30 August 2007
Terrence Roberts
Fifty years ago, black youngsters’ struggles to attend Little Rock’s Central High School during the 1957-1958 school year propelled the civil rights movement forward in the United States. (See “After Facing Mobs 50 Years Ago, Nine Go Home to Honors.”) The Little Rock Nine’s story is really nine stories.
Terrence Roberts, the second-oldest of seven children, said his parents supported his decision to go to Central High in 1957 but also told him that if he changed his mind and decided not to stay, they would be behind him 100 percent.
A common thread among the Little Rock Nine is strong families. “Our parents were truly the real heroes,” said Carlotta Walls LaNier, another one of the Little Rock Nine.
Roberts said he had begun thinking about segregation at age 10 and believed “it made no sense.” As a boy, he said, he assumed segregation was particular to Little Rock and that “outside of this place, people are sane.” But as his awareness of race relations in the United States grew, he saw going to Central High School as a way to force change.
Terrence Roberts in 1957 (University of Arkansas Little Rock Archives)On the first day he tried to gain access to the school, Roberts recalled, he looked into the faces of the people in the mob. “They ranged in age from very young to very old. Every visage was twisted, grotesque. And the words that came out of their mouths were shocking. They really wanted to kill us.”
Segregationists drove by the Roberts' house and threw bottles and rocks from time to time. They vandalized the neighbor’s car four times. “The [Ku Klux] Klan types thought it was our car,” Roberts explained. At school, the soldiers and guardsmen whose duty it was to keep the nine safe were not allowed to go into bathrooms, locker-rooms or classrooms. Consequently, gym class, before and after which students had to change clothes in the locker rooms, was dangerous to the Little Rock Nine. Roberts recalls that a white boy threw a combination lock at him so hard that it caused a bloody gash in his head and almost caused him to fall to the ground. He took refuge in a coach’s office.
Roberts has put distance between himself and that time 50 years ago. “I have no more acute emotions about it,” he said. But Elizabeth Eckford, another one of the nine, once chastised Roberts for his cool attitude. For her, he said, “the emotional trauma was much greater.”
When the Little Rock schools closed for the 1958-1959 school year to avoid integration, Roberts moved to Los Angeles. After graduating from high school there, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology, a master’s degree in social welfare and a doctorate in psychology.
Today, Roberts does workshops that help train law enforcement not to use racial profiling in police work. “I don’t feel like a symbol. But I am aware others see me as that. I use that as a catalyst to get things started.” He is also on the faculty of the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, where he teaches courses about biases that people internalize.
Roberts said it will take a long time for America to completely embrace racial integration because the country took a long time nurturing discrimination and segregation. But he is optimistic. “I see it as resolvable,” he said.
See Black History Month.
