Although separated by 50 years and 1,500 miles, 1950s Arkansas and 21st Century Massachusetts came closer together last night at Faneuil Hall during the 50th anniversary celebration of public school integration that shed light on similarities between the two eras.

In remembrance of the day nine black students walked through the doors of Little Rock Central High School in September 1957 amid jeers from a mob of angry white parents and students, the Arkansas National Guard and the state’s governor, eight of them – now mostly in their 60s — were honored for their bravery last night.

The youngest of the Little Rock Nine, Ernest Green, said he remembers seeing the high school as a place with options, a place that no one could intimidate him from attending.

“We were teenagers,” he said. “We believed we could walk through walls.”

Jefferson Thomas, another one of the students, said the superintendent of schools warned him of harassment and violence he would likely encounter before he arrived at the high school that day.

“I was listening, but I didn’t hear,” Thomas said.

When he got to the school, Thomas said the attitude there was anything but accepting. He was spat on, knocked out and yelled at. “What else can they do to you?” he said his brother once asked him. “If you quit now, all the suffering you’ve been through is for nothing.”

Not all of them took the harassment quietly. Minnejean Trickey, the “bad girl” of the Little Rock Nine, was eventually expelled from the school for insulting a white student.

“People would ask me, ‘Why do you keep going back?'” she said, adding she told them the answer was easy: “I’ve got to find out what they’re going to do tomorrow.”

After recalling the former students’ stories, local officials turned attention back to the present, shedding light on the lack of diversity in Boston and Massachusetts, especially in leadership positions.

Gov. Deval Patrick — just the second black governor since Reconstruction – spoke last, repeatedly stressing that even though civil rights have come a long way since those students first stepped into the high school hallways in 1957, “We’ve got work to do.”

U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter read last night that too many young people are still being denied access to quality public education.

Boston-based photographer Lolita Parker Jr. said she was met with varying degrees of acceptance and harassment as she moved across the country while going to school. But when Parker, 51, attended school in Texas, she remembered being pelted with racial slurs on a regular basis.

“There was always one girl — white, of course — who stood up and would say, ‘That’s not right,'” said Parker, who attended five different schools in three years. “Now it’s 40 years later, and I still wonder where those girls are.”