Life’s lessons come from unexpected places. We cannot afford to allow prejudices to shut out God’s blessings. Being equal is based on seeing equal. It is seated in each individual’s willingness to claim their own equality despite all evidence to the contrary and all talk by others who dare to question their value.

If you go only where you are welcome, that’s where other people want you to go, not where you choose to go. You’re limited by their vision – not living your own dreams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.