On The 60th Anniversary -Memories Of Central High
School, Little Rock, 1957-A Personal Set Of Memoirs From One Of The Little Rock
Nine
By William Bradley
NPR Terry Gross- Fresh Air
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/15/577371750/they-didn-t-want-me-there-remembering-the-terror-of-school-integration
In setting up this short introduction to the NPR’s Terry
Gross’ show Fresh Air I had to look
up some information on Wikipedia to get a feel for an event that I had only
read about briefly in my high school History class about a decade ago. One
picture of the crowd full of hate-flecked white students and their white
supremacist supporters threatening, menacing nine black high school students
whose only “crime” was wanting to go to an integrated school for a quality education
as per Brown v. Topeka made the hairs
on the back of my head stand up. Made me want to scream stop some sixty years later.
But that part was nothing, that first day part for as this personal memoir of
one of the Little Rock Nine makes clear the whole experience was from hell. We
may have come a long way from then-make that “maybe” very provisional but this
hatred-filled photograph is very deeply etched in my brain and I won’t soon forget it. Listen up.
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