Jefferson Thomas:JEFFERSON THOMAS, one of the "Little Rock Nine" who provoked a major civil rights battle in the United States in 1957, has died at 67 from pancreatic cancer.
The history-making battle erupted when the nine students integrated Arkansas’s largest public high school, over the opposition of Gov Orval E Faubus.
Many school districts in the South had defied a landmark 1954 US supreme court ruling that declared racial segregation unconstitutional, leading to lawsuits and violent methods of enforcement. One of the first and most shocking showdowns occurred in Little Rock, when Faubus ordered the state’s National Guard to keep black students out of Central High School in September 1957.
President Dwight D Eisenhower sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to carry out the court’s mandate. Nine black students were caught in the middle – corralled by a spitting and rock-throwing mob of white protesters. Taylor Branch, historian of the civil rights movement, described Central High’s integration as the “first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era” and the subsequent images of the confrontation shocked millions for their disturbing look at American race relations.
Jefferson Thomas said decades later that he was stunned and traumatised by the violence. He said Little Rock neighbourhoods had not been segregated, even if the schools were, and he often practised football on weekends with white kids from Central High before the conflict over integration. “I had no reason to think that the quiet, peaceful place where I grew up could change so drastically,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
Thomas, who lived a mile from Central High and three miles from the all-black high school, was just 15 when he volunteered to break the colour barrier at Central High. More than 100 black students volunteered, but the list was pared down by school officials. Only nine showed up on September 4th, 1957, to go to school, but they were denied entry by the Arkansas National Guard. They entered successfully on September 25th, escorted by the 101st Airborne.
The superintendent of schools counselled the teenagers not to retaliate against white protesters as the war between federal and state authority was captured on television. Once attending school, many of the nine were harassed and intimidated for months and years to come. One was expelled after dumping a bowl of chilli over the head of a white student who had insulted her. Thomas was one of only three to actually graduate from Central.
Thomas said he tried whenever possible to avoid drawing attention: “I would get out of the way. I was a skinny little guy. I’d been on the track team in junior high. I could run fast . . . Mentally what would hurt was when little puny guys came up and slapped you in the face. You couldn’t hit back. We got better experienced at getting out of the way as the year went on. You’d laugh at the fact that they ran into the wall while they were going after you.” However, Thomas recalled, his role in the integration of Central High “destroyed the family base”, noting that his father was fired from a sales job with International Harvester because of the controversy. The elder Thomas scraped by as a handyman and, the day after his son’s graduation, moved the family out of the state.
Jefferson Thomas later recalled his familys journey to California as a scene of misery from the pages of John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath– "everything on top of the car and you move off".
He received a degree in business administration from what became California State University at Los Angeles and then served in the army in Vietnam. He later worked in accounting for Mobil Oil and the US defence department, from which he retired several years ago. In 1964, he narrated Nine From Little Rock, the Academy Award-winning documentary short directed by Charles Guggenheim that explored the incident through Thomas’s eyes.
On the 40th anniversary of their enrolment, members of the Little Rock Nine received Congressional Gold Medals, the highest award bestowed by Congress. They were presented by President Bill Clinton in the White House.
Jefferson Allison Thomas, born September 19th, 1942; died September 5th, 2010