… was authorized on this date in 1998.
On the morning of September 23, 1957, nine African-American high school students faced an angry mob of over 1,000 whites protesting integration in front of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the students were escorted inside by the Little Rock police, violence escalated and they were removed from the school. The next day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell to escort the nine students into the school. As one of the nine students remembered, “After three full days inside Central [High School], I know that integration is a much bigger word than I thought.”
This event, watched by the nation and world, was the site of the first important test for the implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954. Arkansas became the epitome of state resistance when the governor, Orval Faubus, directly questioned the authority of the federal court system and the validity of desegregation. The crisis at Little Rock’s Central High School was the first fundamental test of the national resolve to enforce African-American civil rights in the face of massive southern defiance during the years following the Brown decision.
