Trump signs bill to modify Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site

The National Parks Service will be allowed to enter into cooperative agreements with private property owners and provide other services to neighborhoods surrounding Little Rock Central High after President Donald Trump signed the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site Boundary Modification Act. The act expands the historic site to include properties on South Park Street. U.S. Rep French Hill, R-Little Rock submitted the bill in 2017.

The site commemorates the plight of the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to integrate the Little Rock school system on Sept. 4, 1957. Angry mobs met the students, and it became one of the pinnacle moments in the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and 1960s.

“It’s an exciting, historic day for Arkansas and Little Rock as President Trump signed my bill into law today that preserves Arkansas’ important role in ending so-called ‘separate but equal.’ This could not come at a better time as we recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s brave actions integrating Little Rock Central High School,” Hill said.

“Together with the school, seven homes across the street from Central High will now stand as living monuments to the civil rights movement in Arkansas and the United States. I was pleased to work with Senator Tom Cotton, the neighborhood, and the National Park Service to make this a reality, and I’m pleased that this bill is now law because Arkansas’ history is America’s history,” he added.

In 1996, the neighborhood surrounding the high school, including seven privately owned residences on South Park Street, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Central High School Neighborhood Historic District. The residences on South Park Street across from the high school are connected with the events of 1957, as images of the Little Rock Nine, crowds of protestors, the public, and National Guardsmen appeared in newspapers across the nation and were broadcast live through the emerging media of television, according to the bill.

The bill allows the NPS to use the site’s operational funds to mark, interpret, improve, restore, and provide technical assistance for the preservation and interpretation of the properties. It allows the NPS to assist the homeowners in applying for federal grants. All the property owners and several community members have expressed their support for the proposal, including the Central High Neighborhood and Preserve Arkansas.