Operation Arkansas. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort the Little Rock Nine students into the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African-American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in America, racial discrimination became regulated by the so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated strict segregation of the races. This legislation that mandated segregation lasted to the mid-1960s. Institutionalized racial segregation was ended as an official practice by the efforts of such civil rights activists as Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr., working during the period from the end of World War II through the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson.