Melba Pattillo Beals ist eine Autorin, deren Werke aus tiefgreifender persönlicher Erfahrung mit Rassentrennung und dem Kampf für Bildungsgleichheit schöpfen. Ihr Schreiben konzentriert sich auf die Themen Stärke, Widerstandsfähigkeit und die transformative Wirkung von Mut angesichts von Widrigkeiten. Beals fängt meisterhaft die psychischen und emotionalen Folgen von Diskriminierung ein und feiert gleichzeitig den Triumph des menschlichen Geistes. Ihre Erzählungen spiegeln die Botschaft wider, dass individuelle Handlungen kollektive Veränderungen anstoßen können und dass akademische Freiheit ein Eckpfeiler einer gerechten Gesellschaft ist.
Using the diary she kept as a teenager and through news accounts, Melba Pattillo Beals relives the harrowing year when she was selected as one of the first nine students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.
From the legendary civil rights activist and author of the million-copy selling Warriors Don't Cry comes an ardent and profound childhood memoir of growing up while facing adversity in the Jim Crow South.
In 1957, Melba Beals was one of the nine African American students chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. But her story of overcoming didn't start--or end--there. While her white schoolmates were planning their senior prom, Melba was facing the business end of a double-barreled shotgun, being threatened with lynching by rope-carrying tormentors, and learning how to outrun white supremacists who were ready to kill her rather than sit beside her in a classroom. Only her faith in God sustained her during her darkest days and helped her become a civil rights warrior, an NBC television news reporter, a magazine writer, a professor, a wife, and a mother. In I Will Not Fear, Beals takes readers on an unforgettable journey through terror, oppression, and persecution, highlighting the kind of faith needed to survive in a world full of heartbreak and anger. She shows how the deep faith we develop during our most difficult moments is the kind of faith that can change our families, our communities, and even the world. Encouraging and inspiring, Beals's story offers readers hope that faith is the solution to the pervasive hopelessness of our current culture.