," Noland said, "and without explaining to anyone in this community why this is not an issue that can be left to be decided by a democratically elected school board." Zook said that a decision about the union needed to be made by the end of the month. But that explanation didn't satisfy Noland. "Please explain to the press and the public why you are taking these actions," she continued.

Zook paused for a moment. Then she moved on to the next issue on the agenda. "Shame!" a member of the audience exclaimed, and then another. Zook summoned the police to the front of the room.

"Somebody have some integrity," someone said.

"This is absolutely shameful," another man said as he left the room.

Zook gaveled as the crowd began to jeer at the board. "I have some new business if-" Zook was cut off. She paused.

"We are your business," someone yelled.

"This meeting is adjourned," Zook said, as the crowd erupted. For a full minute they stood and chanted, "Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame." People began filing out of the auditorium. The board members packed up. Cameramen moved in to get a better shot.

Suffice it to say the rift between the state board and residents of Little Rock was not mended during the October meeting, and the future of the school district is unclear. What is clear is that once again, the city of Little Rock has found itself in the middle of a national struggle over school segregation. But this time, the angry demonstrators are fighting for things to be fair.

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An Attempt to Resegregate Little Rock, of All Places

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark.-When Diane Zook, the chair of Arkansas' State Board of Education, banged her gavel to bring the afternoon meeting into order on October 10, every seat in the cramped boardroom was filled. Nearly every inch of paint on the wall had been covered by a body before the fire marshal, concerned about capacity, ushered those standing out of the room.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/24/little-rock-arkansas-school-segregation-racism

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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.