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On September 4, 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus ordered National Guard troops to surround Central High School in Little Rock, to keep nine black teenagers from entering. His action was in direct defiance of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which said black students had a right to attend integrated schools. That same afternoon, a federal judge ordered Faubus to let the black students attend the white school.
The next day, when 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford set out for class, she was mobbed, spit upon and cursed by angry Whites. When she finally made her way to the front steps of Central High, National Guard soldiers turned her away. An outraged federal judge again ordered the governor to let the children go to school.
Faubus removed the troops but gave the black children no protection. They made it to their first class but had to be sent home when a violent white mob gathered outside the building.
President Eisenhower, saying "our personal opinions have no bearing on the matter of enforcement," finally federalized the National Guard, and, for the rest of the school year, soldiers walked alongside the Little Rock Nine as they went from class to class.
The next year, Gov. Faubus shut down all the public schools rather than integrate them. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "evasive schemes" could not be used to avoid integration, and Little Rock's schools finally opened to black and white students alike.
Fifty years later, the country continues to grapple with racial segregation in its schools. In Little Rock, a park ranger, a civics teacher and a team of 15-year-olds armed with tape recorders are revisiting the lessons of the past to help change the future.
Spanning two city blocks in a modest neighborhood south of downtown, Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., looks in 2007 almost exactly as it did 50 years ago.
In September 1957, nine brave Black students crossed a line of armed soldiers to integrate Central High, in the first major test of school desegregation after Brown toppled the notion of "separate but equal."
At its peak, the building rises five stories, an ornate pinnacle flanked on either side by three-story, tan-brick wings. Four stone statues stand watch above the front doors. Twin staircases spiral down from the entrance, spreading into a maze of sidewalks crisscrossing a wide, green lawn. In the middle of the lawn is a reflecting pool.
Though this is still an operating high school, on most days tourists stop here. They wander the grounds in clusters, pausing to stand next to the reflecting pool, pointing their cameras upward. They shield their eyes from the sun, squinting to read a sign bearing the school's name. They lean down to remind their children what happened here.
This September, Little Rock will honor the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine. The anniversary is more than a chance to look back and honor ordinary students who turned into heroes. It also is a chance to look forward, to see exactly how far we still must travel to achieve the promises set out in Brown.
'Neglect of history'
The 1957-58 school year at Central High left deep wounds, the kind that heal slowly. Some white residents in Little Rock report feeling vilified by the events of that year, while other residents -- black and white alike -- say the city still has a long way to go.
"When you think about what happened, there's a little bit of -- not embarrassment, that's not the word – but a discomfort in how to talk about it," says Laura Beth Arnold, an administrator with the Little Rock Independent School District. "We have an anxiety around it: 'If I dive into this, the class is going to have a discussion about race, and I'm not sure how to deal with that.'"
The event that drew international media coverage and pitted governor against president gets a paragraph in the school's civics textbook and is barely mentioned in some history books. As a result, many students and some teachers at Central didn't fully understand the story of the Little Rock Nine. Central High civics teacher George West calls this "a neglect of history."
"The doors of Central became the gates of change for an entire America," West says. "Yet so many students at Central knew virtually nothing about the events that happened here."
West has taught history and civics for more than 20 years, four of them at Central. He grew up in Little Rock; his father-in-law was the chairperson of the STOP committee, a grassroots movement in the late 1950s to support integration. As a trained oral historian, West was disturbed by his students' lack of knowledge.
Then, in 2005, Laura Miller from the Central High School National Historical Site picked up the phone and called West with a request: Could he help design a curriculum about the Little Rock Nine that would interest teachers across the country? Quickly, West said yes.
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