God’s Precious Idea
In 1957 nine black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, wanted equality so badly that they risked their lives to become the first black students to enroll in the all-white Little Rock Central High School. I took these photos last year when Ray and I visited Central High to see for ourselves the place where the remarkable story of these courageous teenagers took place.
Our family became interested in the story of these students who came to be called the Little Rock Nine after we discovered the 1993 made-for-television movie called The Ernest Green Story, which we watched again and again as our children were growing up. Ernest Green was the oldest of the nine and the first African American to graduate from Central High. Our children went to Little Rock to attend the ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of this historic event while on a sibling vacation in 2007.
I’ve been listening to the story of Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the girls who were among those nine teenagers. Melba’s mother had struggled to become one of the first black students admitted to the University of Arkansas, where she graduated with a Master’s degree.
While Mrs. Pattillo studied in the evenings, Melba’s grandmother India, who lived with the family, played checkers and chess with Melba and her brother and read books to them. Books were important in the Pattillo family. On the mahogany bookshelf in the family’s front hall were books that Melba’s mother and grandmother loved, including ones with writings by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Emily Dickinson.
As Melba chaffed under the “separate but equal” societal norms of 1950s Little Rock, her grandmother pointed her again and again to God and His word.
Grandmother India told Melba that God loved her.
She told her that she must strive to be the best of what God made her.
She told her that she was “God’s precious idea.”
Each of your children is God’s precious idea. You are, too.
What is man, that You remember him?
Or the son of man, that You are concerned about him?
You have made him for a little while lower than the angels;
You have crowned him with glory and honor,
And have appointed him over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things in subjection under his feet.
Hebrews 2:7