The students who integrated Central High School in 1957 became known as the Little Rock Nine. That included Thelma Mothershed Wair. She died at a Little Rock hospital Saturday at the age of 83, after having complications from multiple sclerosis. That’s according to her sister, Grace Davis.
For three weeks in 1957 Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus enlisted the National Guard to block the black students from enrolling. These developments unfolded a full three years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in May of 1954. As part of the ruling, the nation’s High Court declared segregated classrooms were unconstitutional.
As the Associated Press reports, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school on September 25th, 1957. Mothershed Wair would eventually earn her high school diploma at Central High School, before going on to earn both her bachelor’s degree in home economics and a master’s degree in guidance and counseling. She dedicated much of her career to public education.
All the members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, which they later donated to the Clinton Foundation in 2009 to honor their relationship with the former president.
