African-American student Terrence Roberts felt absolute terror as he made his way to the entrance of Little Rock Central High — a white high school — in 1957.

The crowd of angry segregationists had to be held back by members of the National Guard. They would threaten Roberts’s life that day and for the rest of the contentious school year.

Nearly 60 years after he struggled to attend a white high school, Roberts, a Little Rock Nine member and civil rights activist, says that people must wake up, discuss and actively learn about race and diversity.

More than 120 people filled the Bellevue Library on Jan. 16 to hear Roberts speak about his experiences during the Civil Rights movement and subsequent thoughts on race and diversity.

“One thing I hope they take away is that if they don’t know much, they need to get cracking on learning … That’s why I’m here — to wake people up,” Roberts told the Reporter.

Engaging in discussion and taking the initiative to learn was a major theme in Roberts’s speech and discussion. It was inspired, in part, by his first grade teacher telling him to “take on executive responsibility for learning.”

As he got older, there was much to learn.

Roberts was just 16 years old when the Little Rock school board began the implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

This ruling that established state laws allowing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.

Originally, about 150 students from the city’s African-American middle and high schools volunteered to help desegregate the then-white Little Rock Central High School, Roberts said. That number quickly narrowed down to nine students whose families were comfortable with allowing their sons and daughters to be at the forefront of the volatile issue.

“I came home and told my parents that I had volunteered and they said, ‘We will support your decision 100 percent’… They followed that up, ‘If you get up there and it’s too hot, you want to quit, we will support your decision to quit 100 percent,’” he said.

When the Little Rock Nine were denied entry to Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called in federal troops to escort the students into the school.

But the integration of Little Rock’s schools was far from smooth sailing in the following months and years.

Roberts was regularly beaten up by his white classmates, and he and other members of the Little Rock Nine were continuously taunted, he said. Then, in a last ditch effort to halt desegregation, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus closed all schools the following year.

Following Faubus’s decision, Roberts moved to Los Angeles, where he finished his senior year of high school and earned secondary degrees in sociology and social welfare.

Ever since, Roberts has traveled the country speaking and consulting — most recently launching a business with his wife to help organizations have racial dialogues called “Talking About Race.”

He disagrees that violence against African-American men is seeing a resurgence — arguing instead that it has historically been an ongoing issue floating in and out of the public’s conscious — and rejects concepts such as “color-blindness.”

“What I’ve already discovered is that some citizens in Bellevue have embraced something called ‘color-blindness.’ It’s a very pernicious malady. I would suggest you get rid of that thought, immediately, because if you don’t see me, I’m in real trouble … Color-blindness suggests that in order for me to be palatable, I have to be clothed in whiteness,” he said.

That is not to say that he has all of the answers.

When asked what he thought it would take to wake people up, he replied, “I don’t know, honestly, because it’s all a matter of choice. As we can see historically, the overwhelming majority of Americans have chosen to remain asleep.”