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.