ARKANSAS WATCH : The Real Victory

The players out on the basketball court today weren’t even born in 1957. Some of their parents may have barely been born. Today in Arkansas, nobody cares about what happened in 1957; all they are thinking about is the University of Arkansas Razorbacks’ big game in the semifinal of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. championship tournament. Today, nobody cares that many of the Razorbacks are African American. Today, nobody cares that the team’s popular coach, Nolan Richardson, is also the team’s first black coach.

But before Arkansas was known as the home of the Razorbacks, and not incidentally, of the 42nd President of the United States, it was known as the place where school integration was vehemently resisted. It was the place Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard in to prevent nine black students from enrolling in previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. It was the place where angry white mobs that attacked blacks and broke school windows were controlled only by the presence of Army troops.

That was 37 years ago, and to this relatively young nation, that’s a very long time. But what happened back then still matters. It won’t matter to the cheering fans today, watching Arkansas play Arizona. But without the showdown in Little Rock in 1957, and the preceding landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that outlawed “separate but equal” schooling for blacks, Richardson could not have been the coach that took Arkansas to the Final Four. But he is--and there’s no little symbolism in that.