The Little Rock Nine is the name given to the nine students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. September 25 was the day the Little Rock Nine attended their first classes. What happened in Little Rock was one of the first big showdowns between segregationists and the US government following the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 that declared school segregation unconstitutional.
If September 25 seems rather late to you for starting public school classes, you’re right. The school year began on September 4. However, Arkansas’s governor, Orval Faubus, surrounded the school with 100 troops from the Arkansas National Guard. Although supposedly there to prevent bloodshed, what the guardsmen really did was prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school.
This is when the federal government got involved. Although no strong friend of the Civil Rights Movement, president Dwight Eisenhower wouldn’t stand to see the authority of a Supreme Court ruling flouted in Little Rock. So, he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to make sure the Little Rock Nine could get into school and attend classes.
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Aftermath of the Little Rock Nine
What happened at Central High School in Little Rock wasn’t the last big fight over school desegregation. In fact, when the Little Rock Nine began school in 1957, it wasn’t even the end of the story in Little Rock. Governor Faubus struck again when he ordered all Little Rock high schools to close rather than see them integrated in 1958. A court struck down the legality of this move in 1959, but by then, most Little Rock students had lost an entire year of high school.
Discussing why southerners hated school integration so passionately would require much more space than one blog post. So, I’ll provide one reason and encourage my readers to check out the immense trove of primary and secondary documents on this important subject. If I had to guess at the single most important reason for opposing school desegregation, however, I’d go with the fear of miscegenation.
Miscegenation, a fancy word for racial mixing, was one of the most important reasons for Jim Crow laws and segregation. Particularly, southerners thought they needed to protect white women from black men. This was to reinforce their stereotype of African American men as hypersexualized animals, another issue that would take pages and pages to explain in detail. Suffice it to say here that southerners feared school desegregation would encourage miscegenation, in part because if black and white children mixed with each other socially at school from a young age, they’d never develop the aversion to each other necessary to keep society segregated sexually.
This was one reason the reaction to the Little Rock Nine was so powerful. There are others, of course, and I encourage my readers to learn more about this important event from 1957.
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