Teaching \"Warriors Don't Cry\" with Other Text Types to Enhance Comprehension

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61English Journal Vol. 95, No. 3 January 2006

eaching students to take a critical-literacy perspective is imperative.Such a perspective enables studentsto look at issues of social justice

through a new lens, and it allows them to reexam-ine the lives of others as well as their own (Vasquez1). Segregation, integration, Brown v. Board of Edu-cation, and the Equal Rights Amendment are a fewof many political and social landmarks that havepromoted change and influenced what happens inthe lives of families, children, and educators.

Believing in the importance of teaching forsocial justice and the necessity of providing multi-ple perspectives through multiple types of texts, wedesigned a unit for seventh-grade students. At thecenter was Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir ofthe Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, toldfrom the perspective of Melba Pattillo Beals. Thestory sends a powerful message about what it meansto fight opposition for the greater good and for thefuture of Americans who must live and worktogether. As the philosophy goes, schools are thegreat equalizer for all people, but Warriors Don’t Cryteaches its readers that not all people would haveblack students treated as equals—even when theUS Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier that“separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional.

Fenice remembers the role she played in inte-grating John Graham Senior High School over thirtyyears ago. It was not uncommon for her white peersto refer to black students by using the N-word ratherthan learning their names. During the fight for equal

opportunities under the law, schools were effectivelyclosed for two to three months at a time to preventprocess and progress for school integration. WarriorsDon’t Cry brought back memo-ries of the struggles Feniceencountered while trying to bea student leader and to provehow academically capable shewas in her new school afterhaving demonstrated her aca-demic and leadership abilitiesat her all-black school. Unlikein Beals’s story, the National Guard was not sent toFenice’s school to prevent black students from enter-ing. Black students outnumbered the white studentsat John Graham Senior High School 3 to 1. Yet, thestruggles black students faced were still prominent,and resistance to school integration by white studentsand their families was strong. Like Beals, Fenice drewher strength from her grandmother, mother, and themany supportive people in the community whowanted the young black students to succeed andachieve access to an equal education under the law.

Deborah decided to teach Warriors Don’t Crybecause she was looking for a new autobiography toteach. Her first consideration in using the text inher classroom was that the book grabbed her heartand mind. The story is powerful—Deborah literallyfeared for Beals’s safety and wanted to know howshe survived her year—and the book helped herunderstand what life under segregation must havefelt like more than any other book she had read or

Fenice B. Boyd and Deborah Regan Howe describe a unit for seventh-grade students on desegrega-tion of public schools. Showcasing different perspectives through multiple texts and text types, suchas film and photographs, added credibility to the lessons and allowed students to understand eventsthat were distant from their experience.

Fenice B. Boyd and Deborah Regan Howe

Teaching Warriors Don’t Crywith Other Text Types to Enhance Comprehension

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Moreover, the study of

Warriors Don’t Cry with

other text types promoted

students’ critical literacy

and understanding about

social-justice issues from

multiple perspectives.

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Copyright © 2006 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

taught, including Richard Wright’s Black Boy andHarper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Deborahstrongly identified with Beals, whose mother was ateacher who wanted her to do well in school andhave friends, and yet Beals was treated in ways thatDeborah had never been treated.

Deborah also loved the values the bookemphasized—that your strength and sense of selfcome from the inside and not from what othersthink of you. Beals’s situation was extreme becauseher mother and grandmother had to help herbelieve that she was beautiful, smart, and a goodperson despite the racist world’s labeling her differ-ently. As teachers, we know that every child strug-gles in his or her own way to find self-worth.

Our background experiences as former highschool students and as educators are different, but ourrationale and reasons for working together using War-

riors Don’t Cry are similar. Fenicelived—to some degree—whatBeals lived, while Deborah livedthe experience through Beals’smemoir. Armed with experien-tial and background knowl-edge, our work together isintended to help readers see

how using multiple text types (e.g., print, film, pho-tographs) in classrooms can enhance students’ com-prehension skills. Moreover, the study of WarriorsDon’t Cry with other text types promoted students’critical literacy and understanding about social-justice issues from multiple perspectives. Deborah’sschool librarian, who took a young adult literaturecourse with Fenice at the university, introducedFenice and Deborah. In the past, Deborah had usedfilm to enhance her instruction of Warriors Don’t Cry,and Fenice was looking for a teacher to conduct aresearch project on literature and film adaptations.We worked collaboratively to develop ideas and activ-ities that would enrich students’ thinking about theways that segregation affected education during thecivil rights movement.

