The More Things Change: Remembering the Little Rock Nine"

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Dick Price
Northeast Democratic Club of Los Angeles

For those of us of a certain age, the image is forever seared in our minds of Governor Orville Faubus blocking the doorway to Little Rock’s Central High School, flanked by members of the Arkansas National Guard, denying entrance to a group of nine black students. It was 1957 and the beginning of the Television Age. The drama played out before our eyes on the nightly news that we were just coming to know.

Ten, shortly afterwards, President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division—the same unit occupying Baghdad today—to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court school integration decision. Who can forget that 15-year-old black girl—Elizabeth Eckford was her name—striding bravely and alone through the crowd of cursing, jeering, spitting white students and their parents toward the schoolhouse door, determined to get her chance at an equal education?

Clearly, that was a signal moment in the history of race relations in America, opening the door to even more fundamental change as the Civil Rights movement gained momentum in decades that followed. Or so some of us thought. Today, with America’s schools—like much of our society—still largely segregated, that 10-year-old kid watching history flicker past in 1957 wonders what happened

One of Nine

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine, one of the original nine—then Terry Roberts, now spoke of his experiences then and since at the "Urban Issues Forum." Founded and moderated by journalist and professor Anthony Asadullah Samad, , the Forum holds monthly breakfast meetings at the African-American Museum that address urban political, social, and economic issues relevant to Central Los Angeles communities.

Now a clinical psychologist with a practice in Pasadena, a program chair at Antioch University, and a charming and much sought-after speaker, Roberts directed his remarks especially to the 50 or so mostly black and brown students from Jefferson High School and Samad’s classes at East Los Angeles and Southwest Colleges who attended the Urban Issues session on September 14th. “Early on, I was advised to become the executive in charge of my own education,” Roberts said. “So when they asked for volunteers to go to Central High, I had both hands in the air.”