The Story of the Little Rock Nine and School Desegregation in Photographs by David Aretha

Author:David Aretha [Aretha, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4645-1226-1
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Image Credit: AP Images

A white student punches a dummy of a black student near Central High School on October 3, 1957. This incident occurred on the day that white students walked out of the school in protest of integration.

Harassed and Abused

Tensions in Central High School continued for weeks and months. In early October, several dozen white students protested integration by walking out of their school. They hoped that hundreds of students would join them. When they didn’t, they vented their frustrations in another way. They made a black dummy and hanged it from a tree. This mimicked a lynching. Over the previous century, whites had lynched several thousand African Americans in a similar way. Most of these lynchings occurred in the South.

White students continued to physically abuse the Little Rock Nine. Melba Pattillo said that whites often turned off the cold water in their locker-room showers. The hot water would remain on, burning their skin. On another occasion, a student threw a chemical into her eyes, causing them to burn. A friend immediately splashed water into her eyes. If he hadn’t, an eye doctor said, she might have gone blind.

A student named Andy often harassed Pattillo. One time, he slashed a knife at her. It cut through the cover of the book she used to protect herself. Melba said she had to become a warrior. “I had to learn,” she later told CNN, “. . . how to get from that door to the end of the hall without dying.”

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