Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High - Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Patillo Beals was one of nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas's Central High School in 1957. For Melba and her friends it marked their transformation into reluctant warriors--on a battlefield that helped shape the civil rights movement. Warriors Don't Cry is their riveting story. Optioned by Disney for a feature film.
In this compelling autobiographical account by one of the Civil Rights Movement's most powerful figures, Beals explores not only the power of racism, but also the ideas of justice and identity.

In 1957, well before Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Melba Pattillo Beals and eight other teenagers became iconic symbols for the Civil Rights Movement and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the American South as they integrated Little Rock's Central High School in the wake of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education.

Throughout her harrowing ordeal, Melba was taunted by her schoolmates and their parents, threatened by a lynch mob's rope, attacked with lighted sticks of dynamite, and injured by acid sprayed in her eyes. But through it all, she acted with dignity and courage, and refused to back down.

Warriors Don't Cry is, at times, a difficult but necessary reminder of the valuable lessons we can learn from our nation's past. It is a story of courage and the bravery of a handful of young, black students who used their voices to influence change during a turbulent time.