On November 6, 1998, Congress established Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. The National Historic Site is administered in partnership with the National Park Service, Little Rock Public Schools, the City of Little Rock, and others.
The Visitor Center for the site is located diagonally across the street from the school and across from the memorial dedicated by Michael Warrick, and opened in fall 2006. It contains a captioned interpretive film on the Little Rock integration crisis, as well as multimedia exhibits on both that and the larger context of desegregation during the 20th century and the Civil Rights Movement.
Opposite the Visitor Center to the west is the Central High Commemorative Garden, which features nine trees and benches that honor the students. Arches that represent the school's facade contain embedded photographs of the school in years since the crisis, and showcase students of various backgrounds in activities together.
Opposite the Visitor Center to the south is a historic Mobil gas station, which has been preserved in its appearance at the time of the crisis. At the time, it served as the area for the press and radio and television reporters. It later served as a temporary Visitor Center before the new one was built.
Read more about this topic: Little Rock Central High School
Famous quotes containing the words rock, central, high, school, national, historic and/or site:
“Dont say, dont say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple....”
—Dylan Thomas (19141953)
“Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (18421911)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed beforea national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (18561924)
“Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call history by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World history ... only comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imaginationunstanchable as that red flood may bebut rather the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is womans fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)