Melba is the author and main character of Warrior’s Don’t Cry. During the heart of the narrative, the record of happenings in 1957-58, Melba is an idealistic Black teenager who chooses to be part of the group of nine Black students to integrate previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. Her memoir records the turbulent events surrounding Melba’s birth and her continuing education and marriage after her integral role as one of the Little Rock Nine. Melba adds an Epilogue, written in 1987, 30 years after the drama, and a 2007 Update, penned 50 years after integrating Central High.

Melba portrays herself as an inquisitive child with a keen sense of fairness and the recognition from her earliest years that Black Little Rock citizens experience prejudice and injustice. She feels a continued, palpable anxiety that she describes as a perpetual white person’s boot holding down the head of the Black person. She writes to God about this in her diary, asking when Black people will gain equality. A vacation to Cincinnati just before the 1957-58 school year reveals to Melba what living in an integrated community is like, showing her that equality among racial groups is possible.