In 1982, Dr. Sybil Jordan Hampton received an invitation to the 20th reunion of her Little Rock Central High School class.

It came as a surprise. Hampton entered Central as a 15-year-old sophomore in 1959, just two years after the desegregation crisis of 1957.

She was the youngest of five Black students following in the footsteps of the Little Rock Nine in attempting to desegregate Central High, and the only Black student in her 1962 graduating class. Her years at Central were not pleasant.

Despite some misgivings, she attended the reunion.

Hampton, who became president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation in 1996 and retired as president emeritus in 2006, first told the story of her time at Central and the 20-year reunion in 2019 as part of a Little Rock program at Robinson Center Performance Hall presented by The Moth, a New York City-based nonprofit storytelling group.

She was first contacted by Meg Bowles, senior director and co-host of the “Moth Radio Hour,” who graduated from Central more than 20 years after Hampton.

Hampton was asked by Bowles to tell her story, titled “Being a Foot Soldier,” to let people know about desegregation after the flash-point year of 1957, when Gov. Orval Faubus initially tried to stop the enrollment of nine black students at Central.

“I was always struck by the fact that people were not curious about what happened after 1957, ’58,” Hampton said.

Sharing her story with others was daunting at first.

“I had never been a storyteller. It was totally nerve-wracking. You stand at a mic under all these lights with no notes, you cannot see the audience and you just tell your story.”

Her story made an impact, and she was invited to share it with audiences in Seattle; Boston; Austin, Texas; and at Lincoln Center in New York City. It has now been collected in the new book “The Moth Presents A Point of Beauty: True Stories of Holding On and Letting Go.”

In “Being a Foot Soldier,” Hampton tells how she was ignored by fellow students and even some teachers. On her first day of school in homeroom she was not introduced to her classmates, no one spoke to her and one boy “ominously” muttered things under his breath.

For three years she “was invisible, but mostly I was treated as if I didn’t matter.”

It’s a powerful story, and you can hear Hampton tell it at themoth.org.

Over the years she has become friends with a number of her classmates and has attended other Class of ‘62 reunions.

“While I believe it is important to share my [Central High School] story,” she said in an email, “it is just as important to witness to the fact that there have been many moments since 1982 of reconciliation and healing.”