Ashley Giron
Period 5
APUSH
December 4, 2014
Warriors Don’t Cry
Warriors Don’t Cry is written by Melba Patillo Beals. The book was written out the authors past experiences of when she was younger, going through the 40’s and 50’s in Little Rock, Arkansas. Melba lived in a legally segregated society when she was growing up, she emphasized in the book that many blacks in the south during this time were terrified to come in conflict with the “White Folk”. When Melba was around 12 years of age there was a lawsuit, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, where the Supreme Court made a huge decision. Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer of behalf of the African-American child named Linda Brown, who was not allowed to attend an all-white elementary school. Marshall also argued segregation “separate but equal” was in violation of the fourteenth commandment. Once the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional, Civil rights activists tried to then integrate which lead to integration of education and schools. Melba was one of the nine students chosen to integrate into Central High School, one of the nation’s top high schools for whites, where she spends one miserable year attending there. Throughout the year she has been threatened and hated upon. Until the following year when then Governor of Arkansas, at the time Orval Faubus, shut down Little Rock’s schools forcing the end of segregation. Melba was sent to live with a family of white Quakers in California, when she graduated, she then began living in California. Only two years later were Blacks allowed back into Central High School.
The historical and geographical setting is in Little Rock, Arkansas. The president at the time was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Governor of Arkansas was Orval Faubus. The historical time period this book deals with is the early 1950’s when there was a huge civil rights movement. As said above the Author is also the narrator in this book, Melba Patillo Beals, she wrote the book because she simply wanted to write her story of when she was younger dealing with the threats and segregation of whites and blacks and being in the crowd that tries to integrate the black into white schools. She was born December 7, 1941 and the integration of Central high school happened her junior year in 1957. There is a definite bias she is telling her story of her perspective of this time period not as, she presents this time period by expressing how she felt and explaining what happened and what conflicts she has faced during this integration.
To apply this book to real life society now you must think on how this affects the past and how it was written. I believe that from this book you can learn about the civil rights movement, segregation, integrations, and how this was accomplished and how each society acted upon this situation. The author kept a diary during this time period and when she was writing this book she relied on what she remembered form years ago and also on what she wrote and how she wrote it to express the feeling in the book. In other words, yes