"Situated on a sloping lot at the northeast corner of 21st and Pulaski streets, the one-story Green House is a Craftsman bungalow. While exhibiting many typical features of the Craftsman style, such as broadly-pitched, gabled rooflines with exposed rafter ends, the house is somewhat different in plan from the typical bungalow in Little Rock .
The Craftsman bungalow at 1224 W. 21st St. was built about 1916 as the residence of William E. Alexander, an African-American mail carrier. Within a few years, however, the house had become rental property. Between the early 1920s and the late 1930s, it was occupied by a succession of tenants, including a porter, a carpenter, a laborer and a stonemason. In the late 1930s, the house was purchased by Ernest and Lothaire Green. At the time, Mr. Green was a custodian at the post office, and Mrs. Green was teaching at Dunbar High School .
A few years later, in 1941, the Greens became parents of a son, Ernest G. Green, Jr. Like other African-American children of the era in Little Rock , the young Ernest Green grew up attending all-black schools. Unlike most of his peers, however, Ernest Green made the decision to enroll in previously all-white Central High School when the opportunity presented itself.
After the U. S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka decision, which stated that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” the Little Rock School District began planning for desegregation. Initially, the district conceived an approach that would have resulted in substantial integration beginning at the grade school level. The plan that actually was adopted, however, provided for only token desegregation, beginning in the fall of 1957 at one senior high school, Little Rock Central. Limited desegregation would be phased into junior high and elementary schools over several subsequent years.
Through various means, including a rigid screening process, the school district restricted the number of black students who were eligible to enroll at Central. In addition, not all black students were interested in leaving familiar surroundings in order to further the cause of integration, particularly when they were told that they would not be able to take part in extracurricular activities at Central.
The decision to attend Central reportedly was one that Ernest Green, Jr. made on his own. Daisy Bates, president of the Little Rock chapter of the NAACP in the late 1950s, recalled Ernest’s mother telling her that when “Ernest announced to the family that he was going to enroll at Central, we knew it was useless to try to talk him out of it.” Ernest Green, Sr. had died in 1953, perhaps contributing to his son’s maturity, which Mrs. Bates described as “beyond his years.”
The Little Rock School Board ultimately gave approval for about 25 black students to enroll at Central, but by the time school was scheduled to begin in the fall of 1957, the number had dwindled to nine. Sixteen-year-old Ernest Green was the only senior among the “Little Rock Nine.”
School opened in Little Rock on Sept. 3, 1957 , but segregationists, supported by Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, prevented the Nine from entering Central, thus setting the scene for the first major test of the Brown decision. When negotiations between the state and federal governments failed to resolve the situation, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered 1,200 members of the 101st Airborne Division -- the “Screaming Eagles” -- to Little Rock from Fort Campbell , Kentucky . On Sept. 25, these federal troops surrounded Central High School , and a small detachment escorted the Nine into the school to attend classes for the first time. Some of the paratroopers remained on hand at Central until Thanksgiving. For the rest of the school year, the federalized Arkansas National Guard was responsible for maintaining order.
Unfortunately, “order” during the 1957-58 school year was a relative term. While the Nine knew that attending Central would mean leaving behind friends and extracurricular activities, they had not realized that it also would mean braving a daily gauntlet of hostile white adults outside the school and being tormented, verbally and physically, inside Central by white students. The crowds of segregationists (many of whom were not from Little Rock ) eventually dispersed, but throughout the year, the Nine were subjected inside the school to name-calling, spitting and physical assaults. One of the Nine was expelled from Central early in 1958 after she succumbed to the pressure and lashed out at a tormentor. The other eight finished the school year. All of the black students’ parents suffered also, worrying about their children’s safety and being threatened themselves by the loss of jobs.
Throughout this year of turmoil, Ernest Green, Jr. lived at 1224 W. 21st St. with his mother, who by then was teaching in a black elementary school, and his younger brother, Scott. At the end of the school year, Ernest became the first African-American to graduate from Central High School . He received his diploma on May 27, 1958 -the only black student in a class of 602. Among the 4,500 people on hand in Central’s Quigley Stadium for the commencement ceremony was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The majority of the other members of the Little Rock Nine would not have the opportunity to graduate from Central High School . In an effort to avoid desegregation, Little Rock residents voted to close all of the city’s public high schools for the 1958-59 school year. Like hundreds of other Little Rock high school students, the remaining members of the Nine made assorted arrangements to continue their educations during that year; only two of them eventually returned to Central to graduate.
Following his own graduation, Ernest Green left Little Rock to attend Michigan State University , where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology. He then moved to New York to work for an organization that helped put African-Americans and other minorities into the skilled construction trades, serving for several years as the organization’s executive director. In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training, and he held that post until 1981. After several subsequent years as a consultant, he went to work as an investment banker for Shearson Lehman Brothers, Inc., where today he is managing director.
The pivotal role that Little Rock Central High School played in the civil rights movement and, more specifically, in public school desegregration in the United States led to its designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1982, just 25 years after the event for which the school was being recognized had taken place. Late in 1998, 40 years after the fateful 1957-58 school year, Central High School joined the National Park System as a National Historic Site. Regarding the events at Central, the National Park Service has stated:
“The integration of Central High was a landmark battle in the struggle for civil rights. It forced the people of a city and a nation to confront themselves on the issue of discrimination, pitted a president against a governor, forged new attitudes of racial tolerance, and robbed nine teenagers of their youth.”
As the only senior among those nine teenagers, Ernest Green, Jr. holds a special place in the Central High story. Just as the National Park Service did not wait 50 years to commemorate the events that took place at the school, it is appropriate now to recognize Ernest Green, Jr.’s home (which he has owned since his mother’s death in 1976)" - National Register Nomination form