The Little Rock Nine
Ernest Green
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Ernest Green was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 22, 1941. Ernest was an active member of his community, he went to church regularly, and was a boy scout. He was a student at Dunbar junior High School till being transferred to Horace Mann the year before going to the all white school Central High School. He graduated high school on May 27, 1958. Ernest attend Michigan State University earning a BA in social science in 1962 and a MA in sociology in 1964. After graduating from Central, Green attended Michigan State
University, earning a BA in social science in 1962 and an MA in sociology in
1964. Afterward, Green served as the director for the A. Philip Randolph
Education Fund from 1968 to 1977. He then was appointed as the Assistant
Secretary of Labor during the Jimmy Carter administration from 1977 to 1981. In
1987, Green joined Lehman Brothers, an investment banking firm in Washington
DC, where he is currently a Senior Managing Director. He has served on numerous
boards, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.
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Elizabeth Eckford
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Elizabeth was born on October 4, 1941, and is still alive today. On September
4, 1957, Elizabeth arrived at Central High School alone. The Little Rock Nine
were supposed to go together, but their meeting place was changed the previous
night. The Eckford family had no phone, and so Daisy Bates intended to go to
their place early the next day but never made it. As a result, Elizabeth was
alone when she got off the bus a block from the school and tried to enter the
campus twice, only to be turned away both times by Arkansas National Guard
troops, there under orders from Governor Orval Faubus. She then confronted an
angry mob of people—men, women, and teenagers—opposing integration, chanting,
“Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.” Elizabeth then left went on a bus to her mothers workplace. After she graduated high school she was accepted by Knox College in Illinois but soon
returned to Little Rock to be closer to her parents. She also attended Central
State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, and has a BA in history. Eckford served in the U.S. Army for five years, serving for her first two as a pay clerk and then, upon reenlisting, worked as an information specialist and wrote for the Fort McClellan, Alabama, and the Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, newspapers. Eckford has held various jobs throughout her life. She has been a waitress, history teacher, welfare worker, unemployment and employment interviewer, and a military reporter. She currently works as a probation officer in Little Rock.
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Jefferson Thomas
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Jefferson Thomas was born the youngest of seven children on September 19, 1942. Jefferson was a track athlete at all-black Horace Mann High
School, till he chose to go to Central High School. After graduation, he attended what is now California State
University in Los Angeles, where he received a degree in business administration.
In 1964, Thomas narrated the documentary Nine from Little Rock, which won an
Academy Award. After serving in the Army in the Vietnam War, he worked for
Mobil Oil and eventually became an accountant for the United States Department
of Defense.
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Terrence Roberts
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Terrence Roberts, the oldest of seven children, was born on December 3, 1941 and is Still alive today.Following his graduation from high school, Terrence attended California State University at Los Angeles and earned a BA in sociology in 1967. He attended graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles and received an MS in social welfare in 1970. In 1976, Roberts earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He served as co-chair of the department of Master of Arts in Psychology Program at Antioch College in Los Angeles, California, and also taught several graduate courses there. In addition to serving as CEO of Terrence J. Roberts and Associates Management Consulting Firm, he maintains a private psychology practice and is a desegregation consultant to the Little Rock School District.On May 17, 1979, Roberts was able to meet Orval Faubus(Arkansas Govonor during Little Rock Nine attempt to desegregate Central High School) face to face on ABC’s Good Morning, America. He said, “I really feel it was a violation of public trust to practice your own personal policies of racism in that position. You endangered not only my life, but the lives of hundreds of other people, both black and white.”
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Carlotta Walls LaNier
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The oldest of three daughters, Carlotta Walls was born on December 18, 1942 she is still alive today. Inspired by Rosa Parks, who refusal to give up her bus seat
to a white passenger has sparked the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, as
well as the desire to get the best education available, Walls enrolled in
Central High School as a sophomore. Walls attended Michigan State University for two years in
the early 1960s before moving with her family to Denver. In 1968, she earned a
BS from Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado) and
began working at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) as a program
administrator for teenagers.Also in 1968, Walls married Ira C. “Ike” LaNier,
with whom she had a son and a daughter. In 1977, she founded LaNier and
Company, a real estate brokerage firm in Denver. She currently resides in
Englewood, Colorado.
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Minnijean Brown
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Minnijean Brown, the eldest of four children of Willie and Imogene Brown, was born on September 11, 1941 she is alive today. Although all of the Nine experienced verbal and physical
harassment during the 1957–58 academic year at Central, Minnijean was first
suspended, and then expelled, for retaliating against the daily torment:
specifically, she called one of her tormenters “white trash.” On February 17,
1958, she moved to New York and lived with Drs. Kenneth B. and Mamie Clark,
African-American psychologists whose social science research formed the basis
for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
argument in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, which held
that segregation harmed the self-esteem of African-American children. She
graduated from New York’s New Lincoln School, a private progressive school in
Manhattan, in 1959. Minnijean is the recipient of numerous awards for her
community work for social justice, including the Lifetime Achievement Tribute
by the Canadian Race Relations foundation and the International Wolf Award for
contributions to racial harmony. Minnijean, along with the other Little Rock
Nine was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1958.
