Dr. Terrence Roberts to Speak at NSSSA Luncheon Constitution A – NSSSA Members Only Dr. Terrence Roberts, Little Rock Nine At the age of fifteen, Terrence Roberts, along with eight other black teenagers, faced daily harassment to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. These courageous students became known to the nation as the Little Rock Nine. A graduate of California State University at Los Angeles (BA), and UCLA (MSW), Dr. Roberts obtained his Ph.D. in psychology from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. He is now a professor in the Master's in Psychology Program at Antioch University. A much sought after speaker, Dr. Roberts also heads a management consultant group dedicated to improving human relations in the workplace. Since 1998 he has been the official desegregation consultant for the Little Rock, Arkansas School District, and provides similar services to school districts around the nation. Throwing off the yoke (From the Memphis Daily News- Dr. Roberts - after presentation at Facing History Dinner) By 1955, the Little Rock School Board had decided to cooperate with the high court's decision, submitting a plan for gradual integration starting in the 1958 school year, which would begin in September 1957. The plan was approved unanimously. By then, the NAACP had registered the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High. However, segregationists threatened to protest and block the students' entry into the school. Gov. Orval Faubus responded by sending the Arkansas National Guard to support the segregationists. Then, President Dwight Eisenhower got involved, eventually dispatching federal troops to enforce the integration effort and protect the students. The U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division remained at the school for the rest of the year, until the school board canceled the 1959 school year rather than integrate. And while Little Rock's high schools reopened a year later as integrated institutions, Roberts and the other members of the Little Rock Nine - Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Echford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls - took the beating of their lives and made history in the process. "We were not insane," Roberts said. "We were simply desperate. We knew life under those conditions was virtually no life at all." Even though he and the others were just teenagers and didn't fully realize the path on which they were about to set their feet, they decided to stand firm without resorting to violence. On some level, they knew that trying to cut through more than 300 years of second-class citizenship wasn't going to be easy. "If you understand what's going on, you don't have to respond in kind," he said. "To give in to that primitive impulse to fight would have been joining those folks on their own level." .