Week 3: Central High School, Little Rock

Sept. 20, 2010:  Diversity is any kind of variety that makes our world a better place.  

Would you attend a school if you arrived on the first day to find guards blocking your entrance and 400 angry people waiting there to threaten your life?  Or, would you be willing to stay at a school where students threw acid in your eyes, pushed you down stairs, and subjected you to beatings?  This week we celebrate the unfathomable courage of nine students, who in 1957 became the first black students to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Justice didn’t arrive simply because the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.  When the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, refused to follow the law, it took President Eisenhower to send in the military to enforce the law.  The following year, Governor Faubus decided he would rather shut down every Little Rock high school instead of allowing blacks to attend—and so he did.  The courts ordered schools reopened by the following year, but even still, it took another 13 years before every school in Little Rock was fully integrated down to the elementary level.

Today, Little Rock’s Central High School still functions as a school, and it is also an official National Historic Site with a civil rights museum.

Remember, you don’t have to travel as far as Little Rock, Arkansas to find diversity.  There are hundreds of opportunities to celebrate diversity right in your own school.  Find one today!