On September 25, 1957, nine Black students walked into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, through a crowd of about 1,000 white protesters, escorted by about 100 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division with fixed bayonets. A side door was used. Inside, they were met with a year of shoving, spitting, name-calling and assault, and none of them finished the school year.
The legal position had been settled three years earlier. In Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954 the Supreme Court held that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and in 1955 it ordered desegregation to proceed with all deliberate speed. Little Rock's school board had drawn up a gradual plan in 1955 and had selected nine students for Central High in the spring of 1957: Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray and Thelma Mothershed.
Governor Orval Faubus turned it into a fight. On September 2, the evening before school was to open, he announced that he was calling out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent violence, and on September 4 about 270 guardsmen with bayonets formed a cordon around the school and turned away the nine students who came. Elizabeth Eckford, who had not been told of the change in plan, walked alone through the crowd, and the photographs of her, and of the white woman screaming at her, went around the world.
What ended it was the federal government. Judge Ronald Davies of the district court ordered the governor to stop interfering, and after three weeks and a failed negotiation with Faubus, President Eisenhower issued Proclamation 3204 on September 23, federalised the entire Arkansas National Guard and sent about 1,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne to Little Rock. He spoke to the country about it the same night.
The nine students went in on the 25th and were withdrawn the same day when the crowd inside got out of hand. The soldiers stayed all year. Minnijean Brown was suspended in December for dumping chili on a boy who pushed her and was expelled in February. Ernest Green graduated in May 1958, the first Black graduate of Central High.
Faubus closed all four Little Rock high schools for the 1958-59 school year, and the city's schools stayed closed until a referendum on integration failed and the courts ordered them reopened in August 1959. The nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, and Central High is a National Historic Site, with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in what was once the gas station where reporters gathered.