The little Rock Crisis

Introduction

The civil rights movement was born out of a desire to change the fact that black Americans were regarded as legally, politically and socially inferior to whites. The 1950s saw a number of legal victories, such as Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, although it was soon realised that social and political action was necessary if more meaningful changes were to be achieved. The 1960s were characterised by wide scale, non-violent protests such as the March on Washington, the 'sit-in' movement, and the Freedom Rides. Committed grass roots activists, inspired by leaders like Martin Luther King, helped gain the major political victories of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Despite these triumphs, there was growing disillusionment in the late 1960s, resulting in an increased militancy among black groups, as institutional racism remained difficult to overcome and many blacks remained economically disadvantaged.

The little Rock Crisis is one of the nation's more notorious school desegregation conflicts, from multiple perspectives within the community. On September 4, 1957, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford stepped off a bus and turned quietly, apprehensively, toward Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. National Guardsmen ringed the school, weapons drawn. Elizabeth walked across the street and into a screaming mob of 200 whites. She kept her eyes straight ahead as she approached the impressive brick edifice of one of the city's best schools, until two Guardsmen raised their guns and stopped her. Her knees about to buckle, she turned around and walked back toward the bus stop. As the crowd swirled around, someone yelled, "Lynch her!"

The little Rock Crisis

This historical crisis notifies this inspiring and deeply discouraging story that has stark implications for the condition of education and race relations in America today. In 1957 Little Rock's all-white school board had chosen nine black students, out of hundreds of applicants, to "integrate" only one school. The action was in token compliance with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, but it evaded the intent of the ruling by sheltering the vast majority of white students, especially those from well-off districts, from full-scale desegregation.

After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the United States enters a period of 'reconstruction', or the reconciliation of North and South. As part of this effort, the federal government takes significant steps to extend the rights of citizenship to African Americans, steps such as the Reconstruction Act (1867), the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which collectively work to give blacks the rights of political participation, help provide for their economic recovery and form a bulwark against white resistance. African Americans, meanwhile, pursue education, ascend to political office, form new communities and advance their economic fortunes. By the late 1870s, popular support for black civil rights wanes, and the federal government pulls troops out of the South in 1877, marking an end to the era of reconstruction. Many of the gains made by ...