“Every morning was getting up and going to war” – Melba Pattillo Beals on integrating Little Rock Central High School

Monday at the American Library Association began with song and dance. Before Melba Pattillo Beals spoke about her books Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock High School and White Is a State of Mind: Freedom Is Yours to Choose, the St. Ailbe’s Children’s Choir of Chicago and its dance troupe sang rousing gospel songs on the stage of the ALA Auditorium Speaker Series. Pat Scales of the Association for Library Service to Children then profiled the pioneering African American librarian Charlemae Rollins, for whom her association’s lecture series is dedicated. With some difficulty due to her new titanium hip, Beals then took the stage.

Melba Beals was fifteen years old in 1957 when she was chosen to be one of nine African American students to enter Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, a huge institution with about 4,000 students. Of course, there is a story behind how she was chosen. She had often seen the well-appointed and imposing structure on the way to her shabby black school, and she longed to attend for the current textbooks and better teachers. When the NAACP sought good students to integrate Little Rock, Beals forged her mother’s signature on an application. She did not foresee the storm of violence that would accompany the court ordered opening of the all-white school to blacks. Even with federal troops sent by President Eisenhower to protect the students and restore order, her life was in constant danger during her year in Little Rock Central High. The Ku Klux Klan offered rewards for the capture of any of the Little Rock Nine for the purpose of executing them.

What is most remarkable about Beals is her lack of bitterness for the hate and violence that she witnessed. “If you hate, it’s like sucking a lemon.” She knows that racial hatred is a culturally-imposed stricture that can be overcome. She was blessed after her year in Little Rock High to be evacuated to California to the home of white Quakers, who considered her one of the family. From there she graduated high school and went on to college and graduate school, eventually becoming a journalist and public relations professor.

Throughout her life, in hard times and good times, she has been sustained by libraries. Beals considers the library her home, and currently has an office in her university library. Going “from the back of the bus to the back of the library,” she now gets to see the new books as they arrive. She believes that librarians are “good people” if somewhat too polite. To survive hard economic times and the attacks of right-wing politicians, she thinks librarians need to speak up more and proclaim their cause.