United States | Segregation and Little Rock

Fifty years on

Race issues still run deep

|little rock

LONG before Bill Clinton was elected president, Little Rock was known for a much bleaker past. In September 1957, its Central High School served as the first important test of the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision. That case declared that state laws establishing separate schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities.

The test didn't go well in Little Rock. Nine black students faced a hostile white crowd when they tried to enter the all-white high school. Violence ensued, and Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering. In turn, President Eisenhower sent federal troops from Kentucky to escort the students to school. To protest, Mr Faubus shut down Little Rock's schools in 1958 and students had to go elsewhere in the state.

On September 25th, Mr Clinton, along with other local and national dignitaries, will gather on the steps of Central High School to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Central High School's integration, the nine students and their legacy. Little Rock has planned a gala, lectures and much else around the anniversary.

While this is all a polite and glitzy gesture, many see it as a way of covering up problems that plague the city. The area around Central High School is now overrun with abandoned houses used by drug dealers. There is little in the way of city infrastructure, although some developers are taking the risk and investing in the area. Murders are frequent.

Race issues still bubble in Little Rock. Earlier this year, the black-majority school board fired Roy Brooks, the district's black superintendent, because it said he favoured wealthy whites who wanted more schools in their neighbourhoods.

The district has been plagued with racial problems for decades. In 1982, a mostly black Little Rock school district successfully sued the North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special School District and the state, citing segregation. More recently, an election this month to the Little Rock school board descended into an unseemly row about race because one candidate was white and the other black. Some people wonder at all the hoopla. Central High School wasn't even the first school in Arkansas to integrate. That was in Charleston, a small town in the west of the state, two months after the Brown decision in 1954. With little fanfare, 11 black students went to school with 480 whites. Unlike the Little Rock Nine, few remember those students' names, nor do they have a statue on the grounds of the state capitol.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Fifty years on"

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