While working on a story about Elsie Allen High School government teacher Brien Farrell, I learned something Thursday.

I actually learned a lot, but one thing struck me as amazing.

In his lesson covering government’s role in major civil rights decisions, with a focus on the 1950s, Farrell told his class that one of the Little Rock Nine, the nine high schoolers who integrated all-white Central High in Arkansas, moved to Santa Rosa immediately following that historic year and ended up graduating from Montgomery High.

I was floored.

Turns out the Press Democrat has written some about this link to history a number of times. I couldn’t find a clean way to link to those stories, so I’ve pasted them below.

It’s an amazing story.

Sept 25, 1997

Staff writer Bob Klose

BEALS: LITTLE ROCK WAS ABOUT `ACCESS’

   Members of the Little Rock Nine, who integrated Central High School 40 years ago behind the bayonets of federal troops, say the issue facing minorities in 1957 was really not about integration at all.
    “It’s about access,” Terrance Roberts, a clinical psychologist at Antioch College in Ohio, told a news conference Wednesday. “Integration only allows you to be integrated.”
    “What we wanted was access to education. Access to a good home. Access to a car. Access to a chicken in the pot,” said Melba Beals, the member of the group who eventually moved to California to finish high school in Santa Rosa.
    Beals and Roberts and other members of the Little Rock Nine met with the media covering the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High. The threeweek long celebration will come to a head today when President Clinton appears at Central High to lead the Little Rock Nine into the school under peaceful conditions.
    Clinton is expected to deliver a major speech on race relations and the mood of the country in the wake passage of laws and initiatives like California Proposition 209, which eliminates race and gender preferences in government hiring and programs.
    The Little Rock Nine on Wednesday said access to opportunities normally reserved for whites was the driving force that led them to be the vanguard for integrating Central High.
    They said the same access issue is present today.
    “People who live in the poor towns around Little Rock and can’t get into town to get a good education, they don’t think about integration. They think about access,” Beals said.
    The group offered warm thanks to Little Rock for marking the anniversary and said it showed progress has been made.
    “This is a great step for the city and community of Little Rock,” said Jefferson Thomas, an accountant now living in Ohio.
    But, in response to a complaint from the audience by a young black woman who said racism continues to stand in the way of minorities, the group agreed more work needs to be done.
    “We are not declaring victory here. This is another step in the process,” Beals said. “What we are declaring is the beginning of the second phase of the war.”
    “We want the energy of this celebration to help do more with civil rights,” she said. “It will go on until the last man in line says, `I have a choice.”’
    “Have we made enough progress?” said Ernest Green, a vice president of Lehman Brothers investments in Washington. “Absolutely not. Is there more to do? Absolutely. This is the beginning of another period of change.”
    During a brief period devoted to the groups’ personal experiences after Little Rock, Beals credited the Santa Rosa family of Kay McCabe and her late husband, Sonoma State University Professor George McCabe, for giving her hope after Little Rock. Beals moved to California in 1959 to live with the McCabes after her life had been threatened by segregation extremists.
    Beals said her own mother is hospitalized in Little Rock after suffering series of strokes. So with her adopted mother watching from seating reserved for family members, Beals said: “They took me in. Walked me across the bridge to adulthood. Saw to it I got into college.”
    Earlier, McCabe said her family’s decision to take in Beals was fairly simple.
    “This was something we could do that could be helpful. As it turned out it was a wonderful thing for us. We gained a lot more from her than she did from staying with us,” she said.

FAMED GRAD RECALLS MONTGOMERY DAYS
AUTHOR CHOSEN AS ROLE MODEL

   When she came to Montgomery High School in the fall of 1959 she was a wounded teen-ager, a senior with a secret past.
    Her given name was Melba but the name beside her black-and-white picture in the 1960 yearbook is her middle name, Joy. It was an identity she assumed when she was spirited to a safe house in Santa Rosa for peace and protection from persistent news reporters and Ku Klux Klansmen, who put a bounty on her life.
    The new name described the new life she was to claim in Santa Rosa.
    Melba Pattillo Beals, a successful former network news reporter and author, on Tuesday returned to Montgomery, a school where she spent only four months but where she was able to earn her high school diploma in peace, without running a hateful gauntlet to get to class.
    One of the “Little Rock Nine,” Beals at 15 was chased by rope-bearing lynch mobs, dodged dynamite sticks, had acid thrown into her eyes and faced an armed unit of the Arkansas National Guard when she became one of nine brave black students to integrate the all-white Central High in September 1957. She chronicled her harrowing year -which became one of the biggest news events of 1957 — in a critically successful memoir, “Warriors Don’t Cry.”
    Now, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock school integration war, Beals, who went on to become a successful Bay Area and network news reporter and now public relations consultant, is writing a more joyful sequel.
    “White is a State of Mind,” she said, will recount the months she spent regaining her dignity at Montgomery and in the loving home of Kay and the late educator George McCabe. The couple responded to a national call by the NAACP for safe houses to both hide and provide education to the besieged black youth of Little Rock after then-Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus closed the city high schools for a year rather than follow federal orders to integrate.
    She had two loving parents -her mother managed to overcome barriers to earn a master’s degree and teach — but the McCabes became a second mother and father. Beals said she experienced relatively little prejudice in Santa Rosa, although George McCabe, a university professor and founder of Sonoma State, successfully protested when a public pool denied her entrance.
    “It was to be a really joyful life. People here were wonderful to me,” she recalled before an enrapt group of several dozen students — black, white, Asian and Latino — many of them clutching copies of her book.
    Beside an open 1960 yearbook, she signed books, querying each student about their goals and dreams. And she shared her memories of a mean chapter in U.S. history.
    Questioned about how she put up with the angry taunts and names, she counseled teens that esteem and respect come from within.
    “I do not let it hurt my heart or define who I am. I know who I am. It has nothing to do with what you think of me …” said Beals, now 55, who is writing a screenplay for her book in collaboration with a grown daughter.
    More than a few kids admitted staying up late Monday night to read the book in one sitting, caught up in the drama of a girl their own age who virtually put her life on the line for the cause of integration.
    “When I read it, I realized I have less trouble than I thought. If I had to go through that … I would have given up after the first day,” said Quiana Brown, 16. The young African-American girl read the book two years ago but only recently discovered Beals — who became her inspiration and hero- was a graduate of her own high school.
    The appearance, which only coincidentally fell within Black History Month, was arranged through the Montgomery High School Alumni and Friends Foundation, which inducted Beals Tuesday into its Hall of Fame, which aims to provide kids with role models they can relate to.
    “Otherwise, there was no way for kids to know what a miraculous student had been before them,” said student Jessica Horowitz, who nominated Beals.
    Beals will join a Wall of Fame in the school’s counseling center.