(This story was first published on Jan. 21, 1997.)

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – In 1957, the country watched as nine Black teenagers, accompanied by armed federal troops deployed by President Dwight Eisenhower, crossed a historic racial barrier to attend Little Rock Central High School.

The Army troops were ordered to protect the students from physical harm. But guns couldn’t shelter the youths from heckling, taunting and racial epithets.

Almost 40 years later, however, one of the “Little Rock Nine,” Elizabeth Eckford, still vividly recalls two classmates who extended a Christlike attitude amid the hatred she endured during her senior year.

“There were two people in my speech class who treated me like an ordinary person, who were always friendly and cordial to me,” Eckford told National Public Radio last year. “This was unique because, of the people who were not actively harassing us, the rest of them ignored us. Ken Reinhardt and Ann Williams in that class are very memorable to me, very meaningful to me.”

Reinhardt is now a banking executive in Louisville, Kentucky, a longtime member of St. Matthews Baptist Church and a trustee of Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children. Reinhardt’s first recollection of his senior year was looking out a third-floor window as a mob jeered the Black students. A boy beside him turned away from the window, voicing disgust that Blacks were entering Little Rock Central.

Reinhardt decided to speak to the students whenever he saw them. One day he talked to Jefferson Thomas, a shy Black student who was eating alone in the cafeteria. The next day, Reinhardt was shoved to the ground by an angry white student who yelled a racial slur at him. On the last day of school, one white student in gym class punched Reinhardt in the face. No teacher or student came to his defense.

The treatment was the same the Black students faced daily from many of the school’s 1,500 students, Reinhardt reminded in an interview. “The National Guardsmen followed the black students every day. But every day they were body-slammed into the lockers. The guardsmen wouldn’t do anything.”

Eckford still lives in Little Rock. She could not be reached for an interview. One acquaintance said she prefers to stay out of the limelight and doesn’t like to discuss what she went through 40 years ago.

She still has emotional scars from her senior year in high school, Reinhardt said, explaining she suffers from post-traumatic disorder, a condition common to soldiers who have gone through combat.

Reinhardt said the reason he responded as he did was because he was raised in a Christian home. “I didn’t grow up in a home with prejudice,” he said, his voice cracking. “I never heard racial epithets or anything like that in my home. It was not anything we discussed. The value of people was a given.”

Ironically, Reinhardt faced a similar situation in the 1970s in Louisville. The school district decided to bus some white children to an inner-city school to create a more even racial balance. Reinhardt’s fifth-grade daughter was one of the children selected to be bussed.

“We had a lot of discussion over whether we should fight it,” he said. “But we decided it was best to let it happen. It was a difficult school environment for everybody. But (the white students) were not ostracized. It was not the kind of situation,” he said, like Little Rock Central in 1957.

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