Apartheid. USA 1988

September 27, 1987:

Thirty years ago, Central High School at Little Rock, Arkansas, was forcibly segregated in the face of violent white resistance. Today, more black students than whites fill the hallways of the sprawling tan brick building, a symbol of the resegregation that has taken place here and elsewhere in recent years. Central High, integrated under a court order backed by Federal troops, is now 56 percent black and 44 percent white and situated in a poor black area of the city. Few students seem aware that on September 3, 1957, blacks were turned away under orders from Governor Orval E Faubus, who had called out the state guard to enforce his decision. But President Eisenhower dispatched troops from the 101st Army Airborne and federalized Arkansas National Guard and ordered the units to enforce the desegregation order. Black students were finally admitted September 25, 1957 and attended school that first year amidst taunts, threats and racial slurs.

‘Resegregation of schools is the great issue of the next generation,’ said Gary Orfield, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, who specializes in desegregation issues. ‘Little Rock is an example of what is happening all over, but it is not an extreme example. You have cities like Chicago and New York, where the public school systems are almost 90 percent black and integration isn't possible.’ He continued, ‘The intensification in recent years of segregated residential patterns and the trend of whites to move to the outskirts of growing metropolitan areas while blacks remained trapped in urban ghettos transformed the neighborhood segregation of 30 years ago to segregation on a metropolitan scale.’

[p. 119]

Willie D Hamilton, the city's first black school board president and others have expressed concern that the task of achieving and maintaining integration of the schools in Little Rock was becoming almost impossible. At Cloverdale Junior High School, several white parents removed their children from school and the police were patrolling amid rumors of racial violence that never materialized. Tony Freyer, professor of history at the University of Alabama said developments at Little Rock and elsewhere proved, ‘that the struggle is still with us as a moral and legal dilemma.’ He added, ‘It seems no one wins rights once and for all. It's all just a beginning.’

‘It's a black eye you have learned to live with,’ said Becky Rather, a communications specialist with the Board of Education, ‘You put make-up on it and show the world that you still can look good.’^149.

149. The New York Times, from a report by Ronald Smothers