1957 Little Rock Crisis 60th Anniversary #2

On the sixtieth anniversary of the 1957 Little Rock school crisis, the city’s schools are closer than ever to returning to a separate and unequal basis along race and class lines. Although the city has promoted itself as having a successful school district because it has managed to keep around a fifth or so of its public school population white, in a city 49 per cent white and 42 per cent black, there is a very real threat that the school district is about to go the way of many others in the United States in becoming even more intensely hyper-segregated. Whites continue to flee to private schools and, increasingly, to quasi-private charter schools, leaving behind public schools that seem destined to become entirely composed of black and poor children.