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A graduate of the University of Northern Colorado, Carlotta Walls LaNier has been a realtor in the Denver area for over thirty years. She stepped into history, however, in September of 1957 when she was one of nine black students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the greatest domestic crisis of President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, he called out the country’s elite force, a thousand troopers of the 101st airborne, to escort the nine students into a mob-ringed school. Thus began a year like no other in Arkansas’s history. The students, six girls and three boys, endured the worst kind of physical and emotional abuse day after day. At the end of the academic year, Governor Orval Faubus closed the four high schools of Little Rock for the 1958-59 year. When the schools re-opened in 1959-60, Carlotta returned to complete her senior year and graduate from Central High, the only female to graduate out of what has come to be called the Little Rock Nine. A few months earlier, on February 9, 1960, her home was bombed just before midnight, while she, her two sisters, and her mother were asleep inside the home.
LaNier started telling her story after the Little Rock Nine’s 30th anniversary. She has spoken to thousands of students on many college campuses that include Stanford University, University of Denver, Amherst University, Princeton University, Utah State University, Toledo University, and Michigan State University to name a few. Some school districts through out the country include Cleveland Heights, OH, Montclair, N.J, Cherry Hill, N.J., Evanston, IL, Chicago, IL, Madison WI and Houston, TX... LaNier states, “if the Supreme Court Decision was the vehicle of change in our American educational system, then the Little Rock Nine could very well be considered the designated drivers.”
Today, LaNier heads the Little Rock Foundation, a non-profit agency that provides scholarships for at-risk students. She is the only recipient in the state of Colorado to have received a Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, and one of 300 in our country’s history. The Little Rock 9 have also been honored with a postal stamp issued in August 2005, life size statues named the “Testament” on Arkansas State Capitol grounds and will have a commemorative silver dollar in their honor in 2007, the 50th anniversary of the integration of Central High.
You can contact Carlotta LaNier at 303-770-8111 or fax to 303-7702730 or email her at carlottalanier@comcast.net
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