2009 students learn life lesson from 1957
This story appeared in the Antelope Valley Press
Saturday, March 21, 2009.
By JULIE DRAKE
Valley Press Staff Writer
LANCASTER – About 300 middle and high school students and a handful of adults kept their attention focused on the elegant, bespectacled bald man with the slight gray beard and in the camel-colored suit standing before them Friday morning in the small gymnasium inside the physical education building at Eastside High School’s permanent campus.
The man was psychologist Dr. Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, the African-American high school students who volunteered to integrate the formerly all-white Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957.
Roberts, then a 15-year-old junior, and the eight other students attended Central High for one year. To avoid integration the following year, then-Gov. Orval Faubus ordered Little Rock’s public school system shut down. As a result, Roberts and his family moved to California.
The psychologist was the keynote speaker at Eastside High’s joint teen summit, which included Eastside junior and senior students as well as students from Piute and New Vista middle schools.
Roberts played a brief video history of the Little Rock Nine before he gave his speech and took questions from the audience afterward.