OK, let's take the heroism away right now and understand that Little Rock was a quiet reservation. And there was no thought on my part, no thought on any of our parts that when we went to Central High School it would trigger this terrible catastrophe. I wanted to go because they had more privileges. They had more equipment, they had five floors of opportunities. For me, I understood education before I understood anything else. From the time I was two, my mother said, “You will go to college. Education is your key to survival," and I understood that. And it was a kind of curiosity. It was not an overwhelming desire to go to this school and integrate this school and change history. Oh no, there was none of that. There was just, be, fun to go in this school I ride by every day. I want to know what's in there. I don't necessarily want to be with those people, I assumed that being with those people would be no different than being with the people that I was already with. I had no idea, none whatsoever, until the adventure started that it would be this way. And my getting into Central High School was somewhat almost of an accident. I simply raised my hand one day when they said, “Who of you lives in the area of Central High School?" Then, that was two years before, in 1955, and, they said, you know who has good grades, and I had excellent grades. It was an accident of fate.

Description + Context: ​Excerpt from a 1985 video interview (for a documentary on the Civil Rights Movement) with Melba Patillo Beals, who was one of nine African American students who enrolled in Little Rock Central High School as the first African American students to do so in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.