"Please help the soldiers to keep the mobs away from me," wrote Melba Pattillo in her diary on the n ...
"Please help the soldiers to keep the mobs away from me," wrote Melba Pattillo in her diary on the night of September 24, 1957. We're guessing you've never had to write that line in your diary. The previous day in Little Rock, Arkansas, police had escorted Pattillo, a 15-year-old high school junior, and eight other Black students out of Central High School as angry white protesters threatened the students. Then, on September 24, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730 and sent the U.S. Army—the 101st Airborne "Screaming Eagles," to be exact—to escort the Black students back in. Need us to back up a little more? Okay, here we go. As you undoubtedly know from acing every U.S History class you've ever taken, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declared that segregating public schools by race was unconstitutional. Segregation denied Black students their Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the law; a public education, said the court, was "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." This decision body-slammed the 1896 "separate but equal is okay" opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted racially segregated public facilities as long as they were equal. Which they never were, by the way. A second Brown decision in 1955 ordered school integration to proceed "with all deliberate speed." (Isn't that an oxymoron?) Little Rock's school board, like many others throughout the South, voted to integrate gradually. Beginning with Central High in 1957, the plan called for the rest of the district to be integrated by 1963. Nine Black students from the city's all-Black schools—known to history books and Shmoop learning guides as the Little Rock Nine—volunteered to be the first to attend Central High. Their classmates would be 2,000 white students. This wasn't Arkansas' first rodeo. Other school districts had integrated before Little Rock. There were lawsuits and ugly protests, but no violence. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus generally stayed out of things and left integration to the local authorities. But when Little Rock's turn came in 1957, Faubus changed his mind about his whole "don't come crying to me" approach. Without the support of white segregationists, he knew he'd lose the next gubernatorial election. So when, at the end of August, a federal judge ordered integration to proceed, Faubus loudly and publicly let it be known that he had no intent of complying. He didn't know what was about to hit him. On September 2, Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard on the pretext of "keeping order" in Little Rock. In reality, the Guard was there to keep the Black students out of Central High. When the students showed up for classes on September 4, the Guard turned them away. For the next three weeks, Little Rock simmered as the governor defied the court order. Then, on Friday, September 20, in response to another court order, he withdrew the National Guard. Predictably, when the nine Black students at arrived at Central High the next Monday, the school was quickly surrounded by a screaming, spitting mob of 1,000+ protesters. Fearful that they couldn't control the mob, city police escorted the students home. At this point, President Eisenhower issued a proclamation ordering the protesters to go home and allow enforcement of the District Court order to integrate. The next morning, he received a telegram from the mayor of Little Rock saying that the "mob is armed and engaging in fisticuffs and other acts of violence. Situation is out of control." Oh, no, not fisticuffs. Eisenhower had sworn to uphold the Constitution, and the Supreme Court had made it clear that an equal right to public education was protected by the Constitution. If the state wouldn't guarantee the constitutional rights of its citizens, the federal government would have to do it for them. Ike wasn't happy about having to use federal troops against American citizens; it hadn't happened since Reconstruction. He and his advisors reflected on other times in history when the feds had to use force, like when Washington used troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. But the rule of law was at stake here. "Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of the courts," Eisenhower said (source). Executive Order 10730 of September 24, 1957 placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and allowed the U.S. Army to intervene to remove this obstruction of justice. It was an epic showdown between the state of Alabama and the federal government. David Halberstam, in his book The Fifties, wrote: With the arrival of the 101st, the nation witnessed again a stunning spectacle on TV; elite paratroopers of one of the most honored divisions in the United States Army escorting young black children where once there had been a mob. The soldiers set up their perimeter. Their faces were immobile and, unlike the Guardsmen's, betrayed no politics, only duty. As they marched in, the clear, sharp sound of their boots clacking on the street was a reminder of their professionalism. When the segregationists in the street protested, the paratroopers turned out to be very different from the National Guard soldiers who had so recently been their pals. The men of the 101st fixed their bayonets and placed them right at the throats of the protesters, quickly moving them out of the school area. (Source) Governor Faubus didn't see the soldiers' actions as so heroic, telling his fellow Alabamans, "My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory […]" (source). Years later, Melba Pattillo wrote in her memoir Warriors Don't Cry, "I felt proud and sad at the same time. Proud that I lived in a country that would go this far to bring justice to a Little Rock girl like me, but sad that they had to go to such great lengths." President Ronald Reagan once joked that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." He must have forgotten about Executive Order 10730.
