Why this project?

In September 1957 the nation and the world turned to Little Rock, Arkansas, when Governor Orval Faubus defied the U.S. Constitution and used the National Guard to prevent nine African American teenagers from attending segregated Central High School. This test of Brown v. Board of Education appeared to end when President Eisenhower sent in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne to escort the students, now known as the Little Rock Nine, through the doors of Central High School.

This iconic chapter in the history of the American civil rights movement was years in the making and continues to influence public education in Little Rock. Digitizing this unique group of archival collections drawn from three institutions in Little Rock will provide scholars of civil rights, race, education, and the law the opportunity to study how one city created a system of segregated secondary education in the 1920s and then spent more than half a century dismantling it.

Before desegregation, African Americans attended Dunbar High School. Opened in 1929, Dunbar was the first accredited secondary institution for African Americans in Arkansas. Known as “The Finest High School for Negro Boys and Girls,” Dunbar’s graduates went out into the world and succeeded. The National Dunbar Historical Collection documents the history of a school and its graduates through an extensive oral history collection; numerous private photos, yearbooks, textbooks, term papers, and commencement programs; and a rare silent movie of the school called “A Day at Dunbar.” Among the alumni who donated papers to the collection are LTC Woodrow W. Crockett, a member of the famed “Tuskegee Airmen,” and his wife Daisy, both members of the class of 1939.

Dunbar High School fell victim to the Little Rock School Board’s attempt to stop the desegregation of Central High School by building two new high schools, one for blacks and one for whites, in 1955.  However, building the new high schools didn’t work; blacks did not like the “open air” design of their school and working class whites became increasingly irate that they would shoulder the burden of desegregation while the wealthy escaped.

The process of desegregation that started at Central High School in September 1957 continues to the present day. Both the crisis and the lawsuits are incredibly difficult to understand without having multiple perspectives. This is the strength of digitizing the collections associated with the crisis. They cover religion (Bishop Brown), education (Huckaby, Vice Principal), the law (FBI School Crisis Report), and a pivotal court case, Aaron v. Cooper, which resulted in closing the high schools for 1958-59 (Judge Lemley).

The videotaped interviews commissioned by Central High National Historic Site include detailed interviews with the Little Rock Nine and some of their siblings, some of the white students who tormented them during the 1957-58 school year, members of the Arkansas National Guard and the U.S. Army 101st Airborne, and members of the Women’s Emergency Committee. Lastly, the Records of the Office of Desegregation Monitoring follow the progress made toward desegregating three central Arkansas school districts.