My Son & “The Little Rock Nine”
- February 15th, 2010
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Last night at dinner we were celebrating the lunar new year with some traditional Korean rice cake soup. I’m not entirely sure how the discussion started, but we were talking about how times were harder a while ago for minority children and he busts out with a comparison to “The Little Rock Nine“. My wife and I sat there slack-jawed for a moment and then she asks him, “How do you know about The Little Rock Nine?” To which he casually responds, “Oh, my teacher was telling us about it.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I did not learn about The Little Rock Nine when I was 7 years old. I’m pretty sure I was still learning about how rocks were hard and water was wet, but things are a little fuzzy from those days. Anyway, so he goes on and on and he has a surprising level of depth and understanding of what was going on back then and why. He asked very pointed questions about segregation and asked whether our families lived through that time (as it happens, only 1 of his 4 grandparents grew up in America during the 50′s and most of the 60′s).
My wife got an autographed copy of Terrence Roberts’ new book since her uncle and Mr. Roberts are friends, so she pulled it out and showed The Boy some pictures. After dinner, The Boy decided to write Mr. Roberts a letter, which will be going out in the mail tomorrow. But we wanted to keep a copy of it for posterity. I think it shows surprising astuteness and empathy. Here it is. I guess you get to read it before Terrence Roberts does:
