Tour Americana! Part Two (Little Rock)

My mother spent a portion of her childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, but when I stopped there around noon on November 1st, I was unable to locate the street she lived on. She had told me it was near the Governor’s Mansion, which I did manage to find—a modest two-story Colonial behind a wrought-iron fence in an otherwise iffy neighborhood. She also remembered that it was close to Little Rock Central High School, which she said she remembered well, although she did not go to school there. Then again, anyone, I would suspect, who lived through the 1950s in America, remembers this school. It was here that the 1954 Supreme Court integration mandate from Brown vs. Board of Education ignited a firestorm of southern bigotry. In September 1957, nine black students arrived to enroll at Little Rock Central High, but were met by an angry mob determined to resist integration. Eventually, the threat of violence swelled to such a point that the students were sent home.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, as righteously indignant as he was ornately named, wasn’t much help. He sided with the segregationists, who, determined to block the black students’ entry, had set up camp in front of the school. Governor Faubus sent in the police—not to disperse them, but to augment their numbers. The next day, at the request of Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann, President Eisenhower ordered the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school. At the same time, the President federalized the entire state’s National Guard force, effectively taking it out of Governor Faubus’ hands.

The students were enrolled and did attend classes that year, during which they were the victims of their white classmates’ racist calumny and occasional violence. Meanwhile, the protests from Little Rock Central High’s parents continued. By the end of the year, the Little Rock School Board—with the support of Governor Fabulus and the Arkansas State Legislature—decided to cancel classes for the entire next year rather than integrate the schools. Eventually, further court decisions forced the School Board’s hand, and classes were reopened in 1959—and begrudgingly integrated.

The school itself, it should be noted, was constructed in 1927 and is outlandishly beautiful—and immense. Its entrance is reached by two grand, mirrored stairways, which rise above a series of Italian archways, and a small reflecting pool. The building is triangular in shape, with twin two-story wings jutting outward as you face its front. Its size is all the more astonishing in the neighborhood of modest one- and two-story houses in which it sits. Across the street is a new museum, run by the National Park Service, which tells the story of the Little Rock Integration Crisis and honors the “Little Rock Nine,” as the black students who integrated the school came to be known. The museum opened just over a month ago, in September 2007.