Thelma Mothershed Wair, a member of the group of Black students known as the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated a high school in Arkansas’ capital city in 1957, has died, per The Associated Press. She was 83.
On Saturday (October 19), Mothershed Wair died at a hospital in Little Rock following complications from multiple sclerosis, her sister, Grace Davis, told AP.
Mothershed Wair was one of the nine Black students who integrated Central High School in 1957 as a white mob of segregationists yelled threats and insults. Prior to integration, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus attempted to use the National Guard to block the students from enrolling at Central High School. The standoff occurred years after the Supreme Court ruled segregated classrooms unconstitutional.
The tide turned on September 25, 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent Army members to escort Mothershed Wair and the other students — Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls — into the school.
However, Faubus closed all of the Little Rock schools in 1958 in an attempt to avoid further integration. Mothershed Wair finished her high school classes out of state and her academic credits were later transferred back to Little Rock’s Central High School.
Members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, which they donated to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock in 2011.
“She was always a fighter,” Davis said of her sister. “She’s been sick her entire life. She was born with a congenital heart defect and was told at an early age that she would never get out of her teens. So as she approached her 16th birthday, I remember Mother talking about how afraid she was because she thought she was going to die. But she did what she wanted to do. She enjoyed life.”
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