The 1957 Central High crisis: civil rights and education in the United States as a public history experience through the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History

Abstract

Through an oral and visual history archive, we sought to develop an analysis regarding the period of school segregation in the United States, as well as the moment known as “integration”. Drawing on the experiences recorded in The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, an analysis based on the memories of the period of overcoming segregation in the school context was developed. Our focus was on the perception of the persistence of prejudice as a factor that harms the learning process, as was observed in Terrence Roberts’ speech. The orientation of the work within the sphere of public history aims to show how people simultaneously experience a conflicting situation and the problem of abandoning the past, bearing in mind the continuity of the issues faced and which need to be reestablished.