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Gloria Ray Karlmark
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Gloria Ray was born on September 26, 1942, in Little Rock, one of the three children of Harvey C. and Julia Miller Ray. Ray was a fifteen-year-old student at all-black Horace Mann High School in Little Rock when she registered to attend the all-white Central High for her junior year. The Nine were harassed daily by white students at the school. Ray was tormented by one white student in particular, who called her names and bumped her several times, once knocking her across the floor. Unable to attend high school in 1958, during the “Lost Year” when all of the high schools in Little Rock were closed, Ray moved out of state to finish her high school education. The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where her mother was able to find employment, and Ray graduated from Kansas City Central High School.Following high school, Ray attended Illinois Institute of Technology and received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and mathematics. She worked briefly as a public school teacher and research assistant at the University of Chicago Research Medical Center. Ray married Krister Karlmark in 1966, and in 1970, she joined International Business Machine’s (IBM) Nordic Laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden, where she worked as a systems analyst and technical writer.Karlmark graduated from Kungliga Patent & Registreringsverket in Sweden as a patent attorney, and from 1977 until 1981, she worked for IBM International Patent Operations. From 1976 to 1994, Karlmark founded and was editor-in-chief of Computers in Industry, an international journal of computer applications in industry. In 1994, Karlmark went to work in the Netherlands for Philips Telecommunications in Hilversum and, later, for Philips Lighting in Eindhoven. She and her husband have two children, Mats and Elin.
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Thelma Mothershed
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Thelma Mothershed was born on
November 29, 1940, in Bloomberg, Texas, to Arlevis Leander Mothershed and
Hosanna Claire Moore Mothershed. Mothershed attended Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School before
transferring to Central High. Despite daily tormenting from some white students
at Central High, she completed her junior year at the formerly all-white high
school during the tumultuous 1957–58 year. Because the city’s high schools were
closed the following year, Mothershed earned the necessary credits for
graduation through correspondence courses and by attending summer school in St.
Louis, Missouri. She received her diploma from Central High by mail.Mothershed
graduated from Southern Illinois University at Cabondale in 1964 with a BA in
home economics and earned her MS in Guidance and Counseling Education in 1970;
in 1985, she received an administrative certificate in education from Southern
Illinois University at Edwardsville. She taught home economics in the East St.
Louis school system for twenty-eight years before retiring in 1994. Mothershed
married Fred Wair on December 26, 1965. The couple has one son. Thelma Wair has
also worked at the Juvenile Detention Center of the St. Clair County Jail in
St. Clair County, Illinois, and as an instructor of survival skills for women
at the American Red Cross Shelter for the homeless. During the 1989–90 school
year, the East St. Louis chapter of the Top Ladies of Distinction and the early
childhood/pre-kindergarten staff of District 189 honored her as an Outstanding
Role Model.
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Melba Pattillo Beals
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Melba Pattillo was born on December 7, 1941, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Beals grew up surrounded by family members who knew the importance of an education. Her mother, Lois Marie Pattillo, PhD, was one of the first black graduates of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1954 and was a high school English teacher at the time of the crisis. While attending all-black Horace Mann High School in Little Rock, Melba knew her educational opportunities were not equal to her white counterparts’ opportunities at Central High. In response to this inequality, Melba volunteered to transfer to the all-white Central High School with eight other black students from Horace Mann and Dunbar Junior High School. The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be known, faced daily harassment from white students. Melba later recounted that the soldier assigned to protect her instructed her, “In order to get through this year, you will have to become a soldier. Never let your enemy know what you are feeling.” Melba took the soldier’s advice, and, while the rest of the school year remained turbulent. Barred from entering Central High the next year when the city’s schools were closed, Melba moved to Santa Rosa, California, to live with a sponsoring family who were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for her senior year of high school.In 1961, Melba married John Beals. They had one daughter but divorced after ten years of marriage. She subsequently adopted two boys. Melba graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in journalism and earned an MA in the same field from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She has worked as a communications consultant, a motivational speaker, and as a reporter for San Francisco’s public television station and for the Bay Area’s NBC affiliate. Melba was the first of the Little Rock Nine to write a book based on her experiences at Central High. Published in 1994, Warriors Don’t Cry gives a first-hand account of the trials Melba encountered from segregationists and racist students. The book was named the American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book for 1995 and won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award that same year. White is a State of Mind, her 1999 sequel to Warriors Don’t Cry, follows Melba from her senior year in high school to her college and family days in California. Melba was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1958. As of 2010, Melba lives in the San Francisco area and works as an author and public speaker.
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Other People
President Eisenhower
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Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower. He was born on October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969. He was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front. He was the last U.S. President to have been born in the 19th century. He was the one who overruled Governor Faubus and helped the little rock nine get through the year.
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Governor Orval Faubus
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Orval Eugene Faubus was born on January 7, 1910 and died on December 14, 1994. He was the 36th Governor of Arkansas, serving from 1955 to 1967. He is best known for his 1957 stand against the desegregation of the Little Rock School District during the Little Rock Crisis, in which he defied a unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court by ordering the Arkansas National Guard to stop black students from attending Little Rock Central High School.
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Credit
We got most of the information for our bios from the website Encyclopedia Of Arkansas |