Melba Patillo Beals
The Oxford Languages dictionary defines persecution as hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political or religious beliefs. In the books I normally read persecution is based on religious beliefs. This book is about the persecution and determination of nine high school students as they integrated into a Little Rock, Arkansas high school.
Is this America? This thought kept going through my mind reading this book. This book was a very hard read. I lost track of the number of times I teared up. The language was hard to read but much harder to live through. In the epilogue, Patillo Beals go into some of the lasting emotional effects of her time at Central High but I'm sure there were physical effects after this year of torture as well. It was hard to understand how people could be so cruel to children or use their own children to promote hate. Our county still has lasting effects from the behavior described in this book in which the events took place in 1957. It is our job to educate ourselves on the past so that we might try to prevent the same atrocities from happening in the future.
Melba Patillo Beals uses her diary notes, newspaper clippings, and memory to reconstruct her journey into Central High School. Like so many other biographies, Warriors Don't Cry had me researching other events and people around this era to learn and understand more about this time in our history.
Quick Glean: Keep reading past the political undertones in the prologue. Whether you agree of disagree just keep reading to get to the heart of the story.