Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of the nine black students who integrated a high school in Arkansas’ capital, Little Rock, in 1957 while a mob of white segregationists shouted threats and insults, has died at the age of 83.
Mothershed Wair died Saturday at a Little Rock hospital after complications from multiple sclerosis, her sister, Grace Davis, confirmed to The Associated Press on Sunday.
The students who integrated Central High School were known as the Little Rock Nine.
In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard for three weeks to prevent black students from enrolling in Central High, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated classrooms unconstitutional. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students to school on September 25, 1957.
Davis said she was enrolled at the University of Arkansas at 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 anyone would really hurt her because, you know, we’ve had racist incidents in Little Rock over the years,” Davis said of her sister. “People said things that were mean, but they never really hurt anyone.”
Davis said she and her sister talked about the experience in the years that followed.
“I think someone put some ink on her skirt or something once when she was coming down the hall. And of course there was always swearing,” Davis said. “But she never really had any physical confrontations with any of the students there.”
Faubus closed all Little Rock schools in 1958 to prevent further integration. Mothershed left the state to finish her remaining high school classes. The academic credits returned to Little Rock and she eventually graduated from Central High School.
“She was always a fighter,” Davis said of her sister. “She has been sick all her life. She was born with a congenital heart defect and was told at a young age that she would never grow out of her teenage years. So as she approached her sixteenth birthday, I remember Mom talking about how scared 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 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 has a 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 18 years as an elementary education consultant before retiring in 1994. She also worked for the National Park Service. Juvenile Detention Center of St. Clair County Jail in Illinois, and was a women’s survival skills instructor with the American Red Cross.
Each member of the Little Rock Nine received a Congressional Gold Medal, and they donated it to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock in 2011.
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Wagster Pettus reported from Jackson, Mississippi.