Little Rock Nine

Little Rock Nine, group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. 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 center 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 and served as a major test of whether and how the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education would be enforced in the face of state and local resistance.

U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education

Beginning in the late 1940s, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) began challenging segregated school systems across the United States, including in Topeka, Kansas. Encouraged by the organization, a number of Black parents, including Oliver Brown, unsuccessfully attempted to enroll their children in all-white schools. On behalf of Brown and his daughter, the NAACP filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that the education—including facilities and teachers—offered to Black students in all-Black schools was inferior to that offered to white students. This disparity, the NAACP argued, violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which stated that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The case of Brown v. Board of Education was first heard in 1951, and the plaintiffs lost after a district court ruled that the Black and white schools were similar, citing the “separate but equal” precedent in public education set by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and affirmed in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927). The NAACP appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard the case—consolidated with three similar cases from South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware—in December 1952 and again in December 1953.

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List of Key Figures in the American Civil Rights Movement: Little Rock Nine

Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the opinion of the court on May 17, 1954, arguing that forcibly separating children by race created in Black students a feeling of inferiority that undermined their motivation to learn and deprived them of educational opportunities they would enjoy in racially integrated schools. Warren concluded that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The Court’s landmark decision overturned the precedent established in Plessy.

In a subsequent opinion decided on May 31, 1955, Warren ordered the district courts and local school authorities to take appropriate steps to integrate public schools in their jurisdictions “with all deliberate speed.” This failure to set time limits helped set the stage for years of conflicts over public school desegregation, most notably in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Opposition to integration in Little Rock

Almost immediately following the Brown decision, on May 22, 1954, the Little Rock school board announced that it would comply with the ruling. The board developed a plan, adopted on May 24, 1955, in which Little Rock Central High School would be integrated first, followed by the junior high schools in 1960, and then the elementary schools, with the entire district being integrated by 1963. The plan was approved by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas on August 28, 1956, and reaffirmed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on April 26, 1957.

Opposition to integration was fierce in the former Confederate states. Politicians across the region—including all of Arkansas’s U.S. representatives and senators—signed the Southern Manifesto of 1956, a document attacking the Brown decision and urging Southern states to use all “lawful means” to resist school desegregation. Arkansas segregationists appealed to Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus to stop the integration of Central High School and warned that desegregation would lead to rioting, violence, and bloodshed.

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On August 31 the Little Rock Board of Education announced that 15–20 Black students would enroll at Central High School for the 1957–58 school year and set September 3 as the students’ first day of school. On September 2 Faubus announced that he would deploy the Arkansas National Guard to prevent violence at the school. The next day, about 270 National Guard soldiers and 50 members of the state police armed with billy clubs, rifles, and bayonets blocked the school’s entrance. By employing the National Guard, Faubus—who had complained that the federal government was “cramming integration down our throats”—defied a federal court order requiring desegregation, while presenting his action as necessary to preserve public safety.

Warned by the Little Rock Board of Education not to attend school on September 3, the Black students, now numbering 10 (sophomore Jane Lee Hill would later drop out of the group, returning to Horace Mann High School), arrived the next day, most accompanied by a small interracial group of ministers, but three, including Elizabeth Eckford, arrived alone. They encountered a mob of nearly 400 white protesters in front of the school, who began shouting, throwing stones, and threatening to kill the students. Rather than assist and protect the students as they entered the school, the National Guard troops blocked the school’s entrance, and the students were turned away. Faubus reiterated that the purpose of the Guard force was to maintain peace, not defy a federal court order. Nevertheless, Faubus’s actions were the first time after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown that a governor used his power to block integration before violence occurred.

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

Federal intervention

U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Governor Faubus, and Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann, discussed the situation over the course of the month with each side hardening its position. On the evening of September 4, Faubus sent a telegram to Eisenhower asking him to stop the “unwarranted interference of Federal agents in this area,” warning that if his authority to maintain the peace in Arkansas was breached, he would not be responsible for the resulting violence and “the blood that may be shed.” He sought assurance from Eisenhower that the president understood Faubus’s goal was peace. In reply, Eisenhower wrote to Faubus that he would give no such assurance, and that, as president of the United States, his commitment was to the Constitution of the United States, writing, “The Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.” In light of Faubus’s intransigence in refusing to remove either the troops or the crowds of protesters who were gathering daily at Central High School, Mayor Mann pleaded for the federal government to take action, declaring that

[Faubus’s] words spell sedition, his defiance rebellion. His words and action echo another period in our history when irresponsible men plunged this nation into a tragic civil war. The president of the United States can no longer ignore the gravity of this situation. Time for realistic action is long-since delayed. The issue of integration has become secondary—the security and prestige of the United States of America is paramount.

