Visiting Little Rock Central High School

It was a dark time in the history of our nation, when the civil rights movement was just gathering steam and across the country, American citizens were learning about racial inequality in the South. In 1957, the battleground was a public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. What the world saw in the newspapers and in film footage shown around the world was that it took 11,500 US soldiers from the 101^st Airborne Division to insure that nine African- American high school students could attend a previously all white public high school. Alabama Governor Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar the “Little Rock Nine” from entering the school. A crowd of several hundred angry residents and students cursed and hurled other epithets at the students. They spat at them and even when the students entered the school, students pushed them, tripped them, and threw food at them and exacted many other humiliations.  Despite the fact the United States Supreme Court had ruled segregation unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas), Governor Faubus and other segregationists believed that the court overstepped its bounds and violated the states’ rights clause in the Constitution.  Since the US Constitution did not address public education, under Article 10, how schools are run are the purview of the individual states. Interestingly enough, since the Brown case, the federal government has gotten more involved in public education enacting, for example, National Defense Education Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Visiting Little Rock High School was a sobering reminder to me of what has been wrong with American public education.  Having an up close and personal tour with a US Park Ranger ( Little Rock Central High School is a National Historic Site), enabled me to  visit the auditorium  and the  cafeteria and wander the halls. The school is still a functioning high school with over 2000 students. Visiting this school is a field trip that every teacher and future teacher should take as a reminder of what equality in public education was, is, and still needs to be. Of course if you teach in that part5 of the country and field trip for your students is doable, then by all means go. For more information, please check out this web site

http://www.nps.gov/chsc/index.htm

                        

c.2014

J. Margolis