Sixty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to protect the brave black children who dared to integrate the public schools of Little Rock.

The students withstood taunts, jeers, even stones. They persisted, with the dream and hope of one day having a school system that welcomed all children.

Now, Little Rock activist Anika Whitfield writes, Little Rock is under attack again.

Now it is the Walton family and other billionaires who are intent to closing public schools, opening privately managed charter schools, and dominating black and brown children.

Like many major metropolitan cities in the United States, Little Rock is experiencing the evils of unfounded and manufactured fear about black and brown children that translates beyond white flight (as we experienced soon after the Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas ruling in 1954) and into a calculated systemic effort by U.S. billionaires, like the Walton Family ― who are natives of Arkansas ― to create a new form of discrimination: charter (private-public) schools and voucher systems. And, as they have been successful in doing so in many vulnerable cities like Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, they have also been successful in increasing their prison industrial system to meet the demands of their calculated systems of racism and classism. Together, these systems have been intentionally created to fester more criminal activity in the very neighborhoods and communities that are now absent of public schools.

The Waltons engineered a state takeover of the Little Rock school district. Their hand-picked managers have closed schools in black and brown communities.

If they get their way, public education in Little Rock will be a memory.

We won’t even remember why those brave children fought to integrate the public schools in 1957. Because there won’t be any public schools.

Racism comes in many forms.