Like everyone else, I was sad to learn over the holiday weekend that Jefferson Thomas, one of the nine black students to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, became the first of that group to die. It’s always been particularly shameful to me, as an Arkansan, that the standoff over Brown v. Board of Education is what the state is most famous for. But the story of the Little Rock Nine has also represented how immediate this history is. The white students protesting were only a little older than my own parents. Some of my high school teachers were among those who had to scramble to find education alternatives when Gov. Orval Faubus closed public schools the following year to avoid integration. There’s really no excuse for the young adults my age in Arkansas to claim that institutionalized racism is a thing of the past. As ColorLines points out, segregation is still happening today.
But it's also telling that all nine of these students went on to become successful, and did so outside of Arkansas. This is one of things racism does that people don’t often realize: It robs communities of talent and robs its victims of pride in their homes. It seems obvious that the nine would want to leave after everything that happened — Thomas’ father moved the entire family to California after his son graduated — but it’s no less shameful that the racism of white Arkansans robbed them of their home state.
It becomes especially sad when we consider an anecdote about Thomas retold in his obituaries.
At a commemoration held near the 50th anniversary of Central High’s integration, Mr. Thomas tried to bring levity to an otherwise somber occasion. Although discouraged from participating in athletics, he recalled attending a pep rally at the school and cheering along with white students, whom he thought were singing the school fight song and the state flag.LaNier glared at him, he said. He then realized the problem: “That was not the fight song. That was not the Arkansas flag. They’d come in singing ‘Dixie’ and waving the Confederate flag.”
Thomas wanted to be a kid and cheer for his team, but it turned out it was just another opportunity for the school to make sure he knew he wasn’t part of it.
— Monica Potts
