Dr. Melba Pattillo Beals remembers when she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

It was in 1957 in the midst of segregation; she was one of nine black students at a predominately white high school. They were known to the media as the “Little Rock Nine.”

Having already suffered harassment from classmates and protestors, she had only been at the school for a few days when Dr. King introduced himself to the nine students one by one, looking them directly in the eyes.

“He looked at me sympathetically and I said to myself, ‘what do I want him to say?” Dr. Beals told the audience at an event celebrating King’s life at Chabot College on Monday.

“I wanted him to say ‘you know what, you don’t really have to do this, go home.’ But that’s not at all what he said…he said, ‘Melba, don’t be selfish. You’re not doing this for yourself. You’re doing this for generations of more [to come].’”

From that moment on, Dr. Beals, who was only 15 years old at the time, committed her entire life to advocating equality for all human beings. She believes that Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, is not only about his dream, but provides us with a set of instructions toward reaching equality and freedom.

“He was very specific about his instructions that day…which was; move forward with honor, respect everybody you come in contact with,” she said. “Don’t be persuaded to slow down by those people who tell you ‘listen, be patient, this is all going to happen eventually’ grab it, take it, and make it your own.”

Dr. Beals lived by this advice during her time at Central Valley High School. Following the school’s call for desegregation in 1955, she enrolled in the school in 1957 when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had registered nine black students to attend the school.

Because of the intense harassment of the Little Rock Nine, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine to class.

“Every day I stayed in Central High School was absolute hell,” Dr. Beals said. “How many days did the threat of somebody hanging me, make my heart beat fast? But you know what I did? I made it to the last day of school and eight out of the nine [African American students] at Central High School made it; and because we did that they had to open up the doors, for that and many other schools.”

Her experiences at Central High School motivated her to become a journalist for People Magazine and NBC. Today she lives in San Francisco where she is the director of the Student Success Program and professor emeritus of the communication department at Dominican University. Her award winning book, “Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock Central High School” was published in 1994.

Her work is inspired by the experiences she faced at Central High, as well as many others. She learned to grasp her freedom on her own and never give up when somebody denied it to her.

“[Dr. King] said ‘your founding fathers guaranteed you liberty and justice for all, it’s yours, some people may deny it but you need to reach out and seize it,’” Dr. Beals said. “We’re not sitting around, waiting for [people] to hand us our equality. We are gathering our wits about us and going into the world armed with what skills and education and knowledge we have.”