Melba Pattillo Beals è un'autrice le cui opere attingono a una profonda esperienza personale con la segregazione razziale e la lotta per l'uguaglianza educativa. La sua scrittura si concentra sui temi della forza, della resilienza e dell'impatto trasformativo del coraggio di fronte alle avversità. Beals cattura magistralmente il tributo psicologico ed emotivo della discriminazione, celebrando al contempo il trionfo dello spirito umano. Le sue narrazioni risuonano con il messaggio che le azioni individuali possono innescare un cambiamento collettivo e che la libertà accademica è una pietra angolare di una società giusta.
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.