The Little Rock Nine and the Morning at Central High

On the morning of September 4, 1957, a fifteen-year-old named Elizabeth Eckford got off a city bus near Little Rock Central High School in a new black-and-white dress she had sewn for the first day of school. She carried a notebook. She was alone. The night before, the other Black students who planned to enter Central with her had arranged to meet and walk in together, escorted by ministers. Eckford's family had no telephone, and the message never reached her. So she walked toward the school by herself, toward a line of Arkansas National Guard soldiers who had been sent by the governor, and toward a crowd of white adults and teenagers who followed her, shouting. When she tried to pass the guardsmen, they raised their rifles to block her. She turned and walked down the block to a bus bench and sat there while the crowd closed around her. A photographer named Will Counts took a picture of that walk, with a white girl her age, mouth open in rage, close behind her. The image went around the world. It showed, in one frame, what the Supreme Court's promise of equal schools looked like when a state decided not to keep it.

In short: Three years after Brown v. Board of Education, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Central High. President Eisenhower, no crusader for civil rights, sent the 101st Airborne to enforce a federal court order. The Little Rock Nine's year inside the school and the court fights that followed settled that states could not defy the Constitution, and showed the cost of making children carry a country's change.

The plan that was supposed to be quiet

Little Rock was not supposed to be the place where this happened. After the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954, the city's school board was among the first in the South to say it would comply. Its superintendent, Virgil Blossom, drew up a plan for very gradual desegregation, beginning with the high schools in 1957 and moving down the grades over years. The plan was cautious to the point of being grudging, and the local NAACP sued over it as too slow. A federal court approved it anyway. Arkansas had a reputation as a relatively moderate Southern state. Its governor, Orval Faubus, had been seen as something of a moderate himself.

The Supreme Court's second Brown decision in 1955 had told districts to desegregate "with all deliberate speed," a phrase that many Southern officials read as permission to go slowly or not at all. Across the region, white political leaders signed on to a campaign of massive resistance. In Arkansas, segregationist groups pressed the governor hard as the school year approached, and Faubus faced re-election and challengers to his right.

From a larger pool of Black students who had signed up to transfer, nine were chosen and stayed with it through pressure and threats: Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls. They were good students from families who understood what they were asking of their children. Most were sixteen or younger.

A governor calls out the Guard

On September 2, the night before school was to open, Faubus went on television and announced that he was sending the Arkansas National Guard to Central High. He said it was to keep the peace and prevent violence. In practice, the soldiers were there to keep the nine students out. The federal judge overseeing the plan ordered desegregation to go forward. The school board asked the Black students to stay home the first day, and then the morning of September 4 came, and with it Elizabeth Eckford's walk.

She did not sit on that bench alone for long. A white woman named Grace Lorch, the wife of a teacher at a local Black college, came to her side and stayed with her until a bus arrived. A reporter from the New York Times, Benjamin Fine, sat beside her too. Accounts of who else helped vary, and the most important thing about the scene is not settled by any of them: a teenager kept her composure on a bench while adults screamed at her, and she got on the bus.

The other eight students, who had come together, were also turned back by the Guard that day. For nearly three weeks, the soldiers kept them out while lawyers fought in court. The organizer behind the students was Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas branch of the NAACP and co-publisher, with her husband, of a Black newspaper called the Arkansas State Press. Her home became the meeting place for the nine and their families, and it was attacked repeatedly. The Bateses' paper lost advertisers and eventually closed.

The side door, and a mob

On September 20, a federal judge ordered Faubus to stop using the Guard to block the students, and the governor withdrew the soldiers. On Monday, September 23, the nine entered Central High through a side door while a crowd of hundreds gathered in front of the school. When the mob learned the students were inside, it turned on Black journalists covering the scene, beating several of them. Local police struggled to hold the crowd back. By late morning, officials decided the students were in too much danger and took them out of the building in police cars.

By the next morning, with crowds gathering again, the mayor of Little Rock, Woodrow Mann, had asked the federal government for help.

Eisenhower's decision

Dwight Eisenhower was not a civil rights crusader. He had privately expressed discomfort with the pace the Supreme Court had set in Brown, and he had avoided strong public endorsements of the decision. He had met with Faubus earlier in the month in Rhode Island and thought he had a compromise. He did not.

But Eisenhower had been a soldier for most of his life, and what was happening in Little Rock looked to him like a direct challenge to federal authority: a state governor using troops, and then a mob, to block a federal court order. On September 24, he signed Executive Order 10730. It placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal command and sent soldiers of the Army's 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. That night he spoke to the nation on television and radio. He explained that he was acting to uphold the law and the authority of the federal courts, and he warned that the mob's defiance was damaging the country's standing in the world at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was eager to publicize American racism.

On September 25, the nine students walked into Central High surrounded by soldiers. Each was assigned a guard who followed them through the halls.

