Five decades ago today, Thelma Mothershed, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas, Melba Pattillo, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls and Ernest Green, escorted by the 1,000 U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division under orders from President Dwight Eisenhower, marched to the accompaniment of racial slurs, in a single-file line, to integrate Central High School and mark their place in history.
Sept. 25 marks the first day the nine black students--dubbed the Little Rock Nine--successfully desegregated the all-white high school. Once the school day started, white classmates used physical and verbal abuse to terrorize the nine black students. "Clearly, none of us anticipated that it would be as difficult as it was," Ernest Green, the first of the nine to graduate, told The Washington Post. "But once we got there, all nine of us knew how important it was to stay. Backing down was not an option."
Today, the desegregation of Little Rock is being commemorated in many communities around the country. Yesterday, close to 1,300 gala attendees gathered in the Arkansas statehouse convention center to pay their respects, including former President Bill Clinton, an Arkansas native.
"It is easy to celebrate the courage of others for what they did 50 years ago. It is another thing altogether to build the world our children would like to live in 50 years from now," said Clinton to the crowd as he shared the stage with the honorees, according to The Associated Press.
In Little Rock, where Central has been designated a national historic site, recent events have included a legal symposium and an education town hall, with an address today by Clinton and comments by the Little Rock Nine themselves.
Green, the first of the nine students to graduate from Central High school, is now the managing director of public finance for Lehman Brothers. "It has been a tremendous boost for me," said Green in an interview with The Washington Post. "It provided me with opportunities I never would have otherwise had ... I had a tremendous window into the last half of 20th century."
Filmmakers Brent and Craig Renaud, white brothers from Little Rock, are doing their part to make sure the story of the Little Rock Nine is never forgotten with their 70-minute film "Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later." The provocative documentary, according to Craig Renuad, features mostly younger people attending Central today. Craig Renaud, 33, who graduated from Central in 1992, told The New York Times, "It's not experts, in terms of school desegregation or the achievement gap. It's just seeing those things through people's lives."
Despite the documentary highlighting the history of integration, students at Central still feel intellectually inferior to whites. "This indictment--and that's what it is--is not about Little Rock but the nation," Minnijean Brown Trickey, 66, said of the film to The New York Times. "The black kids in this documentary believe in their intellectual inferiority and the white kids believe in their intellectual superiority."
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