Little Rock Nine: About

Watch Videos

Who were the Little Rock Nine?

The Little Rock Nine, as the teens came to be known, were Black students who sought to attend Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957. The Supreme Court had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Three years later, states in the South finally began to face the reality of federally mandated integration. It was historic, and dramatic and for weeks on end, it was profoundly ugly.  Continue reading from Life

School Segregation and Integration

The massive effort to desegregate public schools across the United States was a major goal of the Civil Rights Movement. Since the 1930s, lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had strategized to bring local lawsuits to court, arguing that separate was not equal and that every child, regardless of race, deserved a first-class education. These lawsuits were combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in schools in 1954. But the vast majority of segregated schools were not integrated until many years later. Many interviewees of the Civil Rights History Project recount a long, painful struggle that scarred many students, teachers, and parents.  Continue reading from the Library of Congress' Civil Rights History Project

Learn More about the Little Rock Nine 

• Little Rock Nine (National Museum of African American History & Culture)
• Little Rock Nine: End of Legal Segregation (National Park Service)
• Little Rock School Integration Crisis (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library - primary documents)
• Little Rock Nine: Connecting 1957 to Today (Facing History and Ourselves)
• Little Rock Nine (Encyclopedia of Arkansas)
• Little Rock Nine: How Far have We Come? (The Atlantic)
• Little Rock Nine (History)
• Carlotta Walls LaNier, youngest member of Little Rock Nine, calls for community to come together (PBS Rocky Mountain)
• Little Rock Nine: American Activists (Britannica)