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

The poorly chosen, tabloid worthy subtitle of this memoir almost made me give it a pass, but I am so happy I didn’t. Over the past year, I have been reading a lot of books by and about people whose lives are radically different from my own, due either to the color of their skin, their religion, of their politics. I have been deeply disturbed to see the rifts that are developing in the United States in terms of race, religion, and political affiliation. Looking back in history and analyzing how issues were resolved —or failed to be resolved — helps me to understand where things stand in our country today.

The author of this book, Melba Pattillo Beals, was one of the Little Rock Nine, nine Black teens chosen to forcibly integrate Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School in 1957. At just fifteen and sixteen, an age when high school is tough enough, she was being ushered to class — on days when she was lucky — by members of the famed Screaming Eagles, the army’s 101st Airborne Division. On not so lucky days, her “protection” came from members of the Arkansas National Guard — who more often than not stood by and made a spectator sport out of the treatment of the Nine.

These young people and their families endured death threats, beatings, broken bones, scaldings and humiliation in locker rooms, flaming paper bombs, and an endless stream of smaller physical abuses, as well as verbal and emotional abuse. Intervention went as high up as the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, who allowed sporadic use of the 101st but was mostly managed by Arkansas officials who were adamantly opposed to integration. They hoped that the abuse the teens suffered would lead to either the students backing down and returning to their Black high school or for adults to refuse to allow them to continue for safety reasons. Every day, these nine young people went to war, not on foreign soil, but in a school. Right here in the United States.

Melba, who was inspired by the journalists who spoke her truth and that of her eight classmates, decided that one day she would become a journalist, too, so she could pay it forward. Despite being encouraged to tell her story, it took her more than thirty years to be able to face her own past. I don’t know who chose this book's ridiculous subtitle (“searing” is such a histrionic word), but the text itself sets the perfect tone. Melba neither champions herself nor lapses into self pity. She lays out the facts in a forceful, organized, and documented fashion, drawing on the diaries she diligently kept and contemporary newspaper reporting.

If you have never read a book about the Little Rock Nine (I never had, despite several languishing on my TBR), I highly recommend this one. Melba left me in absolute awe of these nine young people who showed such strength of conviction and character. The audio, narrated by Lisa Reneé Pitts, perfectly matched the tenor of the text; it, too, gets five stars from me.