Review: Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later

If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend watching the HBO documentary “Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later.”

Fifty years after President Eisenhower used the 101st Airborne Division to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, two filmmakers come back to Central High School to check out all the “progress” that has unfolded there since this watershed victory by the Civil Rights Movement.

Black students are now the majority at Central High School and their parents have taken over the surrounding neighborhood. The student body now has a black president. Civil rights martyr Minnijean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine, now teaches a high school course about the evils of “white privilege” and “institutional racism.” She has a monument dedicated to her memory at the Arkansas State Capitol. President Bill Clinton has even designated Central High School a National Historic Site.

And the result?

Central High School is still one of the best public high schools in Arkansas on account of its lavish funding, which attracts a rich, highly intelligent, and capable White minority, who are shielded from the black majority by enrollment in AP courses. Meanwhile, the majority of black students are several grade levels behind their White peers. In spite of their presence inside the same integrated high school, their instruction by a corps of benevolent anti-racist pedagogues, the sympathy of the world and the full force and resources of the federal government behind them, the black students exist in a parallel universe of academic failure and broken homes, where everyone seems to know someone who has been shot to death.

After spending over a billion dollars in pursuit of racial equality, the racial gap in academic achievement remains impregnable. The Black Undertow has taken over the surrounding neighborhood, which used to be the pride of Little Rock, and have transformed it into a desolate wasteland populated by crackheads milling about the ruins of abandoned businesses tagged with graffiti, vacant lots overgrown with weeds which are reverting to the wilderness, and blighted houses with boarded up windows and garbage strewn about their yards. Gang warfare has turned the surrounding area into a “war zone,” which is silently protested by a makeshift memorial to black-on-black violent crime.

Central High School is a place where the children of White investment bankers play on the golf team, and the football stadium is surrounded by razor wire to keep the black residents of the surrounding neighborhood at bay. Who could watch this documentary and not come away impressed with this glorious triumph of the Civil Rights Movement?

Thanks for the laughs. This country is a joke.