Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – This is the history they want to keep out of the schools. This is what they want us to forget.
It was this week in 1957 that the Little Rock Nine had to be escorted by Army paratroopers in riot gear in order to finally walk through the front doors of Little Rock Central High School.
All month, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had used the Arkansas National Guard to keep the nine black students from enrolling, and mobs of white citizens had surrounded and taunted the students to block their entry.
The nine were chosen to be among the first African-Americans to attend a segregated school in the South after the Supreme Court banned racial segregation in 1954. They were: Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls.
They were to have arrived together to enroll on the first day of school. But 15-year-old Eckford, whose family did not have a phone, did not get word of a last-minute change in meeting plans.
In her starched dress and sunglasses, she arrived alone. A mob of white students surrounded and stalked her as they hurled epithets (as captured in a legendary UPI photograph by Johnny Jenkins).
The nine would be forced to study at home for the next two weeks. Under international pressure, President Eisenhower finally intervened and pressed Governor Faubus to withdraw his troops.
On Sept. 23, 1957, the nine students, this time with city police officers, managed to get in by the side door. But when the crowd of enraged white citizens got wind that the black students had made it into the building, they broke into the school to hunt them down. The students had to escape yet again.
On Sept. 24, 1957, President Eisenhower had to send the 101st Airborne division of the United States Army so that the Nine could finally begin their classes.
But the resentments could not so easily be quelled. The Little Rock Nine would endure a year of taunts and harassment. They were spat upon, isolated and assaulted.
This is not ancient history. Many of the people in these photos are alive, influencing current generations.
#caste #history | Posted on 25/Sep/2023 21:48:45
