1957 School Crisis Primary Documents: Faubus

On the night of Sunday, September 2, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus went on television and told citizens: “Units of the National Guard have been…mobilized… [to] restore the peace and order of the community.” His actions promulgated a constitutional crisis. You can find Faubus’s speech, along with more primary sources from the 1957 desegregation of Central High School, and other landmark events in the civil rights movement, in my new book, The Civil Rights Movement: A Documentary Reader, published this month by Wiley Blackwell. The book tells the story of the civil rights movement in the United States through more than 120 carefully selected and edited primary documents, each with its own introductory headnote for context and explanation.