Little Rock Central High School

In the fall of 1957, a grand Arkansas high school became the front line of the struggle to enforce the Supreme Court's promise of school desegregation. When nine Black teenagers tried to enter all-white Central High, the governor called out the National Guard to stop them — and the president answered by sending the U.S. Army to escort them in. The 'Little Rock Nine' turned a schoolhouse into a test of whether the federal government would back the Constitution against a defiant state. It did, and the nation was changed.

When it opened in 1927, Central High was hailed as one of the most beautiful high schools in America, a sprawling Collegiate Gothic and Art Deco landmark. Three years after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed segregated schooling, Little Rock's school board agreed to admit nine carefully chosen Black students to Central High for the 1957 school year.

On September 4, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to bar the students from entering, defying federal court orders. Photographs of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford walking alone through a screaming mob flashed around the world. The standoff became a constitutional crisis between a state governor and the federal courts, watched anxiously at home and abroad.

President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, and on September 25, 1957, soldiers escorted the Nine into the school. They endured a year of harassment; Ernest Green became the first to graduate, in 1958. Rather than continue integration, Faubus closed all the city's high schools for the 1958–59 'Lost Year.' Still an active public school, Central High was made a National Historic Site in 1998.