Little Rock School Desegregation

Background

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal department, led by Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston, became involved during the late 1940s in a campaign to reverse the separate but equal principle reached in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537 [1896]).

After making a strategic decision that obtaining relief in state legislatures was nearly impossible because of Jim Crow laws that prevented many African Americans from voting, the NAACP decided to challenge segregation on the grounds that segregated facilities were separate but not equal.

After Houston's death in 1950, Marshall and the NAACP took up a series of cases that challenged school segregation. In the case that ultimately became known as Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a unanimous opinion that state laws establishing separate schools for African American children violated the U.S. Constitution. Two kinds of segregation can exist in schools and other organizations: de jure and de facto. De jure segregation is that which is mandated by law, and de facto segregation is that which occurs as a result of human behavior and custom.

Determining that separate facilities were inherently unequal, the decision in Brown v. Board of Education abolished de jure segregation and paved the way for integration. Though the ruling eliminated the legal justification for segregation, many state and local governments resisted the ramifications of Brown. For that reason, for the next several years the NAACP and others approached a variety of segregated white schools throughout the south to register black students, which would result in the integration of the schools. The Little Rock School District, located in Arkansas's capital city, had long maintained segregated schools. When approached by the NAACP in 1955, however, the Little Rock School Board agreed to enroll African American students in Little Rock Central High School, an institution that had long served only white students. The school board instructed Virgil Blossom, the superintendent of schools, to work with the NAACP to develop a plan to integrate Little Rock Central High School.

Working together with the NAACP and parents, Blossom formulated a plan for the gradual integration of the Little Rock public schools. Although his earliest preference had been to begin desegregating the elementary schools, parents wary of long bus rides to integrated schools convinced Blossom to begin with the high schools.

Pursuant to Blossom's plan, integration would begin at the start of the 1957 to 1958 academic year at Central High School, commence at the junior high school during the 1960 to 1961 school year, and proceed to the elementary schools during 1963 and 1964. The plan met with the approval of the NAACP and the Little Rock School Board. In anticipation of the integration of Central High School, the NAACP selected nine students to enroll there. Each of the nine had stellar academic records and outstanding patterns of attendance. These students, often referred to as the “Little Rock Nine,” were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls. In September 1957, they were prepared to enroll in Central High School, and the integration plan was approved by the district court.

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