Melba Pattillo Beals is een auteur wiens werken putten uit diepgaande persoonlijke ervaringen met rassenscheiding en de strijd voor gelijkheid in het onderwijs. Haar schrijven richt zich op thema's als kracht, veerkracht en de transformerende impact van moed bij tegenspoed. Beals brengt meesterlijk de psychologische en emotionele tol van discriminatie in beeld en viert tegelijkertijd de triomf van de menselijke geest. Haar verhalen resoneren met de boodschap dat individuele acties collectieve verandering teweeg kunnen brengen en dat academische vrijheid een hoeksteen is van een rechtvaardige samenleving.
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.