| Melba Pattillo Beals | |
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| Born | Melba Joy Pattillo December 7, 1941 |
Melba Pattillo Beals (born December 7, 1941) is a journalist and member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who were the first to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Beals was 13 years old when in May 1955, she was chosen to go to Central High school, an all-white school. Two years later, she was enrolled as a student at Central High. White students spat at and mocked the integrating students. The Nine also faced mobs that forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in the 101st Airborne Division to protect their lives after the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, used troops to block the Nine's entry to the school. At least one white student, a senior named Link, helped her avoid dangerous areas during the school day, but for the most part, she and the other black students faced daily hostility and persecution.[1]
In an interview for the 1987 public television documentary on the Civil Rights movement, Eyes On The Prize, Beals said that when she arrived home on the last day of the school year, she was so upset over the way she had been treated that she burned her schoolbooks, and admitted that she wasn't looking forward to going back to school in the fall. As it turned out, she didn't have to; the Little Rock school system chose to shut down operations in the fall of 1958 to resist integration[2], leading other school districts across the South to do the same.[citation needed]
To finish school, Beals moved to Santa Rosa, California, with help from the NAACP, living with foster parents George and Carol McCabe while she completed her senior year at Montgomery High School.[3] She then attended San Francisco State University, earning a bachelor's degree. At age seventeen she began writing for major newspapers and magazines. She later earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. While in college, she met John Beals, whom she later married. She has one daughter, Kellie and twin sons, Matthew and Evan.[4]
Beals' book Warriors Don't Cry chronicles the events of 1957 during the Little Rock crisis, based partly on diaries she kept during that period. She also wrote White is a State of Mind, which begins where Warriors left off.
In 1958, the NAACP awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal to Beals and to the other members of the Little Rock Nine, together with civil rights leader Daisy Bates, who had advised the group during their struggles at Central High. In 1999, she and the rest of the Nine were awarded the highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal. Only three hundred others have received this.[5]
Today, Beals lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and teaches journalism at Dominican University of California, where she is the chair of the communications department [6].
On May 22, 2009, she received her Doctoral Degree in Education at the University of San Francisco. The day marked USF's 150th annual commencement ceremony.
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