Beals Melba - March forward, girl: from young warrior to Little Rock Nine

Text copyright 2018 by Melba Pattillo Beals

Illustrations copyright 2018 by Frank Morrison

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Melba Pattillo Beals: , cover (foreground)

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Jim Bowen: cover (background)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

ISBN: 978-1-328-88212-7

eISBN 978-1-328-91915-1
v1.1217

To all the members of the Little Rock Nine, who marched with me in pursuit of my dream of equality in education for all: Minnijean Brown Trickey, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Terrence Roberts, the late Jefferson Thomas, Thelma Mothershed Wair, and especially Carlotta Walls LaNier who stood by me through all these years and through my journey back to the past

Black folks arent born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you are teething and says, Heres how you must behave as a second-class citizen. Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.

Warriors Dont Cry, Melba Pattillo Beals
(Simon & Schuster, 1994)

During the three months that it took to write and ponder the paragraph above, I often wondered what it would take to explain this process to someone who hadnt lived it. Many of the national reviewers who wrote their opinions of Warriors Dont Cry mentioned this paragraph as being significant, beautifully written, and haunting. It has always stood out to me as the kernel of words that totally reflects how I feel about the life experience of an African-American.

I am writing this book in the hope of enlightening readers about the journey an African-American takes in having to grow up and live under the laws and traditions of oppression. It is an experience that indelibly imprints certain behaviors on ones brain that never, ever quite go away.

Although the experience in the South has been chronicled as being much more detrimental than that of living in the North, the bottom line is all of it hurts deeply, and all of it leaves grave impressions, which must be overcome if one is to develop self-esteem and a life purpose. In order to accomplish any goal, one must feel worthy of achieving what one seeks.

Signs like this one surrounded me during my youth. I felt smothered and choked by them.

As a child, to have white people tell me both in words and by their actions that they did not feel I was good enough to be in their presence, ride their buses, go to their schools, go to their theaters, or drink from their water fountains made me begin to ask at age three, Why? At first I pondered it myself, and then I asked my parents. Their answer was this was a temporary condition that would go away.

However, my question of Why? got bigger and bigger as I saw the way they behaved in the presence of white people. Their facial expressions changed to humble, their words were apologetic, and their demeanor lacked confidence. They were obviously quite nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing. Everything they did or said was to gain the approval of the white people with whom they interacted. They behaved in a way that defines a word I would learn laterkowtow.

After a while, I decided they were afraid and that they could give no answers to my questions because they didnt really know the answers. I would learn later that segregation and oppression were not simply traditions passed down through hundreds of years, but that permission to treat us as though we were less than was actually defined in laws called Jim Crow.

It was signs like this that usurped my self-esteem and my hope.

It seemed to me in the beginning that none of the white people around us had any desire or reason to change. It was what had always been acceptable. Treating us as unequals was a privilege granted them by the laws of our land.

As I grew and experienced these interactions with the adults in my community and with whites outside my community, I realized that a teaspoon of my self-esteem was being extracted day by day as I struggled to survive the risky lifestyle I had to embrace in order to be safe. I came to expect this demeaning process. I didnt know how, where, why, or when it would occur, but the expectation of it boiled the fear inside me until it was overwhelming, and I realized if I didnt control it, it would eat me alive.

Here at fourteen, I was filled up to the brim with the rules that governed what my people could and could not do.

This book is about my experiences as a black child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1940s and 50s under the umbrella of the rules and traditions of my oppressors. We as black people were compelled to learn these rules in order to stay alive. They were rules that were not written down but instead handed down through the spoken word from generation to generation by black folks absolutely committed to passing them on so that they and their descendants would live to one day become free and equal, to experience the freedom and justice for all in the Constitution.

CHAPTER 1

Ill Figure It Out Later

THE FIRST THING I REMEMBER about being a person living in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1940s is the gut-wrenching fear in my heart and in my tummy that I was in danger. I didnt know why exactly, but clouds of dread engulfed me every evening when day turned to night. I sensed from the very first moment of consciousness that I was living in a place where I was not welcome. By age three, I realized the culture of this small town in the Deep South was such that the color of my skin framed the entire scope of my life. It brought with it many ground rules designed to imprison and control everyone who was not white.

Of the eighty-eight thousand residents, sixty-six thousand were white, while twenty-two thousand were black. The white people and the black people lived in separate worlds that seemed to intersect only when absolutely necessary. My big questions from the beginning were Who set up my community that way and why? and Why do whites get more privileges than we domore houses, more books, more pets, and more food, more merchandise in all the downtown stores, all the police officers and firefighters, and all the transportation? Even the city buses belonged to them.

When I felt frightened and overwhelmed, which was often, I would clench my fists so hard that my knuckles would hurt. Then I would press my open hands into my sides as hard as I could. I would let go and do it again and again until I felt in control of the terror bubbling inside me.