E-mail a friendDr. Terrence Roberts
airdate September 6, 2007
Dr. Terrence Roberts made history as one of the "Little Rock Nine"—students who volunteered to desegregate Arkansas' Little Rock Central High School in 1957. To avoid integration the following year, the city's high schools shut down, and Roberts moved to L.A. with his family. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in psychology and helm a management consulting firm. In '99, the nine received the Congressional Gold Medal. Roberts' new memoir, Lessons from Little Rock, details the effect of growing up in the segregated South.
One of the "Little Rock Nine" discusses recent re-segregation in schools across America. (1:11)
Dr. Terrence Roberts
Tavis: Fifty years ago, in 1957, Terrence Roberts and eight classmates made history by becoming the first African Americans to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fearing for their safety, the Little Rock Nine, as they were known, entered the school that September morning escorted by members of the 101st Airborne.
Dr. Roberts would go on to a successful career as an academic. He currently remains on the faculty at Antioch University here in L.A. Dr. Roberts, as always, sir, nice to see you.
Dr. Terrence Roberts: Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: You doing all right?
Roberts: Absolutely.
Tavis: Let me start, as I always do when I see you, by saying thank you.
Roberts: Well, you're quite welcome.
Tavis: Thank you for your courage and conviction and commitment, and that of the other eight, who I've had a chance to meet over the years, for what you all did 50 years ago. I guess the obvious question is, does it feel like 50 years ago?
Roberts: It doesn't. It feels like yesterday. Fifty years have gone by so fast.
Tavis: When you go back 50 years ago - whether it feels that way or not - what do you most recall about that morning, about that day?
Roberts: I think the one thing certainly that I recall the most is my own level of fear. I'd never been that afraid in my entire life. In fact, I thought if anybody were ever that afraid, they'd probably just fall over and die. Because there was no way to quell that fear, and as I looked out at the mob and heard what they were saying, the fear level just kept going up and up.
Tavis: How did you come to be one of, as we now know, the Little Rock Nine?
Roberts: We were all volunteers. The Little Rock school board decided to obey the law - no precedent for that, of course - in terms of the Brown decision. And so they put together a plan to desegregate the schools. Now the initial plan made a lot of sense. They were going to start with kindergarten through third grade.
But the townspeople were up in arms about that one, because they realized that that would work, and they weren't happy about it. So they forced the school board to abandon that plan and they came back with a compromise of grades 10, 11, and 12. And at that point, we - Black kids at the all-Black school - learned about the plan and the request for volunteers came. So we all said, "Well, sure."
Tavis: Now I'm trying to juxtapose in my mind your being a young person - in your case, a sophomore, as I recall?
Roberts: A junior.
Tavis: Junior. So you're obviously a young person, you're in high school. On the one hand, you said a moment ago that day when you all actually integrated Central High School with the help of the National Guard protecting you as you made your way in, the highest level of fear you'd ever experienced. And yet I'm trying to square that with your having volunteered for this assignment.
Roberts: Well, couple of things. One, living in Little Rock as a Black person, fear was sort of an ongoing reality. So it wasn't new; just the levels were new. And also, I felt this was an opportunity to really make a statement about the reality that was around us. As a young kid, I couldn't figure out this thing about segregation - none of it made any sense.
I was totally mystified. How could a government, how could a nation, abide by these principles which said certain people were second- or third-class? It made no sense. In fact, I remember I thought at one point, Little Rock was some sort of an aberration. That outside Little Rock, people were actually sane. Well, that proved to be false, of course, as I got a little older.
But I thought okay, well, we have to do something here. I had no idea it was going to explode the way it did. Now, I knew there would be some opposition - that much was clear. I hadn't lived in Little Rock all those years and not realized that people would be upset by this. But I thought they would simply manifest their displeasure and perhaps go home. But no, they stayed.
Tavis: Let me ask you about two parts of this process - two additional parts, I should say. Take me inside your home, to your kitchen table, in fact, to the conversations, I would assume plural, that took place in your home about your role in this process on the front side.
Roberts: My parents were people who tried to maintain sort of a balance at home. We didn't actually talk about this a lot. I came home from school one day, told them that I had volunteered, and they said, "Okay, we'll support you 100 percent."
Tavis: Just like that.
Roberts: But then they added something. They said, "Look, if you get up there and it gets too hot for you and you want to quit, we'll support your decision to quit 100 percent." Now I didn't realize it at the time, but that last part was very critical. Because I knew - and it did get hot, no question about it - but I knew that I could quit if I wanted to, and wouldn't lose parental esteem, and that was important.
Tavis: Tell me more about what was inside of you. You hit on this a little bit earlier, but I'm really intrigued now that I learn more that it was even more your decision than it was your parents'. What was driving young Terrence to want to step out in this way, other than the fact that you were mystified by segregation?
Roberts: Well, the rightness of the thing. Our cause was a just cause - there was no question about that in my mind. And secondly, I knew from my own study that a lot of people had given their lives in this same struggle. For me, even as a kid, to say no would have been the same as turning around and spitting on the graves of those folk. I couldn't do it - absolutely could not.
