Little Rock, 50 Years Later
Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.
While it is important to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock 9, its also important to do a reality check of how far we have come in achieving some of the ideals that those students struggled valiantly for.
These nine were not the first to integrate schools. In fact, smaller towns in Arkansas like Charleston and Fayetville and Hoxie had done it successfully years before the now-famous showdown. There are even stories of white students in those towns escorting the black students in so there wouldn't be any trouble. However, it is the iconic images of these nine students, and the mobs outside, that are embedded into the history of the civil rights movement.
We are entering the last decade with a white majority in our nation's schools. It is already a fact in regions such as the south and the west, and perhaps adds urgency to an examination of what has happened to classrooms in terms of diversity and desegregation.
A recent report released in August of this year by the Civil Rights Project is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. It puts hard numbers behind a disturbing trend- that of re-segregation in the nation's schools. They're certainly not as segregated as they were 50 years ago, when these brave students were escorted to class everyday by the 101st airborne. But they are far worse than they were even 20 years ago.
In the story on the Evening News, I pointed to a few numbers, but let me give you some more that I found interesting, but didn't have time include in the piece...
(ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT GAZETTE/AP/FILE)
These nine were not the first to integrate schools. In fact, smaller towns in Arkansas like Charleston and Fayetville and Hoxie had done it successfully years before the now-famous showdown. There are even stories of white students in those towns escorting the black students in so there wouldn't be any trouble. However, it is the iconic images of these nine students, and the mobs outside, that are embedded into the history of the civil rights movement.
We are entering the last decade with a white majority in our nation's schools. It is already a fact in regions such as the south and the west, and perhaps adds urgency to an examination of what has happened to classrooms in terms of diversity and desegregation.
A recent report released in August of this year by the Civil Rights Project is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. It puts hard numbers behind a disturbing trend- that of re-segregation in the nation's schools. They're certainly not as segregated as they were 50 years ago, when these brave students were escorted to class everyday by the 101st airborne. But they are far worse than they were even 20 years ago.
In the story on the Evening News, I pointed to a few numbers, but let me give you some more that I found interesting, but didn't have time include in the piece...
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