Little Rock, Ark. – Fifty years after federal troops escorted Terrence Roberts and eight fellow black students into an all-white high school, he says the struggles over race and segregation remain unresolved.
“This country has demonstrated over time that it is not prepared to operate as an integrated society,” said Roberts, a faculty member in the psychology program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
He and the other students known as the Little Rock Nine will help the city observe Central High School’s 50th anniversary of integration this week.
For three weeks in September 1957, Little Rock was the focus of a showdown as Gov. Orval Faubus blocked nine black students from enrolling at a high school with about 2,000 white students. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregated classrooms unconstitutional in 1954 – and the Little Rock School Board had voted to integrate – Faubus said he feared violence if the races mixed in a public school.
The showdown soon became a test for President Eisenhower, who sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in to control the angry crowds. It was the first time in 80 years that federal troops had been sent to a former state of the Confederacy.
Half a century later, there are signs of progress and strife in Arkansas’ largest school district, which is now 70 percent black.
A federal judge ruled this year that the 27,000-student district was unitary, or substantially integrated, and ordered the end of federal desegregation monitoring. The school has a nearby museum for the Little Rock crisis, and statues of the nine brave students stand on the grounds of the state Capitol.
In 1957, “I really didn’t understand at 14 we were helping change the educational landscape here in America,” another of the nine, Carlotta Walls LaNier, recalls. “All we wanted to do is go to school.”
When Faubus pulled Arkansas National Guard members from blocking nine students from entering the school, an inflamed crowd gathered to keep the black students out.
Relman Morin, an Associated Press reporter standing outside the school at the time, described the chaos as a “human explosion” when the nine students were slipped inside during a melee.
Eisenhower signed a proclamation approving the use of federal troops to enforce U.S. District Judge Ronald Davies’ desegregation order, and the students entered Central High under armed escort Sept. 25, 1957.
“That was a turning point in history because it said that, when push comes to shove, two of the three branches of American government will respond on behalf of integration as part of the fundamental American heritage,” said historian Taylor Branch. “It said that segregation is not compatible with American ideals.”
Despite the torment and legal battle, eight of the nine black students completed the school year.
Today, Minnijean Brown Trickey and the others said they’re frustrated with the school system nationally, not just in Arkansas, that they see as still widely segregated.
“We’re still living segregated lives based on culture and language,” said Trickey, who now works as a gender- and social-justice advocate. “Here we are in 2007, and we’re still playing the same game.”
