Today in History—September 25: The Little Rock Nine’s First Full Day of Class

At 9:22 am on this day in 1957—escorted by federal troops as a U.S. Army helicopter circled overhead and protesting students chanted “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate”—nine Black teenagers entered Little Rock Central High School to attend their first full day of classes.

This was not their first attempt.

Three weeks earlier 10 Black students, escorted by local ministers past hundreds of white protesters, were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard—at the behest of the state’s governor, Orval Faubus. Following this setback, one of the 10 students transferred to another school.

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On September 23 the Little Rock Nine, now protected by police, walked past a protesting crowd and into the school. But the crowd turned violent, attacking Black bystanders and out-of-state reporters, and the students were whisked away in police cars after only three and a half hours of class.

Later that day Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a presidential proclamation to “command all persons engaged in such obstruction of justice to cease and desist.” Ignoring this, another mob gathered on the 24th. Eisenhower then federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent a thousand members of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. Known as the “Screaming Eagles,” these troops arrived that night and secured a three-block perimeter around the school.

Although the Nine finally completed a full day of classes on September 25, their ordeal was far from over. They endured routine insults, a walkout (in which white students burned a Black effigy), bomb threats (one of which proved real when dynamite was found in an unused locker), and physical harassment. Despite this unrelenting racism, the first Black student, Ernest Green, graduated from Central High School in 1958.

Brown v. Board of Education had struck down segregation in public schools in 1954, but desegregation still faced an arduous uphill battle—one that wasn’t limited to the South. Indeed, mandatory busing programs in urban areas across the country gave rise to white flight, and state programs have continually undermined the Supreme Court’s ruling that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”