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Who's Who in the Central High School Crisis
Daisy Bates: President of the Arkansas Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and coordinator of the plan to enroll nine black students at Central High.Bruce Bennett: Arkansas attorney general, the state's chief legal official.
Virgil T. Blossom: Superintendent of Little Rock's public schools since 1953 and chief architect of the system's gradual desegregation plan.
Wiley Branton: Pine Bluff native who was an attorney for the NAACP's Little Rock court proceedings in September 1957 and would serve as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general from 1965 to 1967.
Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Carlotta Walls: The nine black students who were able to attend Central High School under the protection of federal troops by late September.
Herbert Brownell: U.S. attorney general and legal adviser to President Eisenhower on the Little Rock school situation.
Ronald N. Davies: Federal district judge assigned temporarily from North Dakota to Arkansas to handle desegregation cases.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Republican president of the United States, in the first year of his second term.
Orval E. Faubus: Governor of Arkansas, serving the second of his six two-year terms.
Amis Guthridge: Lawyer of strongly segregationist views and a leader of the Capital Citizens Council of Little Rock.
Brooks Hays: Democratic congressman from central Arkansas, considered a racial moderate, who tried to mediate between Eisenhower and Faubus.
James D. "Jim'' Johnson: Loser of the 1956 Democratic gubernatorial primary as an outspoken segregationist, to be elected in 1958 as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
Woodrow Wilson Mann: Mayor of Little Rock, scheduled to leave office under a new city manager plan approved by voters the previous November.
Thurgood Marshall: NAACP chief counsel, in Little Rock periodically during September 1957 for school-related litigation.
Marvin H. Potts: Little Rock police chief, responsible for security at Central High in the two days between Faubus' withdrawal of the Arkansas National Guard and the arrival of federal troops.
Edwin A. Walker: Army major general who commanded the 101st Airborne Division soldiers sent to Little Rock.
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