Melba Beals

Melba Pattillo Beals was born on Pearl Harbor Day—the day that the Japanese attacked a US naval base in Hawaii, thereby launching the United States into World War II—to Lois and Howell Pattillo. Beals was her parents’ first born, but they also had a son, named Conrad. Lois was an educated and ambitious woman who was among the first black students at the University of Arkansas. During Beals’s childhood, Lois worked as an English teacher and would later earn a Master’s degree. Howell was a worker on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Beals’s parents divorced when she was seven. Beals entered Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in September 1957 as part of the Little Rock Nine—the first African American students to attend Central in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that ended segregation in American public schools. Due to Governor Orval Faubus’s closing of all Little Rock schools in 1958 to halt integration, Beals was relocated with the help of the NAACP. She moved into the home of Dr. George McCabe, a professor at San Francisco State University, and finished high school in Northern California. In 1962, Beals enrolled at San Francisco State University for two years, then left to marry John Beals, a martial-arts expert. The couple had one child, Kellie, then divorced after seven years. Beals pursued a career in journalism and worked as a news reporter for an NBC affiliate in San Francisco. She was also the host of a radio news talk show for ABC. She has written articles for numerous publications. While working as a journalist, she simultaneously ran her own public relations firm and, in 1990, published her first book on self-promotion entitled Expose Yourself. In 1999, Beals joined the faculty of Dominican University in California and founded its Department of Communications and Media Studies. In the same year, she and other members of the Little Rock Nine received the Congressional Gold Medal for their contributions to integration and civil rights. She continues to write and work as a public speaker.