Melba Pattillo Beals Biography

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 13 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 spit 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. 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, leading other school districts across the South to do the same. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.