Thanks to the efforts of LAHS English Teacher Karen Yoshihara-Ha, history and literature came alive for more than 500 students and parents on Tuesday evening, March 6. Dr. Melba Patillo Beals, author of “Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High School,” shared her experiences with a capacity crowd in the Performing Arts Center on the Los Alamitos High School campus.
Three years following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, nine African American teenagers set out to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
On the morning of September 23, 1957, these students faced an angry mob of over 1,000 White Americans protesting the integration of the school. As the students were escorted inside by the Little Rock police, violence escalated and a decision was made to remove the students from the school. The following day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the 1,200-man 101st Airborne Battle Group of the U.S. Army to escort the nine students to school. By the same order, the entire 10,000-man Arkansas National Guard was federalized to remove them from the control of Governor Faubus. Dr. Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the nine students, remembered, "After three full days inside Central, I knew that integration is a much bigger word than I thought."
Dr. Beals opened the evening by asking the audience if they have ever felt unequal. She jokingly shared that no one leaned over her crib when she was an infant and whispered in her ear, “You are less than others.” Growing up, she always asked questions and wondered, “Why” to many of the practices in Little Rock at the time. She always wanted to ride the Merry-Go-Round at the public park, but was not allowed due to her skin color. When told she could not swim in the public pool with the white children, she had a solution – “I suggested that we let the white folks have the pool from January through June and the Black folks take over from July through December. Seemed fair to me.”
In the spring of 1957 when students at Horace Mann High School were asked who wanted to attend Central the next year, Melba Pattillo’s hand went up. This decision proved to be divisive within her family. Her father was strongly opposed to Melba going to Central while her mother was a bit ambivalent. The driving force in support of Melba’s wish to attend the school was her grandmother. However, none of them imagined the turbulence and violence that would accompany this decision.
While many see her as a leader in integrating public education, that was not her motivation for enrolling in Central High School. As she said it, “We went to Central for opportunity. We didn’t understand integration; we didn’t even know the word. We wanted to go to Central High first and foremost because of access. Because it was seven stories high and four square blocks in diameter. Because at the time it was considered one of America’s finest high schools.” In order to have this opportunity, it meant leaving Horace Mann.
Dr. Pattillo Beals shared that the nine students were instructed that when confronted, either physically or verbally, not to fight back. She went on to say, “It wasn’t easy to not fight back or talk back. But learning how to do that has been very important. Adults told me that if you hit back or fight back, you lose. I remember the time Dr. Martin Luther King told us, ‘Don’t be selfish. Remember, you’re doing this for future generations.’”
After sharing her thoughts, Dr. Beals responded to questions and answers from the audience. One student asked how the teachers treated her. Dr. Beals replied, “Teachers were trapped. They could not help us and many did not want to. A few students were kind, but once they were, they were treated badly. There was a shorthand teacher, Mrs. Pickwick, and she was wonderful. She was no-nonsense and would not allow me to be bothered in her classroom. The vice principal, Mrs. Huckaby, wasn’t warm, but she did her job and did her best to facilitate our safety.”
Another student asked if she felt that she played an important part in our history. She shared, “It was interesting sitting in my college history classes and getting stares from classmates who saw me sitting next to them and saw my picture in the textbook.”
One other student asked, “What was the most frightening time she had at Central High School.” Dr. Beals relayed the time when she and the other eight students were gathered into one room while the local police conferred outside their door to decide how to get the students out of the school alive. As Dr. Beals shared, “There was talk about allowing one of us to be killed. This would then divert the attention from the other eight and they could get out alive. I remember the assistant sheriff intervening and saying that we would not do that. Instead, he took all of us to the basement of the school where there was a garage. He put all nine of us in a vehicle, raised the rolling metal gate and drove us out of the school amid jeers and taunts from the crowd that had gathered outside the school.”
The evening concluded with Dr. Pattillo Beals encouraging the students to follow their dreams and overcome obstacles that may present themselves. As she put it, “Do not let someone else define you.”
Beals was the first of the Little Rock Nine to write a book based on her experiences at Central High. Published in 1994, “Warriors Don’t Cry,” was named the American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book for 1995 and won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award that same year. She, along with the other eight students, was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1958 and in 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine.