Dr. Johanna Miller Lewis will give a lecture titled The Federal Government Must Prevail: Eisenhower, the 101st Airborne, and the 1957 Central High Crisis.

In the fall of 1957 Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus decided to ignore the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Topeka Board of Education and sent in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American teenagers from desegregating Little Rock’s Central High School. President Eisenhower said from the outset that the federal government would support the Constitution and the Supreme Court, but he never specified how the executive branch might be involved until he called in the 101st Airborne to escort the students into the high school on September 25, 1957.

The six sessions of the 2024-2025 Evenings with History series will be held on the first Tuesdays of October, December, February, March, and April, and on the second Tuesday of November. Refreshments are served at 7:00 p.m., and the talk begins at 7:30 p.m. This year’s lectures will be held in the Ottenheimer Auditorium at the Historic Arkansas Museum, 200 E. Third Street in Little Rock.