Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High by Melba Pattillo Beals; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Lisa Reneé Pitts

Drawn from personal diaries, Warriors Don't Cry is the riveting true story of Melba Beals's experience as one of the first nine black teenagers chosen to integrate the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, brought the promise of integration to Little Rock, Arkansas, but it was hard-won for the nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Central High School in 1957. They ran a gauntlet flanked by a rampaging mob and a heavily armed Arkansas National Guard-opposition so intense that soldiers from the elite 101st Airborne Division were called in to restore order. For Melba Beals and her eight friends those steps marked their transformation into reluctant warriors-on a battlefield that helped shape the civil rights movement.

Warriors Don't Cry, drawn from Melba Beals's personal diaries, is a riveting true account of her junior year at Central High-one filled with telephone threats, brigades of attacking mothers, rogue police, fireball and acid-throwing attacks, economic blackmail, and, finally, a price upon Melba's head. With the help of her English-teacher mother; her eight fellow warriors; and her gun-toting, Bible-and-Shakespeare-loving grandmother, Melba survived. And, incredibly, from a year that would hold no sweet-sixteen parties or school plays, Melba Beals emerged with indestructible faith, courage, strength, and hope.

"Beals, one of the nine black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, AR, in 1957, tells an incredible story of faith, family love, friendships, and strong personal commitment." —School Library Journal

"Pitts [brings] passion to the story and makes us feel the immediacy of Beals’s experience." —AudioFile

"Beals looks back on her Little Rock experiences as 'ultimately a positive force' that shaped her life." —Publishers Weekly

"A profoundly uplifting---and also a profoundly depressing---account of the integration of Central High in Little Rock." —Kirkus

Melba Patillo Beals earned a bachelor's degree from San Franciso State University and a graduate degree from Columbia University and worked as a reporter for NBC. Warriors Don't Cry was an ALA Notable Book for 1995 and won the 1995 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.

Lisa Reneé Pitts is an award-winning actress in theater, television, and film, as well as an accomplished audiobook narrator. She has been seen Off-Broadway, in Europe, and in regional theaters across the United States, performing leading roles in such prominent plays as A Raisin in the Sun, Doubt, Waiting for Lefty, Valley Song, and Our Town. Her television appearances include The Shield and Law and Order, and she played the recurring role of Allison Sawyer on the hit family drama Lincoln Heights for the ABC Family Channel.

Lisa's audiobook titles include biographies, fiction, nonfiction and children's novels, including Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall, for which she won an AudioFile Earphones Award for excellence in narration. Other notable titles are Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza, Better Than I Know Myself by Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, and My Name Is Not Angelica by Scott O'Dell. Lisa is a graduate of Rutgers University, where she received her B.F.A. in Theater Arts. She lives in Burbank, California.