The 101st at Central High: September 24, 1957

On the morning of September 24, 1957, paratroopers from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division landed in Little Rock, Arkansas. They had not come for a war overseas. Their mission was a high school.

Three years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Little Rock's school board agreed to desegregate gradually, starting that fall at Central High. Nine Black teenagers volunteered — Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo Beals. They wanted a better education, and they were willing to be first.

On the first day of school, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus sent the state's National Guard to ring the school and turn the nine students away, while an angry crowd outside shouted threats. A federal judge ordered Faubus to stand down, and on September 23 the students slipped in through a side door — only to be rushed back out by police when a mob of more than a thousand gathered outside. That night, Little Rock's mayor sent a telegram to the White House: send troops.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had hoped the crisis would resolve without him, acted the next day. He signed Executive Order 10730, federalized all 10,000 members of the Arkansas National Guard — stripping Faubus of his weapon — and ordered about 1,000 paratroopers of the 101st's 1st Airborne Battle Group from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, into Little Rock. On the morning of September 25, the nine students walked through the school's front doors escorted by soldiers. It was the first time since Reconstruction that a president had sent federal troops to the South to protect the civil rights of Black Americans.

The soldiers stayed for the rest of the school year, and the students endured months of harassment from classmates who opposed them. But they stayed. In May 1958, Ernest Green — the only senior among the nine — became the first Black graduate of Central High School, with Martin Luther King Jr. quietly watching from the audience.

September 24 proved that when a state defied the Constitution, the nation would not look away. The sight of paratroopers escorting teenagers to class told every American — and the watching world — that the federal government would enforce the law of the land. The Little Rock Nine became icons of the civil rights movement, and the school they integrated is now a National Historic Site.

Photo: xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).