"Award cites group for desegregating Arkansas high school
By Tom Tolan of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Feb. 6, 2010
Jefferson Thomas' memories of the segregated schools of Little Rock, Ark., in the years before he helped integrate Central High School with an escort from the 101st Airborne Division, are not entirely negative.
Thomas was the youngest of eight children, and when he was little, his older sisters would read to him from their schoolbooks, teaching him to read and write.
'When I got into the first grade, they thought I was a genius,' says Thomas, a member of the famed Little Rock Nine, who will receive Marquette University's fifth Pere Marquette Discovery Award on Tuesday.
Through his years at the segregated Gibbs Elementary School and Dunbar Junior High School, he had teachers who had affection for him, who encouraged him to perform, who knew his whole family.
But in 1957, when the Little Rock school district was recruiting black students to help carry out the U.S. Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation throughout the country and across the South, he jumped at the chance."
By Tom Tolan of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Feb. 6, 2010
Jefferson Thomas' memories of the segregated schools of Little Rock, Ark., in the years before he helped integrate Central High School with an escort from the 101st Airborne Division, are not entirely negative.
Thomas was the youngest of eight children, and when he was little, his older sisters would read to him from their schoolbooks, teaching him to read and write.
'When I got into the first grade, they thought I was a genius,' says Thomas, a member of the famed Little Rock Nine, who will receive Marquette University's fifth Pere Marquette Discovery Award on Tuesday.
Through his years at the segregated Gibbs Elementary School and Dunbar Junior High School, he had teachers who had affection for him, who encouraged him to perform, who knew his whole family.
But in 1957, when the Little Rock school district was recruiting black students to help carry out the U.S. Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation throughout the country and across the South, he jumped at the chance."