A year inside

The soldiers could get the nine into the building. They could not make the school safe. Through the year, a group of white students carried out a steady campaign of harassment: kicking, shoving, tripping, threats, ink thrown on clothes, objects thrown in the halls, a constant stream of insults. Many white students did not participate, and a few were friendly, but most stayed silent, and some who were kind were punished by their peers for it.

Minnijean Brown was suspended after dumping a bowl of chili on two boys who had been tormenting her in the cafeteria, and was later expelled after another confrontation. She finished high school in New York. The other eight kept going. In May 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior among them, became the first Black student to graduate from Central High. Martin Luther King Jr., then a young minister in Montgomery, came to Little Rock and sat quietly in the audience at the ceremony.

The Lost Year and Cooper v. Aaron

The fight did not end with graduation. The school board asked the federal courts to delay desegregation, citing the turmoil. The case reached the Supreme Court, which met in a rare special session in the summer of 1958. In Cooper v. Aaron, decided that fall, the Court rejected the delay unanimously. In an unusual step, the opinion was signed by all nine justices individually, a deliberate show of unity. It declared that state officials were bound by the Court's interpretation of the Constitution in Brown and that the rights of children could not be sacrificed to violence and disorder created by state officials themselves.

Faubus responded by closing Little Rock's public high schools for the entire 1958 to 1959 school year, under a new state law, a period residents later called the Lost Year. White students and Black students alike lost a year of public schooling; some white families moved their children to new private schools, while many Black students and poorer white students had few options. Business leaders and a group of white women in the city, organized as the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, pushed back, and voters recalled segregationist school board members. The high schools reopened in 1959. Desegregation in Little Rock moved slowly for years afterward.

Little Rock was not alone

It is tempting to treat Little Rock as a single dramatic exception. It was not. In March 1956, more than a hundred Southern members of Congress had signed a statement, widely called the Southern Manifesto, denouncing Brown as an abuse of judicial power and praising states that resisted it. That document gave political cover to governors and legislators across the region who were preparing to fight.

Virginia's leaders built a program of what they called massive resistance, passing laws to cut off funds to and close any school that desegregated. Several Virginia schools were closed in 1958 before state and federal courts struck the laws down. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, officials went further and closed the entire public school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate, while white children attended a private academy and most Black children went without formal schooling for years. Other states passed pupil placement laws, designed to keep schools segregated through paperwork rather than soldiers.

Against that backdrop, Little Rock mattered because it forced the question into the open. A governor had used troops; a mob had followed; and the president, however reluctantly, had answered with federal force. After Little Rock, no Southern official could claim not to know what the federal government would do when a court order was openly defied. The resistance did not end, but it shifted toward slower tactics: delay, legal maneuvering and the private academies that sprang up across the South.

What the morning still teaches

There are arguments made about Little Rock today that deserve an honest answer. One is that federal intervention in local schools always breeds resentment and backlash, and that change works better when it comes from communities themselves. Little Rock is often cited for that view. The trouble is that the community had made its own plan, a cautious one, approved by its own school board and a federal judge. What blocked it was a state government willing to use soldiers to defy the courts. Local control did not fail in Little Rock because Washington intervened. Washington intervened because a governor overrode local control.

A second argument is that Brown's goal has been achieved and race no longer belongs in school policy. The record is more complicated. Many American schools have become more racially and economically isolated since the high point of desegregation, as court orders ended and neighborhood lines hardened. Funding still follows property wealth in much of the country. The question the nine faced, whether a child's opportunities should depend on her color or her neighborhood, is not closed.

The nine themselves went on to full lives: in education, journalism, government, business, psychology and public service. Ernest Green served as an assistant secretary of labor. Melba Pattillo became a journalist and wrote a memoir of that year. Carlotta Walls was the first Black woman to graduate from Central. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented each of them with the Congressional Gold Medal. Central High is still a working public school, and part of it is a National Historic Site.

There is a detail in this story worth returning to. The white girl in the famous photograph, Hazel Bryan, apologized to Elizabeth Eckford years later, in private and then publicly. The two women met as adults and for a time tried to build a friendship, which did not last in the way both had hoped. That uneasy story says something true. Reconciliation is possible, and it is hard, and it is not the burden of the person who was wronged.

What you can do

The issues that met the nine at the schoolhouse door, who decides how children are assigned and how schools are paid for, are still decided by people you can reach.

• Get to know your school board. Assignment zones, school boundaries and transfer policies are set locally, often in meetings few residents attend. Speak during public comment, or run for a seat.
• Ask Congress where it stands on civil rights enforcement in schools. Federal offices that handle discrimination complaints depend on funding and staffing set by Congress. Find your representative and senators and ask.
• Follow how the courts are treating race in education. Recent Supreme Court rulings on race and schools continue to shape what districts can do. Court Watch lists the term's opinions with the Court's own summaries.
• Support the people doing the work. Civil rights legal groups and education equity organizations are listed by state in the organizations directory.
• Read further. Our page on racial justice collects coverage of civil rights, schools and the courts from many outlets.