Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of the Little Rock Nine, dies at 83
She and eight other students integrated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957 while a mob of White segregationists yelled threats and insults.

By Associated Press
October 21, 2024 at 11:57 a.m. EDT

Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of the nine Black students who integrated a high school in Little Rock in 1957 while a mob of White segregationists yelled threats and insults, died Oct. 19 at a hospital in the Arkansas capital city. She was 83. ... The cause was complications from multiple sclerosis, said her sister, Grace Davis.

With the help of Daisy Bates, the head of the Arkansas NAACP, 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.

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Thelma Mothershed, as she was then known, in 1957. (AP)