The nuclear submarine Arkansas was christened Saturday, almost a decade in the making since the U.S. Navy announced that a Virginia-class submarine would bear the state’s name, the Navy Times reports.
Carlotta Walls LaNier, one of the nine Black students who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957, launched a bottle of sparkling wine into the hull of the Virginia-class submarine at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.
In 2018, then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus named the six women of the Little Rock Nine as sponsors of the boat. Besides LaNier, Elizabeth Eckford and Gloria Ray Karlmark also attended the ceremony. All the sponsors had their initials welded into steel plates when the submarine’s keel was laid in 2022.
“History is full of groups of collective people who come together to make something happen,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that LaNier said in a speech before the crowd at the shipyard. “Many people are behind the submarine that we christened today. It’s similar to the quote on our currency, E pluribus unum — ‘Out of many, one.’ We have SSN 800, but many participated in the reality of it being here today.”
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro called the boat “the very best of our submarine force capabilities.”
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