Segregation lingers in US schools 60 years after Little Rock occurred

Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK, ARK.

Among the most lasting and indelible images of the civil-rights movement were the nine black teenagers who had to be escorted by federal troops past an angry white mob and through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., on Sept. 25, 1957.

It had been three years since the Supreme Court had declared “separate but equal” in America’s public schools unconstitutional, but the decision was met with bitter resistance across the South. It would take more than a decade before the last vestiges of Jim Crow fell away from classrooms. Even the brave sacrifice of the “Little Rock Nine” felt short-lived – rather than allow more black students and further integration, the district’s high schools closed the next school year.

The watershed moment was “a physical manifestation for all to see of what that massive resistance looked like,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

“The imagery of these perfectly dressed, lovely, serious young people seeking to enter a high school ... to see them met with ugliness and rage and hate and violence was incredibly powerful,” Ifill said.

Six decades later, the sacrifice of those black students stands as a symbol of the turbulence of the era, but also as a testament to an intractable problem: Though legal segregation has long ended, few white and minority students share a classroom today.

The lack of progress is clear and remains frustrating in the school district that includes Central High. The Little Rock School District, which is about two-thirds black, has been under state control since 2015 over the academic performance of some of its schools. The district has seen a proliferation of charter schools in recent years that opponents say contributes to self-segregation.

Ernest Green still remembers the promise of the era that put him and the eight other students on the front line. After reading about the May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education decision, he recalled: “I thought to myself, ‘Good, because I think the face of the South ought to change.’”

He and his classmates came face-to-face with Southern opposition after integrating Central. The first day of school was only the beginning of the hardships they would endure.

Green described the experience as “like going to war every day.”

In the 2016-17 school year, the average black student in Little Rock went to a school that was roughly 14 percent white, 14 percent Hispanic and 68 percent black, according to Arkansas Department of Education data. Twenty years ago, a black student in Little Rock would have gone to a school that was 27 percent white, 1.7 percent Hispanic and 70 percent black, historical data from the National Center for Education Statistics show.

Nationally, the numbers are similarly stark. The average black student nationwide in 1980 went to a school that was 36 percent white. In the 2014-15 school year, a black student would have gone to a school that was 27 percent white.