The Table Video

Where there are deficits in any human enterprise, the missing component is always love. How can we be certain of that? Because God is love, and where God is there is no imperfection. Paul’s listing of the qualities of love in I Corinthians 13 gives us a complete understanding of the power and breadth of love.

Terrence J. Roberts, Ph.D. is one of the “Little Rock Nine” who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. As a 15 year old eleventh grader, he joined eight other students and became one of the first nine black students to go to a formerly segregated public high school in Little Rock.
Dr. Roberts is CEO of Terrence Roberts Consulting, a management consultant firm devoted to fair and equitable practices in business and industry. (More information available at his website: Terrenceroberts.com)

Additionally, he is co-principal of Roberts & Roberts, LLC, a consulting firm offering assistance to groups who wish to engage in substantive conversations about race and the issues related to race in America
(See: talkingaboutrace.com)

A graduate of California State University at Los Angeles (BA), and UCLA (MSW), Dr. Roberts obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. LESSONS FROM LITTLE ROCK, a memoir by Dr. Roberts was published on October 1, 2009. In this book he describes his experience at Central High School and talks about the salient lessons to be learned from that episode. On February 1, 2010, his second book, SIMPLE, NOT EASY: Reflections on Community, Social Responsibility, and Tolerance was published. The essays in this volume seek to guide the reader toward more socially responsible positions in life

A much sought after speaker and presenter, Dr. Roberts lectures and presents workshops and seminars on a wide variety of topics.

Transcript:

Life is a very interesting enterprise, we step into a drama that’s already under way. I started life on December third 1941 and as I exited the womb I anticipated entering a society with people who love me who cared about me, I didn’t know what I was getting into neither do you but we learn as we grow.

I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by people who did care about me, who gave me information about where I was, I found out later that that information was limited they were reluctant to give me the whole story out of fear that some how it might interrupt my growth and development, probably right, but I was a fairly impressioned kid and I found out myself, I began to search for answers by the time I acquired the power of speech I began to ask people what on earth is going on how did you allow this situation to develop because what I had stepped into was a society that by law and by custom had arranged itself in such a way as to leave me on the margin, I didn’t count.

I was ruled one of the undeserving people and I found that a bit strange I didn’t know what to do with it, it was certainly frightening and it made no sense, it was irrational, it was illogical and I came into the universe with some sort of a DNA component that required that things fit together in some reasonable way, nothing was to be found, by the time I got to grade school however things began to open up a bit, in first grade the first grade teacher said to all of us in the segregated first grade classroom, “you kids” she said, “have to take on executive responsibility for learning, you have to become CEO of your own independent learning enterprise”.

That made sense to me I don’t know if the first grade teacher understood exactly what she was doing but she started a fire that has never been quenched and it helped me because that was salvation, learning, knowing, you see the only thing that separates any two people in the universe is how much either one knows compared to the other when you know then you can have a range of choices and options that are unavailable to the person that doesn’t know that made sense to me so I became a learner and I now as I go around the country, I encourage young people to take on executive responsibility for learning and when you think about it, you are the only ones who can do that nobody else can take that responsibility, not your parents, not your teachers nobody.

It’s your responsibility to choose to learn, then you develop the habit of learning then it becomes easy and I know it’s tough you know, I talk to middle schoolers a lot and they fret and chafe about homework, now I always scream at them and say “no no no you should be asking for more homework”. They don’t like that, but its true because there is so much to be known we can never know it all, then I found out that things were worse than I thought. In 1896 the US Supreme Court had ruled in the Plessy v Ferguson case that separation was constitutional, the doctrine of separate but equal was the law of the land when I was born so for my first 13 years I had to operate under the eages of that particular decision.

In 1954 then something magical happened, the same Supreme Court by the way ruled in the Brown case, Brown v Board of Education that it was no longer constitutional to discriminate against people of color, now I thought this is odd, because in 1896 the constitution said that we could discriminate now in 1954 the constitution is now signing a different song and I’m confused and I’m wondering where is Scalia when you really need him with his strict constitutionalist approach, I don’t know if that makes sense at all but in any case I was happy in 1954 because now the law is on my side.

The law says “Terry Roberts you have the right to go to your neighbourhood school” that’s what it meant. People often ask me did you go to central for better education did you go there to make a point, were you there because of pressure from the community, no I was modeling law abiding behavior that was my sole reason for going I wanted to demonstrate to the world that we who profess to be a law abiding nation could in fact be law abiding so my going to central high school was modelling law abiding behavior.

It of course didn’t excite the folk who were there in opposition because they felt the law was wrong, you know in the wake of that Brown decision a huge outcry, you could hear it all over this country, people were not happy over 100 members of the US Congress at that time penned their names to a document we know as the Southern Manifesto in that document they pledged to do whatever they could do whatever was within their power to prevent implementation of the Brown decision.

That was the revelation to me even though the law was on the books it didn’t really mean much, in fact when you look at the wording of the implementation phase of the Brown decision itself you see the truth of the matter it was deemed that we will proceed with quote all deliberate speed and when you look up the word deliberate in any dictionary, the first synonym that jumps out at you is slow that was a not to veil message to the Dixiecrats that it’s okay boys things will be as usual, we won’t get in your way you can still discriminate and we will do what we can to help you.

