The traditional narrative of the Little Rock Desegregation Crisis goes something like this: Nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, attempted to desegregate Central High School in accordance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the district’s own desegregation plan. Violent mobs confronted the students on the first day of school, and initially, the Arkansas National Guard blocked them from entering the building under orders from segregationist Governor Orval Faubus. In response, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730 and sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation and usher the students into Central High.
This story of the Little Rock Nine is familiar to American school children. Textbooks often depict the final snapshot of the 101st Airborne paratroopers leading students up the school steps in 1957 as the finale to the desegregation crisis in Little Rock. It is a celebratory narrative where federal intervention supported Black students and assisted in successful desegregation.
There’s just one problem: systemic failures and inequality continued to plague education in America — including in Little Rock — well beyond 1957.
Even at Central High School, the hostility and institutional failures remained ongoing. After troops left the city, the nine students who integrated Central High — Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown-Trickey, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Terrence Roberts, Thelma Mothershed, and Jefferson Thomas — endured daily verbal and physical abuse. Brown-Trickey was eventually suspended for standing up to her tormentors, while her white aggressors went unpunished. Most teachers and administrators looked the other way.
The following year, in defiance of federal desegregation orders, Faubus shut down all Little Rock high schools — denying thousands of students of all races access to a free and public education. The goal was clear: halt desegregation at any cost.
In 1959, after a year of pressure from the Women’s Emergency Committee to Reopen Our Schools and a federal court order, Faubus relented and Little Rock’s public high schools reopened. But it didn’t end segregation. Instead, the practice morphed and changed form.
Middle-class white families moved to the suburbs or enrolled their children in private academies. White parents also had a new mechanism to evade desegregation: school choice. In 1965, a federal court approved Little Rock’s “freedom of choice” plan that allowed parents to choose which specific school in the district their children would attend. The policy faced opposition from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as offering “neither freedom nor choice” for Black students, who faced local intimidation and feared enrolling in traditionally white schools.