11 Quotes by Melba Pattillo Beals

Grandma entertained us with reading or checkers or chess so we wouldn't bother Mother as she studied for her night-school exams. She was determined to complete her master's degree.

She [Melba's mother] would tell us the story of the lone black man who was trying to integrate the law school. In the classroom, he was forced to sit confined by a white picket fence erected around his desk and chair.

Mother [Lois Marie Pattillo] began meeting with a few others from our community who were also determined to be admitted to the graduate school of education at the university.

My mother was one of the first few blacks to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954.

Then I remember I'd always been told, 'If a fellow's got so little manhood he'd hit a woman, it's up to that woman to relieve him of what few morsels of his masculinity remain.' I bent my knee and jammed my foot backward, up his crotch.

When she began graduate school, our people [blacks] couldn't attend classes with whites at the University of Arkansas. After much grumbling and dickering, white folks had begun to allow small departments to integrate, class by class.

I have only found the strength to visit five times in thirty years because of the uneasy feeling the city gives me. Three of those visits have been since Bill and Hillary Clinton took over the governor's mansion, because they set a tone that made me feel safer here.

The task that remains is to cope with our interdependence - to see ourselves reflected in every other human being and to respect and honor our differences.

Until I am welcomed everywhere as an equal simply because I am human, I remain a warrior on a battlefield that I must not leave. I continue to be a warrior who does not cry but who instead takes action. If one person is denied equality, we are all denied equality.