A group of white girls followed Minnijean Brown through the hallways of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, stepping on her heels until they bled, spitting at her, telling her she stinks, saying she was ugly and calling her the N-word.

After nearly a week of this racist bullying, it finally went too far. As Brown was about to enter her homeroom, one of the girls threw a purse full of combination locks and struck her in the head. Responding to this painful assault, Brown threw down the purse and said, “Leave me alone, white trash.”

For that, she was expelled from school. The girls who attacked her suffered no consequence. 

“The teacher didn’t see the purse thrown at my head,” Brown said. “The teacher did not see them following me, but she did hear me say, ‘Leave me alone, white trash.’ And that is the reason that I was expelled.”

The incident was one of many examples of physical, verbal and psychological abuse that Brown and eight other Black students constantly endured after integrating the previously all-white school on Sept. 25, 1957. 

Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls are known today as the Little Rock Nine. 

Three years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Little Rock Nine’s enrollment at Central High School was the first major test of the federal government’s ability to enforce the ruling.

But 63 years later, schools around the country are still racially segregated, and deep inequities continue to plague America’s educational system. Schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods have fewer resources, fewer counselors and experienced educators and, overall, lack the level of educational opportunities found in schools in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Children of color are often caught in the “school-to-prison pipeline” – the destructive cycle of biased policies, practices and procedures that, directly or indirectly, push children out of schools in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods and into the criminal and immigrant justice systems – at much higher rates than white children.

“As we celebrate the bravery of the Little Rock Nine who knew they had the same right as everyone else to the best education that was available, and had the strength to walk through the most vitriolic manifestations of racist hatred and ignorance, we must never forget that we stand on the shoulders of children with giant, indomitable spirits,” said Bacardi Jackson, managing attorney for the Children’s Rights Practice Group at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which fights for racial equity in schools. “Like them, we have battles left to fight and principles to defend that are bigger than any of us.”

Read more here.