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The most well-known event in Arkansas civil rights movement activism (and arguably the most-well known event in Arkansas history) is the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. In order to prevent federally mandated integration of the school, Governor Orval E. Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High on its opening day of classes, 3 September 1957. Faubus's defiance fueled segregationist resistance in Little Rock and throughout the South. When ensuing legal challenges upheld the constitutional validity of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Faubus removed the guard and left an inadequate city police force to maintain control of segregationist crowds. The resulting mob violence impelled President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to Little Rock to establish order outside the school and offer protection to the nine black students inside the school. The relatively new medium of television beamed vivid footage of the conflict into homes across the country, and the images of antagonistic crowds and armed guards surrounding a public school defined Little Rock in the national consciousness for decades.
The television news footage and print photographs of Little Rock in 1957 remain some of the most indelible and iconic images from the civil rights movement. The images of Central High School besieged by screaming mobs offer stunning but primarily external views of the site of the conflict. In 1981, however, television revisited the story in Crisis at Central High, taking viewers inside the school walls through a narrative dramatization adapted from the memoir of Elizabeth Huckaby, vice principal of girls during the crisis. The made-for-TV docudrama was the first public version of the story told from an insider's perspective, and it covered the events of the year from the chaos of opening day through the graduation of Ernest Green, the only senior in the Little Rock Nine. A second film version appeared in 1993, covering the same ground and again from an insider's perspective. This time, however, the film followed the path of that history-making senior in the made-for-cable Disney movie, The Ernest Green Story.
Crisis at Central High offers the perspective of a white school official, and as the title suggests, focuses especially on the institutional disruption caused by the court-mandated...