Tavis: Speaking of the graves of certain people, we all regret, of course, and of course we all have to - we're all born and we all die at some point, but we regret, though, that Daisy Bates will not be there for this 50th anniversary celebration. For those who are going to read more about this history in the coming days as we lead up to this historic anniversary, tell me about Ms. Bates.
Roberts: Daisy Bates played a rather pivotal role. She was, at that time, the president of the state chapter of the NAACP. When the school board sort of went to pieces, they lost focus with all the social pressure and there was a leadership vacuum. Daisy and her husband L.C. stepped in and filled that leadership vacancy, so to speak, and they did all kinds of amazing things.
For instance, they ran a newspaper - it was the Black newspaper in Little Rock. And they used that as a place to really speak out rather forcefully against these practices of segregation and discrimination, and they suffered greatly for it. The business went belly-up as a result - no advertising, and that sort of thing. But they were stalwart, committed to the whole notion that Black people deserve better in this country.
Tavis: Tell me about the other eight, and how well you all - you all were volunteers, but how did you know these other students? In school were you friends? Tell me about the relationship between the nine of you.
Roberts: Yeah, we did, we all knew each other, because there was only one high school for Black kids in Little Rock. Originally Dunbar High, and then later Horace Mann High, the new school that was built. We knew each other from grade school and we hung out together. And as a result of now being in this group of nine, we were even closer.
We even have a foundation now - Little Rock Nine Foundation - and we're actively involved in trying to support education on many levels. In fact, we're giving this year scholarships to nine students - nine high school seniors - who are going on to college.
Tavis: Tell me how you end up navigating a life, then, having gone through that particular kind of experience around the issue of education or equal access to it, and end up building a career in academia.
Roberts: I'm glad you used that word "navigate." My wife and I, we're currently working on a manuscript called "How to Navigate the Racial Terrain in America," targeted to students, primarily, because it is an issue of navigating. Trying to figure out how to get through, around, over - whatever you need to do - to make it to the goals you set for yourself.
How I've done it is tried to maintain a very high level of awareness about who I am, what I'm all about, and to recognize that I'm not in this thing alone. I depend on a lot of other people, and I recognize that. I recognize the value of connecting with other people and working in concert with them to reach my goals.
Tavis: President Bush is expected to participate in these activities, President Clinton expected to participate, we'll be there during our program from Little Rock, so a lot of focus, lot of attention, lot of politics, even around this. You know as well as I do that it was a Republican president, in fact - Eisenhower - didn't really want to (unintelligible) - but a Republican president who actually ordered this to happen, and so there are going to be a lot of conversations again from the left and the right about education 50 years later, and what it means. What do you make of the politics around what you all did 50 years ago?
Roberts: Unfortunately, a lot of the "political stuff" is not really relevant. A lot of that is about reelection or about pushing a certain party forward. I would hope, though, that this would be an opportunity for us to downplay the political side of it and look at what education truly means. Because when you think about it, an educated populace is an important piece for a democracy.
If you have uneducated people - I saw a sign, a bumper sticker the other day that said, "If you think education's expensive, try ignorance." And it made so much sense to me, because the drain on the public treasury for an uneducated populace is tremendous. So we really do need to rethink what we're doing in terms of education. I think often, education gets short shrift in favor of other things, and perhaps it's because people at the top don't really understand the true value of education.
Tavis: But every president, Dr. Roberts, every president - Democrat or Republican - every candidate for the White House, indeed right about now, says at some point they want to be the education president.
Roberts: I know. It's mainly rhetoric, unfortunately. I don't really see any substance to a lot of the programs put forth.
Tavis: So what do you make of the fact, then, 50 years after your courageous act with your other eight compatriots, we are really witnessing, to a large degree, the re-segregation of schools across America?
Roberts: That's not unusual from my vantage point, because I'm convinced that this country is not really interested in integration. If you look at our history, for well over 335 years, if we were to start, say, at 1619, we practiced discrimination, separation of races. And then it wasn't until 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown case, that discrimination virtually was declared to be unconstitutional. But if you do something for 335 years, no matter what it is, you don't come to a screeching halt in 1954, whether it's the Supreme Court or any other court.
Tavis: It's de facto versus du jour.
Roberts: So you've got spillover - residual leakage from that long 300-year plus period into this period we're in now which since '54 - what is this, 2007 - that's been 53 years. That's a very short period of time. And so it's not surprising to me that we are in the state we're in.
Tavis: Let me ask you - 30 seconds to go here - whether or not given that we live in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, you are hopeful that that will change.
Roberts: I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. I don't know where I base that hope, but it just makes sense to me that if we keep going the way we are, we're headed for sure destruction. It can't go on this way.
Tavis: Dr. Terrence Roberts, what a hero he is, of course, in his own time with those other eight who make up the Little Rock Nine. We will commemorate, celebrate the 50th anniversary of their historic movement in Little Rock to integrate Central High School just a few days from now. Dr. Roberts, an honor to have you here.
Roberts: Thank you very much, Tavis.
Tavis: All the best to you.
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