Melba Beals

Melba Beals Best Sellers

White is a state of Mind... Freedom is Yours to Choose

Berkley Trade - January 10, 2000

This is a sequel to Beals' award winning WARRIORS DON'T CRY, which garnered critical acclaim and The Robert F. Kennedy Award, American Library Association and American Booksellers Awards.

Caught up in the exploding southern battle over school integration, a sixteen-year-old Melba Pattillo fled from the violence of Little Rock Arkansas' segregationist mobs into the protective arms of a white, California family. That family's loving compassion helped to turn Melba's fear and animosity into forgiveness and opened her heart to the white man she would eventually marry.

In the powerful coming of age saga, WHITE IS A STATE OF MIND, Melba Pattillo Beals chronicles that part of her journey following her Central High experience. That time, was to include still more life-changing events that would turn her fear into self confidence. Her time spent in the home of Dr. and Mrs George McCabe, a quaker family with four children, would be a surprise -- a blessing she now calls it.

"At first I was frightened to death. Their physical appearance wasn't much different from the members of the segregationist mobs that stalked me or the Central High school students that bombarded me with abuse. How could I know then that it would be white angels like these people who would help to mend my spirit and show me that neither love nor hate has a color.

How could I imagine that I would relish looking into the eyes of white parents, calling them mom and dad and cherishing their hugs and conversations. As I forged my way into adulthood, I would come to understand that it was my time with these incredible people that would most enable me to SEE and BE equal.

Warriors don't Cry (Best Seller)

Simon Pulse, 2007

In 1957, while most teenage girls were listening to Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue," watching Elvis gyrate and collecting crinoline slips, a 15-year-old Melba Pattillo was escaping the hanging rope of a lynch mob, dodging lighted sticks of dynamite, and washing away burning acid sprayed into her eyes by segregationists determined to prevent her from integrating Little Rock's Central High School. As a teenager, she was caught up in the center of a civil rights firestorm which stunned this nation and altered the course of history.

WARRIORS DON'T CRY, chronicles her experience as a civil rights heroine. It is a snapshot of a Black family in the south living under a system of apartheid during the 1950s. Facing the oppression which would engulf them, they struggled, holding onto their dignity against overwhelming odds.

Among the rave reviews accorded WARRIORS DON'T CRY:

"Riveting monumentally important a rare and eloquent behind-the-scenes look at the 1957 integration of Central High."

The San Francisco Chronicle

"There is no putting WARRIORS DON'T CRY down... in a plainly written story that reflects both the wisdom of the woman telling it almost 40 years after the fact and the crumbling innocence of the young woman who experienced it, Melba Beals gives us a history lesson, a civics lesson and as true a story of coming of age in America at a certain time and place as one could hope to find."

Judith Paterson of the Washington Post

"Vivid and moving."

Keith Dixon of The New York Times

Melcon Communications
P.O. Box 2237
Sausalito, CA 94966
Phone: (415) 464-0718
Fax: (415) 464-0781