After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared segregated schools unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, Little Rock superintendent Virgil Blossom drew up a plan for gradual integration starting at Central High School in September 1957. The NAACP, with Daisy Bates guiding the effort, chose nine students with top grades and attendance records, including Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown and Melba Pattillo Beals. Meanwhile the district drew attendance zones and transfer rules that steered Black students toward Horace Mann High. Governor Orval Faubus, facing a 1958 primary, used a rumored violent white mob as a pretext to send the Arkansas National Guard to block the students on September 4, 1957. On September 24, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, federalized the 10,000 member Guard and sent the 101st Airborne to escort the students inside.
The episode weighs the Cold War pressure behind that decision: John Foster Dulles and Herbert Brownell warned that the Soviet Union was using images from Little Rock as propaganda, and the government circulated a booklet called The Negro in American Life in 15 languages. Inside the school the nine faced a year of abuse while being told not to fight back. After the courts rejected Faubus's request for a delay in Cooper v. Aaron, he closed all four Little Rock public high schools for the 1958 to 1959 Lost Year, until a moderate school board reopened them in August 1959. The hosts follow the group's later honors, from the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 to a 2022 ceremony aboard the submarine USS Arkansas.
Former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice James D. Johnson later admitted he tricked Faubus into believing an armed mob was descending on Little Rock.
Elizabeth Eckford, 15, arrived alone on September 4 after missing word of the group plan, and Guardsmen raised bayonets to block her path.
Minnijean Brown was suspended after dropping a bowl of chili on boys taunting her, then suspended for the rest of the year and moved to a school in New York City.
During the Lost Year, teachers under contract sat in empty classrooms, and the firing of 44 teachers and administrators in May 1959 turned the community against the segregationist board.
Ernest Green became the first African American to graduate from Central High, which is now a national historic site with a civil rights museum.
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