Thelma Mothershed Wair, Little Rock Nine student, dies at 83

Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of nine Black students who became known as the Little Rock Nine for integrating a high school in 1957 during one of the biggest confrontations of the civil rights movement, died Saturday at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark. She was 83.

Her death was confirmed by her sister, Grace Davis. No cause was given.

In the fall of 1957, nine Black students enrolled at Little Rock Central High School, the country’s first test for school integration after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision declared “separate but equal” education unconstitutional.

In a 2004 oral history interview with the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, Mothershed Wair recalled seeing Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas on television calling on the National Guard to block the students from entering on their first day. “I thought he meant to protect me,” she said in the 2004 interview. “How wrong I was.”

The students faced angry, racist mobs that first day, and the soldiers blocked them from entering the school. Mothershed Wair also recalled seeing cars with out-of-state license plates near the school.

For three weeks, Faubus defied the federal desegregation order, setting off a crisis across Little Rock. Then President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort the students to school on Sept. 25. “The army has come into our city to put nine kids in a school?” she said she remembered thinking. “Did that make any sense? Was this not America?”

With the 101st Airborne Division accompanying them, Mothershed Wair recalled how the mobs that had blocked them from entering school “parted like when Moses stretched out his staff at the Red Sea.”

“I think the crisis made me a stronger person,” she said. “It made me more accepting of other people.”

Born Thelma Mothershed on Nov. 29, 1940, in Bloomburg, Texas, her family moved to Little Rock in the early 1950s. She was born with a congenital heart condition that kept her home schooled at times.

She was a sophomore at Horace Mann High School, a Black school in Little Rock, when she saw a notice from the Board of Education that students who lived within Central High School’s jurisdiction could sign up for a transfer to the school. “My friends and I said ‘Hey, we should go to Central,’ ” she said, explaining that they heard the school had better supplies and “might just be a better place to go.”

The next year, after the Little Rock Nine integrated at Central, Faubus used new state laws to stop desegregation, shuttering Little Rock’s four high schools in what became known as the “Lost Year.” Mothershed Wair completed her remaining high school credits through correspondence courses and summer school in St. Louis, Mississippi, according to the National Park Service, and received her Central High School diploma by mail.

Mothershed Wair earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics education from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a master’s degree in guidance and counseling from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She spent more than two decades working in the East St. Louis school system, both as teacher and an elementary career counselor, before retiring in 1994.

Mothershed Wair also worked at the Juvenile Detention Center of the St. Clair County Jail in St. Clair County, Ill, and as an instructor of survival skills for women at the American Red Cross Shelter for the homeless, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

In 1999, Mothershed Wair and the eight other members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bill Clinton.

Mothershed Wair is survived by her son; a daughter-in-law; two grandchildren; a great-granddaughter and great-grandson; three sisters; and a brother.

In interviews, Mothershed Wair has said school integration should have started at the lower levels and worked its way up, but in a 2007 interview with the Arkansas Times, she said she was glad she helped integrate Central High School.

“It made a difference in the world,” she said. “That’s the way it should be.”