The Little Rock Nine and the Struggle for School Desegregation
Updated: Sep 4
On a September morning in 1957, a teenage girl named Elizabeth Eckford walked toward the entrance of Little Rock Central High School. Dressed neatly in a white blouse and skirt, she carried her books like any student would. Instead of being let in, she was met by an angry mob shouting abuse, and by soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard blocking her path. The photograph of her walking on alone, calm but visibly shaken, became one of the defining images of the American civil rights movement.
This was the start of the story of the Little Rock Nine, nine Black students whose fight to attend an all-white school tested the limits of the US Constitution and forced a reluctant federal government to act.
Quick Answers
● Who were the Little Rock Nine? Nine Black students who, in September 1957, became the first to attend the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, under federal protection.
● Why did Governor Faubus block them? Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to stop the students entering, publicly citing fears of violence, though most historians agree the real motive was political, aimed at shoring up segregationist support ahead of re-election.
● Did the students get into the school? Yes. On 25 September 1957, after President Eisenhower federalised the National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division, the nine students entered Central High under armed escort.
● What happened to the Little Rock Nine afterward? They went on to careers in journalism, the military, activism and business. In 1999 they were jointly awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, America's highest civilian honour.
Brown v. Board of Education and the Path to Little Rock
The events in Arkansas cannot be understood without going back to May 17, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483). The Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, striking down the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had legitimised Jim Crow laws for decades. The decision rested on the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
For civil rights organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the ruling was a green light to press for immediate change. Across the South, the NAACP tried to enrol Black students into previously all-white schools, testing whether states would truly follow the Court’s directive. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the school board reluctantly agreed to comply, approving a plan for gradual integration.
The Blossom Plan and Its Shortcomings
The first desegregation scheme came from Virgil Blossom, the city's superintendent of schools. What began as a proposal for broad integration was watered down by political pressure into something far more limited. The final plan, approved in 1955, called for desegregating just one school, Central High, in September 1957, with junior high schools to follow in 1960 and elementary schools left vague, possibly delayed until 1963.
Local NAACP figures, including Daisy Bates and her husband L.C. Bates, criticised the plan as designed to stall rather than deliver. A new “transfer system” let white students dodge integrated schools while denying Black students the same option, maintaining segregation under a different name. In February 1956, the NAACP sued the school board, setting up the confrontation to come.
Choosing the Nine Students
Nine Black students were eventually selected to attend Central High, chosen for their strong academics, attendance and character: Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed and Melba Pattillo. Each was an ordinary teenager, 15 or 16 years old, about to be thrust into history.
Governor Faubus and the National Guard Blockade
On 4 September 1957, the nine students tried to attend their first day of class. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard, not to protect the children but to keep them out, publicly citing fears of “imminent danger of tumult, riot, and breach of peace.” Facing re-election and pressure from segregationists, Faubus saw a political opportunity in defying federal authority. Former Arkansas Supreme Court justice James D. Johnson later claimed he'd tricked Faubus into believing a mob was already massing: “There wasn't any caravan. But we made Orval believe it.”
The sight of armed soldiers keeping children out of school made headlines worldwide, an awkward contradiction for a country fighting the Cold War partly on the strength of its claim to champion freedom. Elizabeth Eckford, who arrived alone that morning after a last-minute carpool change never reached her, later recalled an elderly woman in the crowd whose face at first “seemed a kind face”, before the woman spat on her.
Eisenhower Steps In
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, initially reluctant to intervene directly in civil rights disputes, acted once Little Rock's mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann, pleaded for federal help. On 24 September 1957, Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, federalising the Arkansas National Guard and sending in the 101st Airborne Division, roughly 1,000 paratroopers. The next day, escorted by soldiers with fixed bayonets, the Little Rock Nine finally walked into Central High. It marked the first time federal troops had been used to enforce civil rights since Reconstruction.
Life Inside Central High
Getting through the doors was only the start. Once inside, the nine students faced sustained harassment: spat on, shoved in hallways, insulted and, at times, physically attacked. In her 1994 memoir Warriors Don't Cry, Melba Pattillo Beals described a white student throwing acid in her eyes in a hallway, an injury a soldier from the 101st Airborne prevented from becoming permanent by flushing her eyes with water, and a separate incident where a group of white girls cornered her in a washroom and dropped flaming paper into her stall.
Minnijean Brown endured months of taunting before, in December 1957, she spilled a bowl of chilli on a group of boys who'd been tormenting her in the cafeteria and was suspended for six days. After further confrontations she was expelled in February 1958 and transferred to a school in New York. As she later put it, the students had been “warned not to fight back if anything happened”. Despite everything, Ernest Green graduated in 1958, watched by Martin Luther King Jr., who attended the ceremony.
