Filmed on Monday, December 4 2023, I drive around Little Rock, AR to see what's going on.
Little Rock was named for a stone outcropping on the bank of the Arkansas River used by early travelers as a landmark, which marked the transition from the flat Mississippi Delta region to the Ouachita Mountain foothills.
Travelers referred to the area as the "Little Rock". Though there was an effort to officially name the city "Arkopolis" upon its founding in the 1820s, and that name did appear on a few maps made by the US Geological Survey, the name Little Rock is eventually what stuck.
Little Rock Nine were the nine African American students that desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957 after the Little Rock School Board voted to begin the areas desegregation, in compliance Brown v. Board of Education. On September 4, 1957, the first day of school at Central High, a white mob of segregationist protesters physically blocked nine black students from entering the school.
Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to support the segregationists, and only backed down after Judge Ronald Davies of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas granted an injunction from the U.S. Department of Justice compelling him to withdraw the Guard.
Angry mobs began rioting when the nine black students began attending Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the request of Woodrow Wilson Mann, Little Rock's mayor, deployed the 101st Airborne Division to the city and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to protect the students and ensure their safe passage to the school.
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