Now begins my real civic education I begin to understand, ah huh so this is where I live okay, we live in a country where we can say one thing but do another and it’s okay, very interesting, very interesting I was terrified by it because it meant that my life was going to be really rougher than I had anticipated but I was ready to take it on, especially when you’re young. Young people death defy through life all the time, you do things you know we had been warned that if we volunteer to go to Central High School, we would be killed all nine of us had to be finger printed by the local police department so that when our bodies were found not if but when, identification would be a easy task so there was some concern about this but we got up there and eventually the president did send in the army and we were able to get into school but that was not the end of the hostilities that was simply the beginning.

People in Arkansas in Little Rock were so outraged and the governor spouting off his rhetoric about having now become a occupied territory people took that as an invitation to get rid of us and they tried mightily to do so. Anything that you can think of that one human being might possibly do to another is what they did to us. Inhumane is saying it mildly but we persevered we actually as a group of nine decided to employ non-violence as our response to all of this madness, we had been cautioned by Doctor Martin Luther King that non-violence could only work however, if we truly loved our enemy.

So we took some time to reflect on that and to the degree that we understood love and the concept of enemy we said yes young people do those kinds of things whether we knew what we we doing or not is beside the point, basically we said we’re not going to fight back which was not entirely true because when you’re that young, your concepts get a little confused so even though you profess non-violence, there are times when you do fight and in fact I don’t often talk about that because that’s not what the public wants to hear but our non-violence had a few caveats.

In any case we got through the year, somehow we made it through, well eight of us made it through the entire year, Minnijean Brown one of our number actually got kicked out of school in February of 1958 why because she had reached that point where non-violence didn’t make much sense going forward so she began to fight.

The school and its great wisdom determined that they were going to kick her out so they did they expelled her unfortunately in the wake of her expulsion little cards were circulated all over that campus one down eight to go so they cranked the pressure up on the rest of us so between February and May we really had to fight hard to maintain our non-violence stance, well we did.

I was in the 11th grade, the next year the governor decided to do something different, Orval Faubus he had fretted that entire year about the fact that he had not been able to keep black kids out of this school where he wanted white kids only he said to himself I suppose I’ve got to think of something else so over the summer he came up with a brilliant plan, at least he thought it was brilliant, he said ah hah I got it I know what I’ll do I will close the schools, I will keep the black kids out so he closed all High Schools in Little Rock , all the public high schools and he was satisfied with himself but unfortunately for him and I suppose it’s important to say that he wasn’t a very bright person he didn’t realize that by closing the schools to keep the black kids out, he would also keep the white kids out.

That part escaped him somehow but by the way that’s not so unusual when you think about American politics, you do not have to have a measurable IQ to hold public office that’s not a given you need to be chronological eligible, you need to have enough money to pay for the filing fee but then if you’re charismatic enough to convince enough like-minded idiots to vote for you you can hold office, in fact we are approaching such a enterprise this coming November.

But as a consequence of the schools closure, rather than languish in Little Rock wondering what next for myself remember I’m now the executive in charge of my own education. I determined that I’m not going to stay and wait I take up a offer from relatives who happen to live in Los Angeles, I move out, enroll in Los Angeles High School convince my family of origin to follow me from Little Rock to LA all the members of the Roberts clan, relocated from Little Rock to LA in 1958. We gave up our Little Rock visa permanently.

I don’t know if any of you have ever been to Little Rock? it’s okay you don’t have to go, I’ll tell you all you need to know, in fact once you’ve been to Little Rock and then you leave there’s no real incentive to go back especially if you’ve been gone for a couple of weeks or more but any case I continued my learning and my life, i graduated from La High, continued with undergraduate degrees and masters degrees and then took a doctorate in Psychology in Southern Illinois but all of this time I’m thinking that I don’t think that just having a career and doing those kinds of things makes the most sense for me I need to figure out some way to create a society where people can experience life differently than the way I had to experience it and so I began to develop some ideas and thoughts about what to do so as I practiced psychology for about 30 years I began to formulate other plans and I’ve come up with a notion that says we need to have people understand more about their role in society as members of society so what I’ve been doing lately is talking about what we need to do and one of the first things that we need to do is to accept the fact that we as individuals have responsibility, you cannot put this off on other people, you cannot say it’s the governments responsibility no, it’s the job for each one of us but in order to do anything at all, the very first step is you knowing who you are, understanding what’s going on inside your own head, examining that dialogue that goes on 24 hours a day non stop what messages are you telling you and one of the first things you will discover is that you have to deal first with whether or not you firmly believe that you have profound significance in this universe and as Christian people it could be a easy task, I don’t say it will be or is but it could be a easy task for you if you understand Gods love for you so profound significance if you truly believe that God loves you then it’s a easier task to feel that profound significance because now you are not at the mercy of other people who are telling you who you are even though it has nothing to do with who you are. I am one of those people in the universe who feels very fortunate to have learned this at a early age.

