Melba Patillo Beals

Today, Olivia and I went to an event at Chabot. One of my former professors (who came to my wedding and kept in touch with me over the past decade) invited me to attend the women's history month event she was planning. She also invited me to a big event last March, but I remember feeling like I was going to go into labor early and wanted to stay home.

Anyway, today's event was a guest speaker named Melba Patillo Beals, who was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of black students to integrate the public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The event was free and open to the public and hundreds of people attended. I was surprised at the turnout and how long the line was!

She was a great speaker. She talked about her memories of the year she spent at Central High and the horrible things that were done to her there. She says she still has vision problems from having acid thrown into her eyes. One time a student spread peanut butter with bits of glass on her seat, and she had to have her grandmother pick out the glass from her skin with tweezers. She described how she experienced the most violence in the bathroom, since the guards weren't allowed to accompany her there and one time a group of girls locked her in a bathroom stall and threw burning paper into the stall to try to burn her.

Amazingly, Dr. Beals has a great sense of humor now. She says she's currently shopping for a second husband. She's also a really great motivational speaker. She adopted twins when she was 50 and was told they would have all kinds of learning disabilities (she called them "learning differences") but today the twins are thriving because she refused to compromise on the quality of their education. She encouraged us to continue the fight for civil rights and to remember that it's about helping generations to come.

Olivia was great the whole time. I wore her in the ergo and she waved and smiled at the people in line with us. She got lots of compliments and people especially loved her wooden eggplant that she clung to the whole time. When she started getting antsy, I pulled out some dried apple and that kept her happy.

It felt so good to get out and go to such a wonderful event today. It was made even better by Olivia being so awesome. I can't wait until she can understand what's going on. I hope she's gonna be an academic :)