Little Rock Central High School

We’re in Little Rock Arkansas now. As soon as we got to the campground, I was hurrying John to get in the car to go on a tour of a brewery I found online. It said the tour today (Sunday) was the last for a week. We rushed into town to find that the brewery closed and the building now has a bakery! Ah, traveling life means changes. Since we were already downtown we visited the capital and Little Rock Central High School. 

Good thing we visited on Sunday. We couldn’t find any public parking around the capital. We ended up parking in reserved spots for the media (like NPR, etc.). The capital was basically empty except for a few of us tourists wandering around. That made it easier to see.

Little Rock Central High School is both a national park and a working high school. Again, it was nice to be at the high school on a Sunday so no students were there. The national park visitor center gave us a good history of the times and events at the school. The basics…in 1954 the Supreme Court overturned “separate but equal” laws with Brown v. Board of Education. That meant desegregation for schools. In 1957, Little Rock’s school board decided to gradually integrate the schools. The students known now as the “Little Rock Nine” were the first black students to enter the formerly all-white high school. The governor disagreed and called out both the Arkansas National Guard to keep the black students out (pretending this was for their safety) and also asked white citizens to protest the integration plan. There were crowds every day with the national media including the fairly new TV news filming everything. It took President Eisenhower bringing in federal troops to force the desegregation required by law.

What gets me was the bravery required by those nine. They had to handle a year of abuse (the students were verbally and physically abused by white students even after they finally got in the school door). They had to take the abuse but not answer it. One black student got upset and responded in a very limited way and she ended up being expelled. Their parents had to fully support the students. They had to be presentable at all times to represent their race. And, they had to be good students to pass the courses under such an environment.  All this and they were just young high school students. Wow!

John liked the education center for the national park. The gas station was an unofficial media center for the press who called in their stories from their public phone.

The campground is on a river. The woods were filled with French mulberry.

This is from my morning walk.