In a 2004 oral history interview with the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, Mrs. Mothershed Wair recalled seeing Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas on television calling on the National Guard to block the students from entering on their first day. "I thought he meant to protect me," she said in the 2004 interview. "How wrong I was."
For three weeks, Gov. Faubus defied the federal desegregation order, setting off a crisis across Little Rock. Then President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort the students to school on Sept. 25. "The army has come into our city to put nine kids in a school?" she said she remembered thinking. "Did that make any sense? Was this not America?"
With the 101st Airborne Division accompanying them, Mrs. Mothershed Wair recalled how the mobs that had blocked them from entering school parted like when Moses stretched out his staff at the Red Sea.
Collection
[
|
...
]