Literacy Learning and Comprehension

Teaching students comprehension strategies is andalways will be critically important for their overallliteracy education. The seventh-grade students inDeborah’s class had a range of reading-ability lev-

els, but no students were reading below grade level.Most of their school reading experiences had cen-tered on more-traditional texts such as novels, shortstories, and textbooks. The challenge for teachingreading comprehension in the twenty-first centuryis heightened because all students are expected toread many different types of text that are morecomplicated and that have a wide variety of contentand information (e.g., video games, hypertext, film,and material on the Internet).

Electronic and media texts introduce some com-plications in comprehension because they require skillsand abilities beyond those required for comprehensionof conventional print. Comprehension of electronic andmedia texts requires readers to have knowledge aboutsymbolic representations, for instance, and when ado-lescents are engaged in conversations about popularelectronic media, their readings of such texts ofteninvolve sophisticated interpretive and analytical skills(Williams 551). In viewing a movie for interpretativeas well as entertainment purposes, the viewer must beable to understand the lighting and camera angles tomake reasonable interpretations about the messages adirector is sending about a scene or situation. In printtext, authors use metaphors, imagery, and other sym-bolic meanings in language to challenge readers todelve into deeper understandings. Thus, comprehend-ing while one reads is a complex interactive processthat requires readers to perform multiple tasks simul-taneously. Reading any type of text entails much morethan decoding words, and comprehending multipletext types requires teachers to teach students that whilereading widely, they must also read interactively andcritically.

Using Multiple Text Types for Multiple Purposes

Deborah had clear and specific criteria that met thegoals of the curriculum and the needs and interestsof her seventh graders. Putting on her pragmatist’shat, Deborah found a book with a strong femalecharacter in a situation that required determina-tion, strength, and even spylike tactics that wouldappeal to both boys and girls. Warriors Don’t Cry iswell written, with ample examples of literary ele-ments, including internal and external conflict,point of view, and a strong theme of self-worth.Warriors Don’t Cry contains the repeated metaphoric

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Teaching Warriors Don’t Cry with Other Text Types to Enhance Comprehension

With a photograph,

adolescents can literally

place a finger on each

character’s face and shift

the point of view while

critiquing the picture.


63English Journal


FIGURE 1. Curriculum Materials

Text Type Title Synopsis Purpose

Main Warriors Don’t A searing memoir written from the Used as an instructional tool to show Book Cry: A Searing perspective of one of the Little Rock hostile and violent incidents in the

Memoir of the Nine and centered on the integration hallways and classrooms, which went Battle to Integrate of Central High School virtually unreported by other media. Little Rock’s Also, the memoir shows the complex Central High roles that all the people involved play

in integrating the school.

Supplementary Leon’s Story An oral history of a sharecropping In a clear voice, the author shares the Books family in the Jim Crow South horror of segregation and answers

questions of why it was hard to fight it.

Gandhi A picture book about Gandhi’s life Used to introduce Gandhi’s life and the philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance

The Century for A children’s version of the popular Contains interviews of some people Young People book of photographs involved in resistance to Central High

School’s integration

A Life Is More Photographs of Central High in 1957 Offers varying points of view about Than a Moment: and 1997 taken by a white student the 1950s and shows how views The Desegregation who attended Central High School have changed (or not) over timeof Little Rock’s Central High

Documentary Eyes on the Prize Award-winning documentary about Used to show real-time footage of the civil rights movement the mob and hear the Little Rock

protagonists telling stories

Docudrama Crisis at Central Based on the journal of the white Told from the perspective of a white High girls’ dean Elizabeth Huckaby adult in the school, the movie makes

students aware that perceptions can differ. The docudrama shows actual footage shot at Central High School so that students understand the size and scope of the building.

