a biography of the day-melba pattillo beals (journalist, civil rights activist, little rock nine)

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Melba Pattillo Beals
Born Melba Joy Pattillo
December 7, 1941 (age 72)

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.


Integrating Central High School

Beals was 15 years old when in May 1955, she chose to go to Central High school, an all-white school. Two years later, she was enrolled as a student at Central High. White students and some parents 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, and a few Central High students were benign and even slightly helpful, but for the most part, she and the other black students faced daily hostility and persecution.[1] In her book Warriors Don't Cry, Beals described one extreme incident in which a segregationist student threw acid into her eyes, attempting to blind her. Beals wrote in Warriors Don't Cry that she planned on returning to Central High for the 1958–59 school year, but Governor Faubus shut down Little Rock's high schools that failed to resist integration,[2] leading other school districts across the South to do the same.[citation needed] Not until the fall of 1960 did Central High reopen on an integrated basis.
Career

To finish school, Beals moved to Santa Rosa, California, with help from the NAACP, living with foster parents Dr. George and his wife Carol McCabe and their four children 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, who 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 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]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melba_Pattillo_Beals



Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Pattillo was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. Her parents were divorced when she was seven, and her mother and grandmother both strong, intelligent women had a great impact on her life. Melba's mother, Dr. Lois Pattillo, was an English teacher, and one of the first black students to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954.

Melba was 12 years old on May 17, 1954 the date the Supreme Court ruled in "Brown vs. Board of Education" that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Just over a year later, on May 24, 1955, the Little Rock school board adopted a plan to limit integration to Central High School, but claimed this would not occur for another two years.

When the time came to sign up for Central High, Melba raised her hand and put her name on the sheet. "I thought about all those times I'd gone past Central High, wanting to go inside... I reasoned that if schools were open to my people, I would also get access to other opportunities I had been denied, like... sitting on the first floor of the movies theater" (Beals, 1994).

Then, on Dec. 1 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Melba knew that "our people were stretching out to knock down fences of integration" (Beals, 1994). Mrs. Parks'action and the tremendous response from the community gave Melba hope for change, despite Governor Orval Fauvus'refusal to allow integration in public schools.

But it was Melba's first trip to Cincinnati, Ohio in early August, 1957 that gave her a glimpse of life without segregation. On this unforgettable trip to visit relatives, Melba went to the movies with a white friend, ate at lunch counters and fancy restaurants, walked through department stores, and used "regular" bathrooms. For the first time, white people from her relatives'neighbors to salespeople and waiters were friendly and treated her with respect.

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http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/melba-pattillo-beals


Melba Pattillo Beals (1941–)

Melba Pattillo Beals made history as a member of the Little Rock Nine, the nine African-American students involved in the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The world watched as they braved constant intimidation and threats from those who opposed desegregation of the formerly all-white high school. She later recounted this harrowing year in her book titled Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Desegregate Little Rock’s Central High School.

Melba Pattillo was born on December 7, 1941, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Beals grew up surrounded by family members who knew the importance of an education. Her mother, Lois Marie Pattillo, PhD, was one of the first black graduates of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1954 and was a high school English teacher at the time of the crisis. Her father, Howell Pattillo, worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. She had one brother, Conrad, who served as a U.S. marshal in Little Rock, and they all lived with her grandmother, India Peyton.

While attending all-black Horace Mann High School in Little Rock, she knew her educational opportunities were not equal to her white counterparts’ opportunities at Central High. In response to this inequality, Pattillo volunteered to transfer to the all-white Central High School with eight other black students from Horace Mann and Dunbar Junior High School. The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be known, faced daily harassment from white students. Beals later recounted that the soldier assigned to protect her instructed her, “In order to get through this year, you will have to become a soldier. Never let your enemy know what you are feeling.” Beals took the soldier’s advice, and, while the rest of the school year remained turbulent, all but one student, Minnijean Brown, was able to finish the school year. Barred from entering Central High the next year when the city’s schools were closed, Pattillo moved to Santa Rosa, California, to live with a sponsoring family who were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for her senior year of high school.

In 1961, Pattillo married John Beals. They had one daughter but divorced after ten years of marriage. She subsequently adopted two boys.

Beals graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in journalism and earned an MA in the same field from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She has worked as a communications consultant, a motivational speaker, and as a reporter for San Francisco’s public television station and for the Bay Area’s NBC affiliate.

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http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=725