In 1957, the NAACP successfully sued the Little Rock (AK) School Board, demanding that they open Central High School to black students. And Melba Beals, who was 16 at the time and a junior, was one of nine black students chosen by the NAACP to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. The day before school was to open, Melba wrote in her diary, “What I’m afraid of most is that they won’t like me and integration won’t work.” Our program will tell her story–one of sadness, racism and eventual triumph over adversity.

Of her experience, Beals says, “While the nine of us may have been pre-selected, there really are nine, ten, thirty, forty, fifty kids in every community that could have done that. It wasn’t that nine people fell out of the sky in Little Rock. We were all ordinary kids. You really do have the ability to do a lot more than either you’ve been told or you’ve been lead to believe by your surroundings. If given the opportunity, you’d be surprised at how much you can do, how much you can achieve.” These inspiring words, in fact, set the tone for our series: ordinary kids doing extraordinary things not because they are especially brave but because it is the right thing to do.

LESSONS: This program will reveal the nature of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and how American society came to terms with the fact that there were two nations, unequal and divided by race and economic status. To gain their proper place in American society, African Americans chose not bullets but non-violence to receive what the U.S. Constitution guarantees all its citizens…the right to vote.

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