Early Life and Education
Terrence Roberts was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to William L. and Margaret G. Roberts. He first attended segregated schools like Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School. In 1957, he volunteered to attend the all-white Little Rock Central High School the next fall and help desegregate one of the nation's largest school.
On September 4, 1957, Roberts and eight other African American students (known as the Little Rock Nine) made an unsuccessful attempt to enter Little Rock Central High School. Despite the presence of the National Guard, an angry mob of about 400 surrounded the school.
The National Guard were removed with the protection of the students left to the local police. On September 23, 1957, a mob of about 1000 people surrounded the school as the students attempted to enter. The following day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent U.S. Army troops to accompany the students to school for protection. The troops were stationed at the school for the entirety of the school year, although they were unable to prevent incidents of violence inside.
As a result of the subsequent closing of Little Rock's high schools during the 1958-1959 school year, Roberts completed his senior year at Los Angeles High School in Los Angeles, California.
Read more about this topic: Terrence Roberts
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)