Summary Of Melba Patillo Beals 'Warriors Don' T Cry

In Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Patillo Beals, the character Link fascinated me. In a time of bigotry and segregation, Link steps out of the status quo to help Melba, a black student at Central High. Throughout the last fifth of the novel he cautions Melba as to what will happen to her throughout the day and tells her how she can avoid these issues. “My dad makes me go to those meetings-where they plan what to do to get ya’ll kicked out of school,” Link explains on page 263 how he is prescient about segregationists action. Although he was raised by a family who did not support the racial integration, he acted on behalf of the integrating students. A fraction of his motivation was that his black nanny - Nana Healey - who he had known for all
of his life was abandoned by his parents because of a fatal illness she contracted. “My folks let her go, just like that, after all the time she’d been so good to us. She’s got no money for a doctor,” Link describes his situation with Nana Healey and his family on page 280. Defying his parents’ decision to unemploy his nanny, Link visits her and cares for her. He notices how unfair his parents have been to her because of her race. These are two ways that he disobeys what he has been taught, and it reactivates the ongoing question: “Do humans act by nature, or by nurture?” This quality of independence, righteousness, and humanity impressed me, because Link was raised by the notion that races were not equal, yet he stepped out of the boundaries of his brain to explore what he really thought about the world and what was humane. That quality intrigues me not only on the topic of civil rights, but on the level of any topic. I aspire to act more in that lifestyle, learning not only about what I know, but also about things that I have never thought about, stepping out of the limits of my mind to question what I already think is true, and remembering that what I am taught is not always fixed fact but an open opinion.