Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of the nine Black students who integrated a high school in Arkansas' capital city of Little Rock in 1957 while a mob of white segregationists yelled threats and insults, has died at age 83.
Mothershed Wair died Saturday at a hospital in Little Rock after having complications from multiple sclerosis, her sister, Grace Davis, confirmed Sunday to The Associated Press.
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The students who integrated Central High School were known as the Little Rock Nine.
For three weeks in September 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block the Black students from enrolling in Central High, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated classrooms were unconstitutional. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school on Sept. 25, 1957.
Davis said she was enrolled at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville when her sister and the other students — Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls — integrated Central High School.
“I didn’t think anybody was really going to hurt her because, you know, we’ve had racial incidents in Little Rock over the years,” Davis said of her sister. “People would say things that were mean, but they never really hurt anybody.”
Davis said in the years that followed she and her sister spoke about the experience.
“I think one time somebody put some ink on her skirt or something when she was coming through the hallway. And, of course, there was always name-calling,” Davis said. "But she never really had any physical confrontations with any of the students up there.”
Faubus closed all of the schools in Little Rock in 1958 to try to avoid further integration. Mothershed went out of state to finish her remaining high school classes. The academic credits transferred back to Little Rock, and she ultimately earned her diploma from Central High School.
“She was always a fighter,” Davis said of her sister. “She’s been sick her entire life. She was born with a congenital heart defect and was told at an early age that she would never get out of her teens. So as she approached her 16th birthday, I remember Mother talking about how afraid she was because she thought she was going to die. But she did what she wanted to do. She enjoyed life.”
Mothershed 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.
Mothershed married Fred Wair in 1965. The couple have one son, Scott; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2005, and Mothershed Wair moved back to Little Rock, Davis said.
According to the National Park Service, Mothershed Wair worked in the East St. Louis, Illinois, school system for 10 years as a home economics teacher and for 18 years as a counselor for elementary career education before retiring in 1994. She also worked at the Juvenile Detention Center of the St. Clair County Jail in Illinois, and was an instructor of survival skills for women at the American Red Cross.
Each member of the Little Rock Nine was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, and they donated them to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock in 2011.
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Wagster Pettus reported from Jackson, Mississippi.