lawfuel – The Legal Newswire – In the midst of remembering those times, and considering these times, a small laugh escapes from the tall woman with the majestic crown of dreadlocks. “Sometimes we sit around and say, ‘Did that happen?’” she says. “Yes it did.”
Her name is Rosie Collier Shamburger, and as the schools superintendent for Wilcox County, she is responsible for the public education of some 2,200 children scattered about one of the very poorest stretches of this country. Of those 2,200 students, maybe 10 are white.
Yes, it is the 50th anniversary of Little Rock, isn’t it, when soldiers with rifles escorted black teenagers with books into a white Arkansas high school to strike a blow against “separate but equal.” How time flies, how things change and where are we now?
“I have to think about that,” Ms. Shamburger says.
Wilcox County, a place of privilege and deprivation, of restored antebellum houses and dilapidated mobile homes, had its own Little Rock experience, though much later than most. Slow to come around, you might say.
