Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, became the
first African American graduate of Central High School. Police and
National Guard Troops stood watch during the ceremony. The young
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Arkansas to give a commencement
address in Pine Bluff, attended the ceremony virtually unnoticed.
The harassment, the threats, all that began to increase but I could
see the home stretch and I saw the importance of that diploma.
There's no way I wasn't going to show up for that ceremony. - Ernest
Green
There were white students who were very much
ordinary people, frightened to death, caught up in the same trap
that we were trying to extend a hand. Several of them were beat
up because they showed some grace to us. - Melba Pattillo,
Little Rock Nine.
