Simple,NotEasy:ReflectionsonCommunity,SocialResponsibilityandTolerance
Terrence Roberts Parkhurst Brothers

It’s perhaps too easy, in this day and age of omnipresent brain candy, to pass by a title like this one; it looks like work. The cover reminds that its author, Terrence Roberts, is one of the Little Rock Nine, nine courageous African-American students who volunteered to be the first to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 under the limited (in the sense that Army personnel did not enter the gym or the classroom) protection of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and who endured a year of daily hostility and abuse. Roberts went on to become a psychologist, educator, and speaker.
 
The title, like Roberts’ essays, states things directly. Its seriousness notwithstanding, Roberts’ writing is the kind of writing that goes down easy; which introduces a curious, confident, and compassionate intelligence; and which enlivens the mind and spirit with the possibility of courage and clear sight.
 
In this collection of twenty- nine short essays and speeches, Roberts covers a variety of topics: racism and other divisions; the importance of building community and relationships; cross-cultural issues; public figures, including letters to Senator and President-elect Barack Obama ; the history of his experience at Central High School; and above all, the value of education and keeping one’s mind open to learning and possibility. The topics themselves are interconnected, but they are further tied together here by Roberts’ voice and world view.
 
Roberts sets a conversational tone—indeed, he chafes a bit in the preface at the limitations that a book’s format imposes on his true goal: building a thinking relationship with the reader—and his voice is clear, composed, and in his words, “dripping sweet reason” into the various social wounds and misapprehensions from which we suffer. He is not afraid to bust open a myth or two—the social constructs of race and race prejudice and our national mythological narrative of meritocracy chief among them—and he does so in a way that invites reading and reflection.
 
Inviting reading and reflection on beliefs which are strongly held, or for which one has suffered, is one of the most difficult tasks for a writer or an advocate; it is all too easy to slip into stridency or a faintly superior tone. But Roberts seems to have developed a near miraculous talent for truth-telling in an accessible voice. This is not, however, a writer who hesitates to say what he thinks, either in print or in person. In one passage, he

describes speaking with a group of bored eighth- graders who would rather be somewhere else. When they admit this to Roberts, whose appetite for and commitment to learning is paramount, he tells them, to their astonishment, “You are all cowards.”
 
This kind of confrontation is made tolerable by the fact that it is rooted in a wish to strengthen community, and the knowledge that Roberts himself has risked much, and continues to risk, in order to learn. His early experience of testing the nation’s commitment to Brown vs. the Board of Education is part of a lifelong pattern of testing limits and commitment, and his survival of the experience left him both with some sobering lessons (“…people do what they wish to do when they have the power to do so”) and a real belief in the underlying power of love in our lives, even in harrowing situations. The Little Rock Nine were urged, by Dr. Martin Luther King, to adopt a non- violent approach to their experience at Central High School. In his formative years, on a daily basis, Roberts was challenging history, not only in the form of its— Teresa Scollon, Foreward Reviews

— Ilene Cooper, Booklist

— Eboni A. Francis, Oberlin Coll. Lib., OH, Library Journal

— Publishers Weekly Online