4. Biography, Autobiography, or Memoir: Warriors Don't Cry

Citation:

            Beals, Melba P. Warriors Don't Cry. Old Saybrook: Tantor eBooks, 2011. eBook.

Annotation:

This book is a memoir by Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the nine black students sent to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.  She spent her entire junior year in high school facing insults and brutal physical attacks simply because of her race.

Justification for Nomination:  

This book is organized in the order in which it happens.  The author starts out by describing some of the racist things that happened to her as a child to set the tone for the book.  After Melba discusses her childhood she talks about how and why she signed up to be an integrator at Central High School.  The book ends by discussing how they ended up not being able to attend school the next year because the governor had all schools in Little Rock closed down to prevent the black students from attending another year.

The author claims that this book is very accurate.  She mentioned that she changed some people’s names to protect their identities and conversations have been re-created.  The information from the book comes from the diary entries that she wrote at the time, her and her family’s memories, and news clippings.  So it appears that the author has to the best of her ability made this book as accurate as possible for first being published thirty six years after the event. 

Melba does a really nice job backing up the events of the book with relevant news paper headlines.  With the headlines she gives the paper it was from and the date of the headline.  Another primary source that she uses are direct passages of her diary, that was written at the time of the events. 

This story has a lot of depth to it, because of the intricate details of events in the book.  The narrator’s voice in the book worked very well and was especially good at expressing the feelings and emotions that the events created.  Readability was very easy for this book, especially because Melba tried to write the book from the perspective of her 15 year old self. 

This book has a high appeal for young adult readers because it can inspire them to make it through very difficult social situations.  Melba was so mistreated by her classmates that for most of the school year she had an armed guard from the military following her to keep her from being killed by other students.  These situations can inspire students to get through their awkward social situations.  Another way this book can be appealing to the young adult readers is that it can help create empathy toward people from minority groups. 

Genre:

Memoir / Civil Rights