After Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used National Guard troops to block integration and a white mob threatened violence, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to escort the Little Rock Nine into school. It was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops enforced Black civil rights in the South, a direct test of Brown v. Board of Education's promise.
Three weeks earlier, on September 4, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford had walked alone toward Central High School's entrance only to be turned away by National Guardsmen and surrounded by a screaming mob, a moment captured in a photograph that shocked the world. Governor Faubus had called out the Guard explicitly to prevent integration, defying a federal court order, and for weeks the nine Black students chosen to integrate the school were kept out entirely.
Eisenhower, no natural crusader for civil rights, nonetheless viewed defiance of federal court authority as intolerable. He federalized the Arkansas Guard — taking it out of Faubus's control — and dispatched elite paratroopers of the 101st Airborne, the unit that had jumped into Normandy, to walk the nine students past the mob and into the building.
Inside, the physical danger eased but the ordeal did not end. Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Nine, later described being taunted, shoved, and having acid thrown in her eyes in the school's hallways throughout the year, often out of sight of the soldiers. Only Ernest Green, the sole senior among them, graduated from Central High, in May 1958, with Martin Luther King Jr. in the audience applauding. The Nine became enduring symbols of the courage required to simply attend school.
Key people: Dwight Eisenhower, Orval Faubus, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford