By Lee A. Daniels

At first glance, one might think of Terrence Roberts’ memoir of his experiences as one of the Little Rock Nine* as a book telling a story the world already knows well.

Not only has the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in September, 1957 been examined in dozens of books, but also at least three of Roberts’ fellow pioneers – Melba Patillo Beals, Carlotta Walls LaNier and Minnijean Brown Trickey – have written their own memoirs of that momentous event’s unfolding.

But Roberts’ affecting book, Lessons from Little Rock, should – like theirs – be required reading for anyone who wants to fully understand the unrelenting hostility and petty physical abuse the Nine endured from many students and teachers – and why they persisted – once their admission to Central High had been secured.

True, there were national and global forces at work that conspired to make the Little Rock struggle a landmark moment in American history that continues, deservedly so, to be celebrated today.

Central High School was the first significant test of the Brown decision and thus, of the federal government’s resolve to support not only black Americans’ right to equal educational opportunity, but also of all their “inalienable rights” as Americans. Further, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it was the second highly-visible demonstration of blacks’ resolve to press for those rights. And, finally, it occurred the same month that the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, handing the communist country a double propaganda victory.

Lessons also provides the important benefit of understanding, in full measure, the spirit that drove thousands of black Americans from the most ordinary of circumstances to forcefully but nonviolently confront white southerners’ threats and use of physical and economic reprisals.

As Roberts puts it in the plainest terms, in 1957, he, all of 17 years old, understood that “backing down now was simply not an option.”

He makes that assertion at the end of a passage summarizing the 1957-1958 school year which is worth quoting at length. (It was the only year Roberts, then a junior, spent there; for when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used his authority to close all of Little Rock’s schools, the following September, Roberts’ family sent him to Los Angeles to live with an aunt and uncle and finish high school.)

“The 1957-58 school year had been filled with fear and anxiety for me,” Roberts writes. “And it ended with no real sense of resolution about the continued desegregation effort in Little Rock. Even so, I was all set to return the following … [September] In spite of the fact that we had been so beaten down, both physically and psychologically, I was ready to go back and face the hatred and hostilities most surely awaiting us. … It’s hard to say what enabled me to sustain this kind of thinking but I believe it was rooted in my growing awareness that white people needed to understand that we black people and those who supported us were tired of the indignities heaped upon us by the system of racial separation.”

Here was, writ small, what Harvard University professor Martin Kilson calls the “challenge-demeanor” that, in the half-century since the Plessy decision had spread far and wide among blacks as more and more escaped the brutal racism of the rural South and collected in Southern and Northern cities. By the 1950s, blacks had a critical mass ready to openly take on Jim Crow – and bear the high price.

In describing his own family (and himself as an ordinary American boy and teenager) and the black community of Little Rock, Roberts offers an intimate portrait of how this “marvelous new militancy,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. would describe it seven years later in his speech at the March of Washington, came to push members of that community to rise to the challenge of the moment.

In doing so, he underscores a fundamental truth about black Americans’ twentieth-century freedom struggle.

The black leaders whose names resound in history were not working with unformed clay. Ordinary black people did not just rise to the challenge of the moment. They – via their willingness to stand on the front lines in hundreds of small Southern communities – made the challenge of the moment possible.

Roberts’ own words make clear that this sense of racial responsibility and of an allegiance to the American Ideal, along with an indomitable will, is what enabled the Little Rock Nine, ordinary teenagers of different personalities and ambitions, to brave on a daily basis being captive in a hostile environment.

In other words, they understood the demand being black in America has always required: backing down is simply not an option.

* The other members of the Little Rock Nine are: Melba Patillo Beals, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, Jefferson Thomas., and Carlotta Walls LaNier.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.