Though Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence wrote that the United States would be founded on the principles that all men were created equal, nearly 200 years would pass before the principle was put into any real practice. While the end of the Civil War opened the door for the passage of the Civil War Amendments, which abolished slavery, and, in theory, granted the descendants of both free and enslaved blacks the same rights as those enjoyed by whites, those rights were not respected or practiced during the century following the war. Most aspects of life, including schooling, remained segregated on every level, especially throughout the Jim Crow South, and the years following the desegregation triumph of Brown v. Board of the Education in 1954 saw little done to accomplish the instructions given by the Supreme Court. Put simply, even as Americans are instantly familiar with important events such as the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s also common knowledge that the efforts to integrate society faced stiff resistance, often violently.

James Meredith’s struggle to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962 is still remembered vividly, but the Little Rock Nine are frequently overlooked when it comes to discussing the Civil Rights Movement, despite attempting to integrate Little Rock Central High School five years earlier. For millions of kids, high school is a tumultuous time, with social highs and lows, academic pressure, and extracurricular wins and losses, but for the Little Rock Nine, the first African American students to attend a previously segregated high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, those years were nightmarish.