Warriors Don't Cry

1544 Words7 Pages
The book Warriors Don’t Cry and Melba Pattillo Beals is extremely relevant and represents the history of the traumatic physical and emotional situations that Negros had to go through. The reasons why they are relevant is because it is Melba who represent all Negros and the time the book, Warriors Don’t Cry, took place. As well something occurred to cause the integration to begin in the first place to make this young adolescents go through what she did. But it is understandable, not reasonable, why the white students of Little Rock’s Central High School reacted the way they had. Melba Pattillo was born on December 7, 1941, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Beals grew up surrounded by family members who knew the importance of an education. Her mother, Lois Marie Pattillo, PhD, was one of the first black graduates of the University Of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1954 and was a high school English teacher at the time of the crisis. Her father, Howell Pattillo, worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. She had one brother, Conrad, who served as a U.S. marshal in Little Rock, and they all lived with her grandmother, India Peyton. When the Brown Vs. Board Education passed she was nearly raped by a white man but saved by one of her classmates. In 1958, the NAACP awarded the Spingarn Medal to Beals and to the other members of the Little Rock Nine, together with civil rights leader Daisy Bates, who had advised the group during their struggles at Central High. In 1999, she and the rest of the Nine were awarded the highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal. Only three hundred others have received this. The reason why integration occurred is because of the case called Brown vs. Board of Education. Brown vs. board was when a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary

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