LITTLE ROCK INCIDENT

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28399, 4 October 1957, Page 13

LITTLE ROCK INCIDENT

Students Attack Negroes (N.Z. Press Association— Conynaht) (Rec. 8 p.m.) LITTLE ROCK, October 3. Two of the nine negro students attending the Central High School today were reported to have been chased, beaten and kicked by students inside the school. The six negro girls and three boys by-passed a mass of jeering, hooting white students and used a side entrance to get into the building. Taunts of “chicken” were flung at them when they veered away from students congregated before the main entrance. The two negroes attacked were identified as Terrance Roberts and Jefferson Thomas. Two white boys told reporters the negroes eventually were rescued by a teacher, although National Guardsmen were on duty inside the building at the time.

The two white boys told reporters the school authorities suspended them from classes because of the incidents, although they claimed they were members of a group of from 50 to 150 white students. They did not give their names.

They said they were among students stationed at the main entrance with the intention of keeping the negroes out of school, but the negro group by-passed them by using a side entrance. One of the youths said: “We chased them from one end of the school to the other.” They said a beer can opener was thrown at the negroes, then retrieved from the floor and thrown again. The crowd overtook the negro pair, knocked their books from their hands, kicked

them when they bent to retrieve them and struck them with their fists without knocking them down. Faubus "Stands Pat" Mr Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas, said today that he stood “pat” on a compromise school integration proposal that has been rejected by the White House. He said the next move in the racial crisis was up to Washington. A Reuter correspondent at Washington said that Mr Faubus’s defiant attitude “shook the capital.”