The Shifting of Power Through Resistance
Melba’s year at Central High School centers around maturation, race
relations, and challenging the power dynamic in the United States. In the
segregated South, white people had power and black people did not. The small
act of defiance of nine black children entering an all-white school took on
such significance because it threatened to change the way white
segregationists wielded their power. With this and many other acts,
integrationists such as Melba showed that the power of the white
segregationists was a fragile illusion. Melba’s story makes clear that the
power of whites lie, to some extent, in the consent of the black people.
Once blacks—even just a few of them—stopped consenting, the power structure
began to fail.
Grandma India teaches Melba about passive resistance. Melba learns to
smile and meet every outrageous abuse with a polite “thank you.” For Grandma
India, power lies not in displays of physical strength or firepower, but in
inner strength and faith. The mobs of white people who rely on numbers to
overwhelm a tiny black teenager are only showing that they don’t have the
power they say they do. Grandma India tells Melba she is only a victim if
she lets herself be one. Melba learns that nobody has any power to hurt her
unless she gives it to them. This simple act of refusing to be afraid when
people threaten her changes not just the way Melba sees herself but also the
way other people see her.
The Prominence of Race Relations
People’s perceptions of race cloud the way they behave throughout
Warriors Don’t Cry. Melba is born into a segregated
society, in which black people lack the basic rights afforded to white
people. In Melba’s narrative, this is a system more or less acknowledged by
both white and black people. And though the black people suffer much more in
the system, they also help to enforce it out of fear of retribution from the
white people. The white people are afraid that the black people will rise up
and take over their lives, and the black people are afraid of being punished
by the white people for rising up. This mutual fear often turns into
mistrust and hatred. Even those within the white community who try to reach
out to blacks are called traitors and are threatened with violence.
Though Melba has a valid reason to mistrust many white people
throughout the course of the book, she learns that people can make decisions
based more on honor, trust, and love than race. Link, the white boy whose
love for his nanny humanizes black people for him, proves to Melba that she
can trust some white people. The two white people who save Elizabeth Eckford
from the white mob and the Quaker family that takes her in after she leaves
Arkansas are other trustworthy whites. Eventually, she falls in love with
John, the white soldier who woos her in college. Outside of the tangle of
racial conflict set up by the history in Little Rock, Melba can learn to
relate to people as people rather than as members of a race.
