Teachers hear learning, love can defeat racism
REGINA Terrence Roberts remembers being attacked in a school hallway as a Grade 11 student at Little Rock Central High.
Bloodied and bruised, Roberts never fought back.
The teachers at that Arkansas high school in 1957 “tended to cluster at that extreme”: Like the majority of their students, most of them hated the nine black teenagers who attended the newly desegregated, formerly whites-only school.
“My 11th Grade was spent in sheer hell,” Roberts told a gymnasium full of teachers on Thursday at Miller High School in Regina.
Roberts was one of the black students who went down in history as the Little Rock Nine.
After the Arkansas National Guard blocked the students from entering the school, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the Armed Forces to protect the students.
In 1958, Gov. Orval Faubus closed all the high schools in the state for a year, simply to maintain segregation.
This was a new political climate, after centuries of racial hierarchy and slavery.
When Roberts was born on Dec. 3, 1941, it was into a world “separate but equal,” per an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
When Roberts was almost 13, another Supreme Court decision changed that.
In 1954, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka determined that it was unconstitutional to racially segregate children in public schools.
The law may have changed, but society didn’t.
“These white kids were not doing it as an arbitrary thing; this is what they learned,” said Roberts. “They had been baptized in the rivers of racism. That ideology had so permeated them that they were now operating at bone-marrow level …”
“It becomes ‘the way things ought to be,’ it becomes ‘this is how we are, this is who we are’ … That gives you a clue about how big a job we face today, even in Regina.”
Even so, Roberts forgave every person involved in hating or attacking him.
“I was really concerned about the well-being of these kids who were beating us up,” said Roberts, who practised non-violence according to the teachings of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
“He says the only way you can do non-violence is to know within your heart that you love your enemy … I don’t know exactly how it works, but it works,” said Roberts.
Roberts has also learned to accept people as they are, then “be willing to start helping them with whatever they need help with.”
Further, he advises — and practises — “build(ing) relationships with those who seem utterly opposed to your way of thinking.”
As the only black family in his Pasadena, Calif., neighbourhood, Roberts said neighbours have subtly suggested that he and his wife, Rita, don’t belong.
His next-door neighbours are ardent Donald Trump supporters who, during the presidential election, had five campaign signs on their lawn.
Roberts has yet to broach a discussion related to the current administration, even though he disagrees with his neighbours’ politics.
“We had the Mccain-palin talk. That was easy. Romney-ryan, OK. We’ve not yet had the Trumppence talk,” said Roberts.
“Meanwhile, we’re building relationships. They go on vacation, we take care of their property; we go, they take care of ours … We’re not allowing these little differences to contaminate and taint our relationship. We’ll get to that point, but we have to build up to it. You can’t do it right away because the emotions are too high.”
To inspire change is “time consuming,” added Roberts, who believes in the Jewish tradition, tikkun olam, that “everyone … is responsible for working to repair the world,” even though immediate results are unlikely.
“I’m convinced, for instance, that we are so mired in this issue of racism globally, that we’re not going to extricate ourselves from it any time soon. We just have to accept that,” said Roberts.
But, with time, things can change. They did for a few former classmates of Roberts, who have told him in years since, “I’m sorry, I just didn’t know.”
One said he felt badly about being a bystander during the beatings, “‘but I was too afraid to jump in.’ And I think he was representative of many.”