Member of ‘Little Rock Nine’ speaks to CSUDH students
Alannah Coupp on July 16, 2011 in College Online
By stepping into an all-white high school in Arkansas with eight other black students 54 years ago, Terrence Roberts became an iconic milestone in the long, complicated arc of American race relations.
But, he said, speaking to about 250 students Thursday afternoon at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in Carson, one need only to have watched the news this week – with President Barack Obama producing his birth certificate to prove he is indeed a U.S. citizen – to know that the nation’s struggles with race are not over.
“There was a time in my life when I thought `the people in this country are not going to let it go downhill,”‘ he said. “I still hang onto that. I haven’t given up hope. But my resolve is weakening.”
Roberts, 69, is famous for being one of the Little Rock Nine, the moniker given to the students who volunteered to brave the storm of bigotry in 1957 by attending school at Little Rock Central High School. In keeping with the letter of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education – the Supreme Court decision overturning the legality of “separate but equal” schools in 1954 – the high school had dropped its written rule calling for such a separation, but not the equally powerful unwritten rule.
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