Civil Rights: Melba Beales

Melba Beales and school integration

Melba Patilla Beales at 15 years

The Little Rock Nine was an influential part of the Civil Rights Movement. The Little Rock Nine event took place in Little Rock Arkansas, specifically the Little rock Central High School in September 1957 with nine African American students; Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Carlotta Walls, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Melba Pattillo Beales.  All Nine of these students had been elected by the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), due to their grades and attendance, in order integrate all-white schools in the South. 

Melba Patillo Beales was born December 7, 1941; Beales was only thirteen when she had decided to enroll in Little Rock Central High School and was fifteen during the events of the Little Rock Nine. Violent white mobs and National Guard troops who refused to help, the students eventually entered school after President Dwight Eisenhower ordered Arkansas units who worked with the 101st Airborne Division. Both of these groups escorted the little rock Nine during the school day. 

101 airborne division

Warriors Don't Cry (pub 2008) is a memoir
of the school integration experience

The Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus used military troops to stop the Nine from entering the school. A white senior named Link, helped Melba avoid dangerous areas however the Nine were forced to endure daily hostility and persecution. In her book Warriors Don't Cry, Beals described an extreme incident of racism in her book Warriors Don't Cry where a student threw acid into her eyes, in an attempt to blind her. 

Beales had  planned on returning to Central High for the for the following (1958–1959) school year; however, the governor ceased Little Rock's high schools that resisted integration, making other school districts across the South to do the same.  Not until the fall of 1960 did Central High reopen on an integrated basis.

APPARTS: Little Rock nine excerpt from Eyes on the Prize

A: none in particular from documentary film Eyes on the Prize

P: 1957 Little Rock Arkansas at Little Rock Central high School

P: In 1954 the Supreme Court had ruled that segregating schools was unconstitutional in Brown v. the     Board of Education Topeka, Kansas.

A: The audience of the film is supposed to be people from "modern times" that may not be aware of heaving to endure such a level of discrimination.

R: The video itself was created to bring awareness to the different aspects and problems that members of the Civil Rights Movement had to face. The act of school integration was done so in order to integrate schools under the case ruling of Brown v. the Board of education, Topeka, Kansas

T: The events of School integration were not only challenging but created a ripple in in the education scene during the Civil Rights Movement. 

S:  The events of the Little Rock Nine marked a movement in the desegregation of public schools. The fact that the Brown v. the Board of education had ruled that "separate but equal" was unconstitutional, but still continued to happen was only a continuing contradiction. A student's performance is not based on their race, but solely on their talents. The NAACP wanted to desegregate schools and the Little Rock Nine were the first group of students to try school integration with Ernest Green being the first African American to graduate from a white school. 

Reconstruction blog

Did Reconstruction grant equality?

 Reconstruction was based on the fundamental idea of Reconstructing the nation after the damage that the civil war had marked.Reconstruction brought forth several different topics to the question of what it meant to be America and who was American. For many, however, reconstruction was a matter of an experiment with no one really knowing what the outcome would be.

President Abraham Lincoln  proposed the Ten Percent Plan on December 1863, which stated that a Confederate state could return to the Union when ten percent of the 1860 vote-count from that state had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States and pledge to follow the emancipation. After doing such voters could decide to rewrite their state constitution and even make a new state government, with all Southerners being granted full pardon with the exception of high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials.  In the Ten Percent Plan Lincoln reassured Southerners their private property but not their slaves. 1864 marked the year that Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas were re-integrated as Unionist governments. The Plan was meant to shorten the Civil War and insist the abolition of slavery at the same time.

President Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865)

After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, just weeks after the end of the civil war, Andrew Johnson became president , Johnson believed that “national unity” and ending slavery had dictated that Reconstruction was over. It was only the beginning. Congress being run by Republicans refused to accept that reconstruction was over, they rejected the new Congressional appointees that had been elected by the South.

President Andrew Johnson (in office April 15, 1865 – March 4, 1869)

This lead into the creation of the black codes. Although the lack codes granted new opportunities to African-American Slaves it also asserted many oppressive laws, some of which violated the constitution. The Black codes discriminated against blacks in Southern States at the end of the Civil War to control the labor, migration and other activities of newly-freed slaves. The Mississippi Black Codes were most known for being the harshest Black codes in the nation during Reconstruction. One of the black Codes stated that couples that had been living together before the Civil War would know be considered legally married, white any white person involved in an interracial relationship would be fined or imprisoned betraying the American ideal of the “pursuit of happiness”. Another black code stated that any African-American person that did not have a house would be labeled as a vagrant and fined or imprisoned. Simply for not having a home., while another code stated that any black that would be working for more than a month needed a contract, and could not quit without a “reasonable reason”. If a worker quit and ran away, they would be hunted down and brought back to their employer. Any African American not able to pay the fine or go to jail a white person could pay the fine for them, the African-American would them have to work for that person in order to pay off their debt.

African-Americans in prisons worked in chain gangs under merciless conditions and jobs 

Women, who had been working closely with the Abolition movement grew infuriated when African-American MEN were granted the vote before white women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one such woman, in Home Life she stated that “There is no other human slavery that knows such depths of degradation as a wife chained to a man whom she neither loves nor respects, no other slavery so disastrous in its consequences on the race, or to an individual respect growth and development.” Here  Stanton conveys her anger saying that marriage is the worst type of slavery.

Women suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Reconstruction did not grant equality, it helped paved the way for equality.