This photograph was published on September 26, 1957, in the midst of a tense local battle over school desegregation. Many Americans were shocked to see images like this one, showing a unit of the United States armed services deployed not against a foreign danger but in response to a domestic crisis on American soil. In response to court orders to racially integrate public schools, stemming from the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), the school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, approved plans to implement integration, beginning at the high school level.