Las Animas - Bent County Library District

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, brought the promise of integration to Little Rock, Arkansas, but it was hard-won for the nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Central High School in 1957. They ran the gauntlet between a rampaging mob and the heavily armed Arkansas National Guard, dispatched by Governor Orval Faubus to subvert federal law and bar them from entering the school. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded...

When 14-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up to Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the "Little Rock Nine" would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change America. Descended from a line of proud black landowners and businessmen, Carlotta was...

Looks at the events surrounding the integration of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, the nine African-American students who broke the color barrier, and the impact on the civil rights movement.

Civil rights heroine Melba Patillo Beals puts readers right in her saddle oxfords as she struggles to understand and fight back against the laws that told her she was less just because of the color of her skin.

The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School--and a white girl standing directly behind her screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation throughout the South and an epic moment in the civil rights movement.

"In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that schools had to allow Black students to attend previously all-white schools. On September 4, 1957, nine Black students were set to attend Little Rock Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. But when they arrived, an angry mob of white people spat at them and hurled racist insults. They were also prevented from entering the school by the National Guard. After they were finally allowed in weeks later, they faced...

Two boys in Little Rock get caught up in the storm of the struggle over public school integration.

In September 1957, the nation was transfixed by nine black students attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Governor Orval Faubus had defied the city's integration plan by calling out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school. Newspapers across the nation ran front-page photographs of whites, both students and parents, screaming...