This past week, during Black History Month, Beyoncé became the first female African American performer to win the top prize of Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammy awards. Many felt it was an honor long overdue for the artist who has received the most Grammy nominations of all time. She won for her album Cowboy Carter, a groundbreaking album that blends traditional elements of Black music with mainstream musical genres including country, celebrating her cultural heritage with a modern twist.

While there are many wonderful songs, our Monday Motivational song is her cover of Paul McCartney’s song, “Blackbird.” While a beautiful song on its own, people may not know or remember it was actually McCartney’s tribute to the Little Rock Nine–the nine Black Students who integrated the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 (three years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregated education). Originally blocked from entering by hostile crowds and the Arkansas National Guard, these brave teenagers were eventually allowed to enter the the formerly-white high school when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to protect, rather than to forbid, them in attending Arkansas’s first integrated high school. Of course, once they were in the school, they faced many episodes of hatred, racism, and bullying. But they are examples of the fact that ordinary Americans only enjoy the rights that they insist on pursuing.

Most US educated adults are familiar with the Little Rock Nine. But many don’t know the story of what happened next. It is a remarkable part of American history known as the “Lost Year.”

The following summer, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus (whose orders Republican President Eisenhower overrode by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard), arguing in favor of state rights, closed the public high schools in Little Rock rather than allowing them to become integrated. This required a referendum by Little Rock citizens to become law. Governor Faubus proposed allowing the schools to be leased to private schools that were legally allowed to be single-race institutions. In that way, they could go back to having three white-only high schools and one black-only high school.

The majority of Little Rock voters approved the referendum, so the schools remained closed. However, the plans for private schools to take them over never happened, blocked by the courts. Instead, the high school students of Little Rock, black or white, were stuck at home, learning via TV or correspondence courses. Of course, they didn’t have computers or email or the Internet or Zoom or any of the other educational technologies that schools relied on when we had to close schools for safety reasons under COVID.

Teachers continued to go to school every day and try to teach to their absent students, but there were many restrictions. Teachers could be fired if they were found to have “associations” with various organizations, including the NCAAP or those advocating for integrating the schools.

In 1959, after 44 teachers and administrators had been fired, there was a special election to recall three of the segregationist members of the school board and replace them with more moderate candidates who supported integration. All three of the segregationist lost, and all three of the other candidates won. The new board restated all the fired employees and the schools opened as integration institutions in August 1959.

I think this is an important episode in US history for us all to know about. It was instigated by a ruling by the courts that was unpopular in the South. But it took three years and nine brave teenagers to put that ruling into action, at least in Little Rock. A racist politician tried to find a way to avoid racial integration, and a majority of people voted in favor of his idea. But once again, the courts, the arbiters of our laws, overruled the plan. So for almost a year, things were at a standstill, other than than neighbors arguing with neighbors.

But in the end, when the average citizens experienced the actual results from the empty promises of a racist politician, they made a different choice. They decided it was better for their children to go to an integrated school than to no school at all. Things worked out and the idea that having blacks and whites learning together became the norm, not the horror that many feared. As our musical motivators from last week sang, if things aren’t OK, it’s not the end (click here for that song).

Compared to Governor Faubus, what President Trump has done so far doesn’t seem THAT bad. At least he has only closed the DEI programs in the schools and universities, not the institutions themselves.

So I hope you find this song to be inspirational. It’s a testimony to a woman who continued to make great music when she was continually denied her industry’s top prize. It’s a recognition of NINE–only NINE– principled but beleaguered teenagers who helped move our nation towards equality. And it’s a story of a time when we average Americans made a bad choice, learned from it, and then made a better choice. Plus it has Beatles vibe. What more could you want?

Watch the official lyric video on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/xhempeEjGUA?si=Z6QlduTHI9iCi0Xw