Elizabeth and Hazel: A Photograph's Long Afterlife
The white teenager screaming behind Eckford in the most famous photograph from that day was named Hazel Bryan. Her story became almost as well documented as Eckford's own. In 1963, Bryan, by then married and using the name Hazel Massery, called Eckford privately to apologise; the two didn't speak again for decades. In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation, the photographer who'd taken the original picture arranged for the two women to meet again, and a new photograph of them together was released under the label “Reconciliation.” For a period afterward, the two women travelled together and spoke to schoolchildren jointly about what had brought them to Central High that day.
It wasn't a clean, permanent resolution. By her own account in a 2007 NPR interview, Eckford grew wary of the relationship as time went on, and the two women's contact cooled again by the early 2000s; Eckford later said she felt Bryan had never fully reckoned with what she'd done. When the “Reconciliation” poster went back to print, Eckford agreed to it only on the condition that a small addition be printed in the corner, a line of her own: “True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past.” The full, complicated story became the basis of David Margolick's 2011 book Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. Eckford has spoken since about living with post-traumatic stress in the years after her time at Central High.
Cooper v. Aaron: The Supreme Court Draws a Line
The chaos of 1957 produced one of the most significant Supreme Court rulings of the era. Worn down by the disruption, the Little Rock School Board asked a federal court for permission to delay further desegregation for two and a half years. When the case, Cooper v. Aaron, reached the Supreme Court in the summer of 1958, the Court rejected the delay outright and went further, ruling that no state official, governor or legislature could lawfully defy a constitutional interpretation handed down by the Court. All nine justices signed the opinion individually rather than issuing the usual single unsigned ruling, an unusual step meant to signal that the decision carried the full, undivided weight of the Court. Faubus didn't back down. He responded by closing the schools altogether.
The Lost Year
Faubus wasn't finished. In 1958, after the courts ruled against his further attempts to delay desegregation, he closed all four of Little Rock's public high schools for the entire 1958 to 1959 school year, a period that became known as the Lost Year, leaving both Black and white students without access to public education. Much of the white community blamed the Black community for the closures, and civil rights leaders like Daisy Bates became targets of intimidation. The schools reopened in 1959, though the tension and abuse continued.
The violence didn't stop once the doors reopened. On 9 February 1960, four weeks before her graduation, a bomb went off at the home of Carlotta Walls, the youngest of the Nine. No one was hurt, but police beat her father in a failed attempt to force a confession, then arrested a family friend, Herbert Monts, then just sixteen, who was later shown to have been coerced into confessing to a crime Walls always maintained he hadn't committed. He served most of a five-year sentence regardless. Walls returned to Central High the day after the bombing and graduated on schedule.
Legacy of the Little Rock Nine
The stand taken by the Little Rock Nine reverberated far beyond Arkansas as a test case for federal enforcement of civil rights. Central High is today a National Historic Site with a Civil Rights museum run alongside the National Park Service, and the Daisy Bates House, where the students often gathered for safety, is preserved as a National Historic Landmark. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded the Nine the Congressional Gold Medal. Their story has since appeared on a US postage stamp, a commemorative silver dollar, and in 2008 several of them attended the inauguration of Barack Obama, the country's first Black president. As Eckford put it at a 2023 film festival panel, she considers herself “a footnote to history.”
Global Impact
The crisis wasn't only a domestic story. US officials worried constantly about how images of segregation played abroad during the Cold War, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles reportedly concerned the events in Little Rock were damaging the nation's international standing. Washington increasingly understood that winning influence in Africa, Asia and Latin America meant showing genuine progress on civil rights at home, which meant the courage of nine teenagers in Arkansas carried consequences well beyond the schoolyard.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Little Rock Nine's connection to Brown v. Board of Education?
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) made school segregation illegal nationwide. The Little Rock Nine's 1957 enrolment at Central High was one of the first major tests of whether that ruling would actually be enforced.
Did all nine students graduate from Central High?
No. Minnijean Brown was expelled in February 1958 and finished school elsewhere. Ernest Green became the first of the Nine to graduate from Central High, in 1958.
Are any of the Little Rock Nine still alive?
As of this writing, several members of the group, including Elizabeth Eckford, are still living and have continued to speak publicly about their experience.
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Sources
6. 1957: Arkansas National Guard Blocks Integration of Central High (University of Central Arkansas)
