With the Might of Angels (23 page)

A sign on an outhouse at a rest stop between Louisville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee, directs black patrons to the dining room behind the outhouse.

A sign reading “For Colored Only” denotes a segregated water fountain.

After the
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
decision was reached in the U.S. Supreme Court, schools all over the nation were mandated to desegregate, and the NAACP tried to register black students in previously all-white schools throughout the South. In September of 1957 nine black students, who were chosen on the basis of their academic achievements and who would become known as the Little Rock Nine, were registered to attend Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. However, after groups all over the city threatened to block the entrance to the school, the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, had the Arkansas National Guard deployed to support the segregationists and keep the Little Rock Nine from entering the building. An angry mob of segregationists, who hurled physical and verbal abuse, as well as threats of lynching, and members of the Arkansas National Guard gathered on September 4, 1957, to prevent the nine students from going into the school, a move that reverberated around the nation.

After weeks of rioting and violence, President Eisenhower, at the request of the mayor of Little Rock, Woodrow Mann, intervened and sent the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock. He also federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of the governor’s hands, so that the soldiers could protect the black students and enforce integration. Thus, the Little Rock Nine were able to attend school on Wednesday, September 25, 1957. However, they continued to be subjected to abuse — physical and verbal—by many of the school’s white students.

Pictured here is Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, on September 4, 1957, being verbally abused by a young woman as she attempts to enter the school.

The desegregation of Little Rock Central High School is one of the most significant events in the Civil Rights Movement.

Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army push white students away with their rifles so that the Little Rock Nine may safely enter Central High School.

Four black students attempt to enter North Little Rock High School on September 10, 1957. No National Guardsmen were present, but the police escorted the black students away after a mob hurling taunts and threats prevented them from entering.

A black girl is protected by a National Guardsman as she makes her way to Little Rock High School in 1957.

A high school in Norfolk, Virginia, Norview Senior High, is integrated in February of 1959. Here two of five black students assigned to this previously all-white school are surrounded by students and journalists as they enter the building.

Patricia Turner, one of the five black students registered at Norview Senior High School, sits in class among her fellow students.

Police officers in Jackson, Mississippi, escort a group of black students out of the Jackson Public Library after they had entered the main library building, which was reserved for white use only.

Four black college students held a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February of 1960. The sit-in was a peaceful protest and part of a series of sit-ins that led to policy change by the store and increased national awareness of the Civil Rights Movement. This Woolworth’s store is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. On the first day of the sit-in, the four men ordered coffee, but were refused service at the “Whites Only” counter and asked to leave by the store’s manager. The next day, twenty more students joined the original Greensboro Four. While the black students were taunted by white customers, they remained at the lunch counter, reading and studying quietly. The press covered this day of protest, and with each consecutive day, more black protesters appeared at the sit-in. Still, Woolworth’s declined to serve the black students. This movement spread to other cities throughout the South, and the sit-ins continued. Finally, black students began a boycott of stores that had segregated lunch counters, and after sales at these stores dropped significantly, the managers and owners at last agreed to abandon their segregationist policies.