The Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the Supreme Court took a step in history with the Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka by stating that, “In the field of public education the doctrine of вЂ?separate but equal’, has no place. Separate facilities are inheritably unequal.” Little Rock, Arkansas a city in the upper south became a location of a controversial attempt to put the court order into effect when nine African American students were chosen to desegregate Central High in Little Rock. How did the Little Rock Nine affect America? Sanford Wexler stated in The Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History,” its “effect would ripple across the nation and influence the growing Civil Rights Movement;” in addition, the Little Rock crisis forced the federal government to come down on state government in order to protect the rights of African Americans.

In September 1957, nine African American high school students set off to be the first African American students to desegregate the all white Central High School. The six agirls and the three boys were selected by their brightness and capability of ignoring threats of the white students at Central High. This was all part of the Little Rock school board’s plan to desegregate the city schools gradually, by starting with a small group of kids at a single high school. However, the plan turned out to be a lot more complex when Governor Orval Faubus decided not to let the nine enter the school.

Orval Faubus had never been enthusiastic about segregation, but he was running for reelection and wanted to get the vote of the extreme segregationists. Faubus went on television the night before school opened, and declared publicly that it would “not be possible to restore or maintain order….if forcible integration is carried out tomorrow.” The following day, two hundred National Guardsmen surrounded Central High and blocked the nine African American students from entering. Faubus had now openly defied court orders, which would bring the federal government into action.

“If…he hoped to outbluff the former Allied supreme commander in World War II by barking commands at state reserve units, the governor was out of his depth,” said Robert Weisbrot in Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower the former supreme commander wasn’t going to let Faubus defy the federal government. Eisenhower met with Faubus to make sure that Faubus would do what the federal government ordered. After their meeting, Faubus made no attempt to fix anything which caused Eisenhower to federalize the National Guard and to send the 101st Airborne Division to protect the nine African American students. The soldiers escorted the African American students into Central High and to all their classes.

The soldiers were able to stop protests outside of Central High, but inside the school, racism was still present.

[The students] were subjects of unspeakable hatred. White students yelled insults in the halls and during class. They beat up the black students, particularly the boys. They walked on the heels of the black until they bled. They destroyed the black student’s lockers and threw flaming paper wads at them in the bathrooms. They threw lighted sticks of dynamite at Melba Pattillo Beals, stabbed her, and sprayed acid in her eyes. The acid was so strong that had her 101st guard not splashed water on her face immediately, she would have been blind for the rest of her life. White students protested the nine being in school, some by leaving.

There was no way for the nine students to escape racism even if the National Guard was there. White students taunted the African American students everyday, which eventually led Minnijean Brown, one of the nine, to talk back to one of the white students. She was given a warning and when another student provoked her in a lunch line, she couldn’t take it and poured her chili over his head. That was her last day at Central High. The eight remaining African American students finished the year and one of them was able to graduate. The following year, Orval Faubus shut down all of the public schools in Little Rock to stop integration. Federal action was needed again to reopen the schools the next fall and to let integration go forward slowly.

The importance of the Little Rock crisis was much bigger then integrating a high school in Little Rock. The Federal Government showed that it was willing to use force if necessary against state governments in protecting the rights of African Americans. Even though the Federal Government was hesitant to enforce integration, it wasn’t going to allow state government to challenge federal authority.

This wasn’t the only situation in which the Federal Government had to show its power over state government. In 1961, The Freedom Rides forced President Kennedy to order the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce integration of interstate buses and trains and their terminals. If President Kennedy hadn’t stepped in, then the southern states would have kept the integration of bus terminals from happening in spite of the fact that two Supreme Court decisions had said that segregated bus terminals were unconstitutional.

The following year there was another serious crisis in state relations, but this time in Mississippi. James H. Meredith, an African American, wanted to enroll at the all white University of Mississippi. This situation was almost identical to the Little Rock Nine crisis. Governor Ross Barnett practically declared war on the Federal Government when he told Mississippians in a speech on T.V., “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. . . We must either submit to the unlawful dictate of the Federal Government or stand up like men and tell them, вЂ?Never.вЂ™Ð²Ð‚Ñœ It took numerous decisions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and five thousand Federal soldiers as well as three hundred Federal marshals to finally get Meredith enrolled.