I had a mom who I don’t know where she got these ideas but she inoculated me and my six siblings with the same information and I say inoculated because it was just that she said to us what other people think about you is none of your business, it’s their business and that alone will free up so many people because if you truly understand that what other people think about you is not your business, you are then free simply to think about your estimate of who you are your belief is in you not in what other people think you are not blown away by the applause or the criticism of others because you realize that neither one of those two have anything to do with who you really are. It’s the way other people see you, there’re millions of people out there in the world who don’t like you, you don’t know who they are but it has nothing to do with you and when you bump into them rather than be surprised, know in advance that they’re out there so that you are not impacted by them.

It’s a little harder to do in real life but as you begin to think about it and let that idea seep in and you really grasp that notion of profound significance, that’s about you relating to you and then a second step in this process is how you get along with other people, in intimate relationships and so after profound significance comes this notion of unswerving authenticity, unswerving authenticity what does that mean? it means you make decisions about what you do, especially in relationship to other people , not on the basis of what’s expected of you by others, not on the basis of what you think will get you into the club or what you think will garner you acceptance but what you know to be morally right what you know that God wants you to do and then you can as my mom used to say if 50,000 of your friends turn left but you deem it more appropriate to turn right, then by all means turn right and don’t look back that makes sense that’s unswerving authenticity, now you can’t have that until you have delved into profound significance just makes sense because you don’t have the foundation for it but think about that and think about the freedom it allows you when you have this unswerving authenticity and then the third step in this short three step process, is self-giving love now this is you in relation to the entire world because the ultimate goal of all of this is to love as a flower in the field breathes its fragrance into space and everybody benefits, your love is not withheld that is big that is vast but so important. I didn’t have all of this in mind when I was a student at Central High School but I had the beginnings of it because of what I had experienced as a very young child with the kind of mom I had to tell you something else about what she did for me she told me there is no such thing as race, this was well before I had encountered people who believed differently I grew up thinking that everybody thought the way I did and mom had told me that there’s no such thing as race and I believed her and it’s true there is no scientific no biological basis for race at all but why do we believe in it because we’ve been duped, we’ve been duped.

The first use of that word race as it refers to groups of people is a late entry into the human lexicon. I think you can find the first entry if you delve into the anolts and you’ll find somewhere in the mid 16th Century that there’s a first recorded instance of that word being used in relationship to people prior to that we were members of family of clans of groups of regions, a group of pseudoscientists got together and decided that they wanted to create something different so they came up with this notion of race and they created a hierarchy, racial hierarchy with whiteness at the top and everything else underneath and they sold it to us as a group of folk in the world and we bought it without question and ran with it and today it is a very strong concept.

If you go out here to the streets of La Mirada and ask the first person who comes by are you a member of a race and he or she might say yes and I’m proud to be a member of fill in the blank race oh yeah. It’s all bolony there’s no such animal. That’s problematic though because the belief is at bone marrow level for most of us and when you take that away you wonder well what about this difference we all different yes but it has nothing to do with race the answer is very simple it’s ancestry. Your ancestors determine who you are and what you look like.

It’s very simple, very simple and you think about it you have thousands, maybe even millions of ancestors you know, it’s like a funnel you know you start off with this group of folk coming together and eventually there’s you and then you participate at some point some of you not all of you but some of you will have a progeny, just as well but the idea is when you really know the truth.

That’s why learning is so important you cannot afford to live your life on the sound bytes and the buzz words of our times you have to do the hard work of learning and so as you do that and as you develop and accept this profound significance as I think that is so important and then live your life with unswerving authenticity and then learn how to give yourself away and love to all comers and there again my mom stands as a absolute model, she was a hugger if you were within her hugging distance of that woman she would hug you, just automatic.

I lean in the direction of emulating her I’m not there yet because there’s some people I will run away from, I will not hug some people not yet I’m working on it but I’m not there and I have this image of my mom hugging anybody so that’s my goal I keep that as my goal and it reminds me too the fact that I haven’t made it there yet is I’ve got a lot of work to do and so I go naked to the mirror all the time and ask myself really hard questions and I get answers that are sometimes very disturbing when I have to encounter what’s inside my own narrative.

I’m not perfect neither are you which is why I feel comfortable here but our imperfection need not permanent so our knowledge which is very limited need not be a permanent state either because we can get rid of our store house of ignorance through learning and as I said before you won’t ever learn everything there is to be known which by the way means that you will be a lifelong learner if you buy into this concept and I hope you will, I certainly do and so it is that Little Rock continues to be a beacon not because it is anything dramatic or different from all the other stuff, we just happen to have timing on our side.

Some people have asked me sometimes, well why is Little Rock so recognized in the world? just a matter of timing you know. TV was very new in 1957 not everybody had TV, only a few people but those grainy black and white images were beamed out all over the entire world and so it is that we now see it as some sort of beacon and the standard, and somebody today in the other session referred to me as a icon, that’s very interesting. it was a new concept I’m still working with it but anyway that’s my story and I’m sticking to it