Frail child among Little Rock Nine faced down segregation mobs

THELMA MOTHERSHED-WAIR: 1940 - 2024

Thelma Mothershed-Wair, who has died aged 83, was one of the nine black students who in 1957 had to be escorted by the 101st Airborne Division through jeering mobs at Little Rock Central High during the desegregation of schools in Arkansas, a watershed moment in the civil rights struggle.

If Thelma Mothershed was harassed less than the others, it was perhaps because she was visibly frail, weighing six and a half stone, and the shortest of the nine at barely five foot tall. She was prone to mild heart attacks and was excused the physical education classes where the worst beatings occurred.

Civil rights activist Thelma Mothershed-Wair in 2007.Credit: Getty Images

Even so, she was knocked flat on her face against the metal stairs. The phone threats were so constant that her parents had to take the receiver off the hook. One of the black students was burned in effigy on the campus.

Thelma Mothershed had been top of her class at her black secondary school, and her worried parents tried to talk her out of enrolling at Central High, fearful that the anxiety – and the stairs – might kill her, but she was adamant that she wanted the best education to become a teacher.

Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional, some Arkansas districts had discreetly introduced token black students. But white resistance was growing and the populist governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, risked losing the 1958 election if he did not pander to his segregationist base.

Thelma Mothershed is escorted to an army vehicle after class in 1957.Credit: Getty

On September 4, 1957, Thelma Mothershed and her fellow students were turned away from Central High by the Arkansas National Guard, sent by Faubus. On Monday, September 23, they successfully entered the school but a mob outside beat up black reporters and the children were sent home for their safety. Two days later President Eisenhower deployed 1200 of the 101st Airborne Division to force the issue.

The scenes outside Little Rock became emblematic of the South’s resistance to civil rights. Some girls chanted: “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!” A famous photograph was taken of a white girl screaming at the dignified, subdued black students; she later made a public apology.

“White people from all over the country were there,” recalled Thelma Mothershed. “They feared that if black people were allowed in the lily-white schools there, they’d be allowed in all schools. It would spread like popcorn.”

Hazel Bryan taunts black student Elizabeth Eckhart at Central High School in Little Rock. Credit: AP

Intimidated by the hostility while being shown around the school, her pulse became irregular and she had to be carried into an office to recover. Despite her heart condition, she barely missed a day of that year’s schooling.

In 1958, however, Faubus closed all the Little Rock schools to avoid desegregation. Thelma Mothershed completed her studies by correspondence course, and went on to Southern Illinois University, obtaining a master’s in education and teaching in the East St Louis District 189 for 28 years.

She was born in Texas on November 29, 1940, one of five children of Arlevia Mothershed, a psychiatric aide, and his wife Hosanna Claire, a church worker.

Governor Faubus remained in office for a decade after the Little Rock debacle. When he met Thelma Mothershed on a panel in 1990, he failed to recognise her, making the excuse: “I never did see you during all that turmoil.” She replied: “Oh, that’s because I was so short.”

Eight of the Little Rock Nine, including Thelma Mothershed (centre).Credit: BETTMANN ARCHIVE, Getty.

She was amused to be asked by her son: “Mum, are you black history?” But she was disappointed not to see the promise of the civil rights movement fulfilled. “With all that we went through, we thought we were laying the foundation for things to be better,” she said in 1990. “Now things are backsliding; how and why is a mystery to me.”

She was frustrated at the crime blighting the lives of so many young black men. “Too many of these folks go around with a chip on their shoulders,” she said in the mid-1990s. “They don’t seem to have any direction. Not enough kids are in church. Their parents don’t bring them. They won’t even drop them off at church.”

She took early retirement “so that younger people could be hired”, she said, and began counselling female prisoners and teaching survival skills at a homeless shelter. In 1965 she married Fred Wair and had a son.

The Telegraph, London