Warriors Don't Cry

THREE years after the landmark 1954 supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregation in public schools, a violent mob of Whites noted to stop nine Black teenagers from integrating Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

One of those nine courageous students, Melba Pattillo Beals, has written a first-person account of that tumultuous school year that changed American history in Warriors Don't Cry (Pocket Books, $22).

In her moving memoir, Beals recalls how, on the first day of school, the Little Rock Nine were trapped between the Arkansas National Guard blocking the entrance to the school building and an angry lynch mob of White residents who swarmed about them. The students were only allowed admittance after President Eisenhower sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to escort them to and from their classes.

Throughout the school year, Beals and the other Black students were subjected to mental and physical abuse by White student segregationists. She writes of the difficulty of trying to live a normal teenager's life under the constant threat of death and in the glare of the international media spotlight. Her book reveals that the battle for integration in Little Rock was fought on two fronts: in the courts and in the lives of these brave young adults.