Eisenhower and Faubus met in Providence, Rhode Island, on September 14. There, Faubus assured the president that he would obey the integration order, but also asked for the federal government to have patience and allow the school district to integrate on its own timeline.

Meanwhile, federal judge Ronald N. Davies rejected all petitions from the Little Rock school board to delay the integration order and ordered that the attorney general of the United States and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas file charges of interference and obstruction of the court against Faubus and the leaders of the Arkansas National Guard. Faubus was summoned to appear before Davies on September 20. The NAACP, the Little Rock Nine, and a contingent of segregationists appeared in Davies’s courtroom on that day, but Faubus did not; he was not in attendance when the court issued the injunction against him and the National Guard for obstruction. Later that evening the governor withdrew the troops, announcing his decision in statewide television and radio addresses.

During the negotiations the Little Rock Nine stayed home. With the National Guard removed, 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 the crowd of about 1,000 white protesters became violent, attacking African American bystanders as well as reporters for northern newspapers. The city and state police attempted to control the mob to no avail; the students spent a little more than three hours in the school before being sent home for their safety. In a telegram to the White House, Mayor Mann reported that the mob that had gathered around the school was not spontaneous, but “agitated, aroused, and assembled” by an ally of Faubus.

Eisenhower first responded to the mob action in a statement, saying that he would “use the full power of the United States, including whatever force may be necessary to prevent any obstruction of the law and to carry out the orders of the Federal court.” Later that same day he went a step further and issued an executive order—Executive Order 10730—directing, “Now, therefore, I…do command all persons engaged in such obstruction of justice to cease and desist therefrom, and to disperse forthwith.”

Eisenhower’s order was not heeded, and a crowd formed in front of Central High School once again on September 24. That morning, seeing a huge mob armed and “out of control,” Mann once again begged via telegram for Eisenhower and the White House to send assistance:

The immediate need for federal troops is urgent.…I am pleading to you as president of the United States in the interest of humanity, law, and order and because of democracy worldwide to provide the necessary federal troops within several hours. Action by you will restore peace and order and compliance with your proclamation.

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 next time the Little Rock Nine returned to Central High School, at about 9:25 am on September 25, the students were protected by U.S. soldiers.

Aftermath and legacy

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.

Resistance to Brown continued across the country and in Arkansas after that first school year. Governor Faubus, rather than permit desegregation, closed all of Little Rock’s schools for the 1958–59 school year, a period known as the Lost Year. (Faubus was reelected in 1958 and served as governor of Arkansas through 1967.) 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 the fall of 1959, and efforts to integrate schools and other public areas throughout the country continued into the 21st century. The September 1957 events in Little Rock demonstrated the federal government’s willingness to enforce desegregation, but also the persistence of organized resistance to racial integration.

In recognition of its role in the integration of public schools and the development of the American civil rights movement, Little Rock Central High School was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982. In November 1998 U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, an Arkansas native, signed legislation designating the school and its grounds as a National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service. The following year, Clinton, declaring the events of 1957 a “triumph of the rule of law and the American Constitution,” presented the members of the Little Rock Nine with Congressional Gold Medals in a White House ceremony.

The Scream Image: Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan, photograph by Will Counts, September 4, 1957

When it was determined that the Black students would attempt to integrate Central High School on September 4, Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP, called the students the night before to share the logistics for their entry: They would meet near the school and then enter together, accompanied by Black and white ministers. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, whose family did not have a telephone, did not get that message, and she rode a bus to Central High School and arrived alone.

Eckford’s harrowing experience walking through a crowd of hundreds of angry and screaming protesters before being turned away from the school by the Arkansas National Guard was captured by Will Counts, a 26-year-old white photojournalist who was born and raised in Little Rock. Counts’s iconic image captures Eckford, her face stoic and her eyes shielded behind dark glasses, being screamed at by another student, Hazel Bryan. Eckford endured obscenities and slurs as she courageously walked through the mob. The picture, which appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat before being distributed nationwide, viscerally illustrated the violent opposition the Little Rock Nine faced (and their steadfast commitment to nonviolent resistance) in their attempt to integrate Central High School. The Scream Image also demonstrated a central problem of the American civil rights movement: the gap between the federal expectation of automatic, if grudging, acceptance of legal rulings and orders (in this case the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education) and the reality of furious local opposition to integration. Federal enforcement was required to overcome this fierce resistance, and photographs like Counts’s drew national attention and stiffened governmental resolve in the fight for Black equal rights.