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Foreword Juan Williams Fifty years ago Little Rock, Arkansas, was the scene of a truly telling moment in American history. The president of the United States, the governor of Arkansas, and nine black children took center stage for several days as surrogates for Americans caught in the battle over the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the nation’s schools be racially integrated. That crisis brought federal troops into an American city and sparked fears of a second Civil War. There was shock on all sides of the events of September 1957. The first shock came with the raw sight of white mobs and the Arkansas National Guard, under orders from Governor Orval E. Faubus, blocking nine black children from entering the city’s Central High School. Another shock hit the American body politic when President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops, the 101st Airborne, into an American city to protect black people. The power of these events, filled with so much emotion, has had lasting repercussions over American politics, law, and public education for the last fifty years. Of course, Little Rock also changed the shape of American race relations. The passage of time has confirmed that American history was made in Little Rock much as we now understand the historical power of events at Plymouth Rock, Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor. The significance of Little Rock is so accepted that fifty years later the U.S. Mint issued a silver dollar commemorating the event. Statues of the black students are now in place for school children to admire. There is now a museum, run by the U.S. Park Service as a national historical site, dedicated to the events that took place that September at Central High School. College courses are taught about the history of Little Rock and massive resistance to school integration. Most telling of all, the nation still looks back to Little Rock as a critical spark to the modern civil rights movement and an expression of the nation’s ideal that all men are created equal. vii In fact, the lives of the young black people who integrated Central, the Little Rock Nine, also represent the rapid growth of the black middle class after better schools became open to black people during the 1960s and ’70s. Ernest Green, sixty-five, who became the first black student to graduate from Central High, earned a master’s degree in sociology and worked in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Melba Pattillo Beals, sixty-five, chairs the Department of Communications at Dominican University of California and wrote an award-winning book about her experiences at Central High; Elizabeth Eckford, sixty-five, is a probation officer in Arkansas; Gloria Ray Karlmark, sixty-four, moved to Sweden to work for IBM and later founded and edited the magazine Computers in Industry; Carlotta Walls LaNier, sixtyfour , started a real estate company in Colorado; Terrence Roberts, sixty-five, is a psychologist in California; Jefferson Thomas, sixty-four, fought in Vietnam and worked in government in Ohio for nearly thirty years; Minnijean Brown Trickey, sixty-six, worked in the Clinton administration and is a visiting writer at Arkansas State University; and Thelma Mothershed Wair, sixty-six, became a teacher. Part of their success comes from their ability to mix easily with black and white people and to comfortably join the social and professional networks that segregation kept from black people. In fact, most of the nine worked in mostly white organizations. And four of the nine married white people (three black women married white men, and one black man married a white woman). And researchers now confirm that school integration in the mode of Little Rock benefits students, especially minorities. In 2003 the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University collected data on black and Latino students who attended integrated schools indicating that those students “complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools.” Those successes are why fifty years after the Little Rock crisis the nation still uses Little Rock as a measuring stick for the promise of school integration and racial justice. And that measure is why it seems so deflating that American schools are still nearly as segregated in 2007 as they were in 1957. Recent studies show that nearly three-quarters of African American students , nationwide, are currently in schools that are more than 50 percent black and Latino, while the average white student goes to...

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