It happened on a Wednesday morning almost 35 years ago . . . the same morning National Guardsmen barred eight black students from Little Rock's Central High School.

Sept. 4, 1957. The day four other black students broke the color barrier in Charlotte schools.

What happened here was, for the most part, quieter and more peaceful than the wrenching drama unfolding in Arkansas. Still, it was a crucial moment for Charlotte.

A decade later, the community would become the nation's test case for school busing. And in 1992, Charlotte would begin looking to magnet schools, instead of mandatory busing, as the chief tool for desegregating schools. It all began, however, with a small but courageous step: four youngsters walking into schools where no black student had gone before.

One was Dorothy Counts, the 15-year-old daughter of a Johnson C. Smith University professor. Counts' experience got the bulk of the publicity: She made her way through an angry crowd into Harding High School that first day and left four days later to enroll in school in Pennsylvania.

Teachers at Harding ignored her. Students spit out the word "nigger" when she passed. Her locker was ransacked. On the last day, a piece of tin and a blackboard eraser were hurled at her in the hall . . . while the principal, she said, watched silently.

In the years since, Dorothy Counts Scoggins - now a counselor at Child Care Resources in Charlotte - has given many media interviews. As recently as last month she appeared on a Queens College panel to discuss school desegregation. But what of the others?

What happened to Gus Roberts, the shy young man who entered the 11th grade at Central High School in 1957? His sister, Girvaud, who entered Piedmont Junior High? Delois Huntley, who went to Alexander Graham Junior High?

They've said almost nothing publicly over the years. All are still in Charlotte.

Gus Roberts, 50, is a clerk at the downtown post office. He has a grown child living out of state. (NOTE: Gus Roberts died on Sept. 14, 1992, 5 months after this article was published.)

Girvaud Roberts Justice, 47, is manager of the Postal Service's Freedom Drive station. She has one son, an 8-year-old attending Northside Christian School.

Delois Huntley Miller, 46, is a business analyst for Dun and Bradstreet. Her 24-year-old son attended a private elementary school and graduated from West Charlotte High School.

One recent afternoon, they gathered to share their memories of being Charlotte's desegregation pioneers.

"I didn't realize it at the time," says Miller. "But looking back, I think we were given a commission."

"I didn't know to be nervous"

Early in 1957, about this time of year, the Roberts family huddled around the dinner table to discuss school assignments.

Girvaud, then 12, was entering eighth grade. She was slated to attend all-black Second Ward High School in the fall; her parents wanted her to apply to all-white Piedmont.

Gus, 16, was attending Second Ward. His parents wanted him to apply to all-white Central.

"What it came down to," Gus says now, "is that somebody had to be first."

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's historic 1954 desegregation decision, the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was seeking students to test the waters in Charlotte.

For Gus and Girvaud Roberts' parents - a homemaker and a greens keeper at Charlotte Country Club - no urging was needed. They wanted the best education for their children, and they knew black schools couldn't provide it.

"From an early age, we were aware of the inequities," recalls Girvaud Justice. "Our mother had appeared before the school board, saying if you want to have segregated schools, fine, but at least make them equal. The board opted not to make them equal. . . . We had good teachers, but substandard books and equipment."

Delois Huntley Miller's parents - a domestic worker and a truck driver - talked with NAACP leaders but let their youngest child decide for herself.

"I wasn't really aware that I was making history," Miller says. "I was going for an education, a better education. It was a challenge to me - I didn't know to be nervous. I'd never seen the ugly side of life."

Of 35 requests from black students for reassignments to white schools that year, only four won school board approval.

"I think maybe they thought, These children are just like our children, except they're black,' " says Miller. "We were intelligent children, well- disciplined children. We made good test cases."

"Carry yourself tall"

Police and school officials mobilized for opening day. The media stood ready. Despite the nasty reception that met Dorothy Counts, the others recall little more than the occasional epithet.

Justice remembers walking into Piedmont, wearing a red, white and blue blazer and heeding her parents' advice to "carry yourself tall." Principal Don Newman met her at the door and escorted her to her classroom.

"There was some name-calling," Justice says, "but nobody jumped up and tried to get me. The name-calling mattered not . . . it's something you hear and don't hear. And gradually, it died down."

Roberts was met at the door, too: by principal Ed Sanders, who had engineered opening day at Central with great care.

Roberts arrived to find a mob nearly as large as the one that met Counts at Harding. The morning was uneventful, however, thanks to Sanders' determination to keep it so. Despite scattered incidents of petty intimidation in the coming days, Roberts' experience was "pretty good."

"There was a better breed of children at Central (than at Harding)," he says now. "The boys on the football team would look out for me as I walked the hallway, because they didn't want their school to get a bad name."

And Sanders?

"He was some man," Roberts says. "He wasn't going to let anything get out of hand. Years later, when I was a mail carrier, he turned out to be on my route. I'd go in and we'd sit down and talk. I admired him greatly and still do."

At Alexander Graham, Miller says, her reception was quiet.

"It was uneventful as far as violence was concerned," she says. "It was just a lot of stares. I don't know how they perceived my presence, but for me it was just another day of school. I wound up making some good friends there."

At the end of the school year, the old Alexander Graham building on Morehead Street was demolished and a new one opened on Colony Road. Miller was reassigned to Second Ward, where she graduated in 1963.

Justice, too, was reassigned: to all-black York Road Junior High. Her parents enrolled her in Charlotte Catholic High School. "Otherwise I would have lost everything I had gained."

Only Gus Roberts stayed put. When he graduated from Central in 1959 - the school's first black graduate - he walked onto the stage at Ovens Auditorium and received his diploma "just like anybody else," a school official reported at the time. "There was not a murmur, not a whisper, not a boo from the whole audience."

"We're heading back to segregation"

All three have spent the intervening years, as Roberts puts it, "just living a normal life, nothing special."

They have followed Charlotte-Mecklenburg's schools saga with interest, however. When U.S. District Judge James McMillan ordered full-scale desegregation in 1970, they cheered silently.

"Judge McMillan was a vessel, you might say, for what had to happen," Justice says. "He set guidelines because the school board wouldn't do it."

"That day had to come," says Miller. "I don't think we realized that in 1957, but that's where it was all heading."

Yet if the three pioneers are pleased with how desegregation has proceeded, all are dissatisfied with the state of the schools today.

Justice, who took her son out of public kindergarten and enrolled him in private school, is the most outspoken. "There is no discipline," she says flatly. "To me, children are running the public schools."

Miller, whose son also attended private school for his elementary years, agrees. "Something is missing," she says of the public school system. "It's concern and caring about children, and expecting them to toe the line. The opportunities to learn are better now for black children - but nobody can learn if there's no discipline."

Like many others in the black community, Roberts, Justice and Miller are skeptical of Supt. John Murphy's new plan to replace mandatory busing with magnet schools.

"I think magnet schools are a travesty," Miller says. "I think they're designed to please white parents - whatever southeast Charlotte wants, southeast Charlotte gets. I'm afraid we're going backward . . . that we're heading back to segregation."

"The whole nation seems to be going backward," adds Justice. "It's scary."

And what of their own place in history?

Rarely, the three say, does the subject come up. But when it does, they feel a quiet sense of pride.

Several months ago, Miller recalls, a co-worker saw Miller's picture on a TV special during Black History Month.

"She was surprised," Miller says. "She didn't know. Then my pastor asked me to speak at church on desegregation. I always tell my young people about Delois Huntley." he said.

"It feels good to hear that. Not so much because it was me who did it . . . but just because it happened."