Photographs Water Fountains Demonstrates that separate is not Still photographs “freeze” a historical in the 1950s equal moment so it can be closely

examined and critiqued.

Beals’s Family Depicts an average African American and Friends family with friends

Elizabeth Eckford Shows Elizabeth Eckford walking and Hazel Bryan stalwartly toward school followed by

Hazel Bryan and a mob of angry white adults

Encyclopedia “Plessy v. Describes Plessy’s arrest and the Makes clear how Plessy and others Articles Ferguson” court case deliberately planned for his arrest so

that he would have the opportunity to question the law’s constitutionality

“Brown v. Board Describes Linda Brown’s school and Helps students see that when people of Education, the court case challenge a law, they benefit many Topeka” citizens more than they benefit

themselves


language of the warrior. In addition, Deborah usedthe book to examine the crucial issue of school desegre-gation in US history. Beals was a fifteen-year-old girlwho jeopardized her safety and perhaps even her life tomake school integration a reality.

Even though the memoir is well written, it leftDeborah’s students with many questions. Given thatthese students live in a different time, they could notunderstand how adults could be so verbally andphysically abusive to teenagers or witness othersabusing teenagers without any consequences. Theywere bewildered by the behavior of the white segre-gationists in Little Rock in 1957. If Deborah hadused only Warriors Don’t Cry, the seventh gradersmight not have believed what they read. Using othertext types for the study of Little Rock’s school inte-gration allowed the students to explore the perspec-tives and memories of others who weren’t the focus ofthe memoir to see what else was going on during thesame event. Figure 1 shows the multiple text typesused with the study of Warriors Don’t Cry.

“Reading” Multiple Text Types

Teaching students to read multiple text types givesthem multiple representations and perspectivesabout events and issues. To read multiple textsallows students to make judgments and criticallythink about texts studied. During instruction,where were the dilemmas and struggles for stu-dents’ comprehension and how did several textsenhance their understandings?

Teaching Students to “Read” a Photograph,Memoir, and Nonfiction

One of Deborah’s lessons centered on the famousphotograph of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan,reprinted in Warriors Don’t Cry, The Century for YoungPeople (Jennings and Brewster), and A Life Is MoreThan a Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock’s Cen-tral High (Counts). The seventh graders had readabout Beals’s first attempt to attend Central High.Community and NAACP leaders wanted the stu-dents to meet and enter the school in a group, butEckford did not have a telephone and was notinformed of their plan. She caught the city bus toCentral High School alone. Beals is not in the photo-graph but is both a participant in and a witness tothe events. From far away, Beals saw a mob surround-

ing Eckford, but she couldn’t get near her. Beals andher mother had to run from a mob and return home,and her mother instructed her never to tell anyonefor fear that revealing the danger they faced wouldput the entire movement at risk. Therefore, until thememoir was written, no one knew that Beals and hermother feared for their lives.

During the lesson, Deborah and her students“zoomed in” on the quintessential, classic, andmost notorious photograph of the first day of theLittle Rock Nine’s attempt to enter Central HighSchool (see fig. 2). The students described the layersof people in the photograph. In the foreground isEckford with no expression as she wears her sun-glasses and walks toward the school. The next rowof people is a group of angry mothers, with theirarms linked, and screaming students heckling Eck-ford. Farther back there is a wall of soldiers keepingthe Little Rock Nine away from the school.

Deborah required her students to use a photoanalysis think sheet (see fig. 3) as an instructionaltool to help them acquire skills in reading and ana-lyzing this infamous photograph. She asked thestudents to move through various phases of theiranalysis of the photograph to push their thinkingbeyond the literal. In her scaffolding of the pictureof Eckford and Bryan, she encouraged the seventhgraders to raise questions and wonder about thingsthat cannot be answered in the photograph. Somedilemmas students raised about the photographincluded the following: (a) white people were look-ing disgusted; (b) protestors were physically closetogether; (c) there were only women in the front of

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FIGURE 2. Hecklers followed Elizabeth Eckford as she walkedin front of Central High. Arkansas Democrat photo by WillCounts, Sept. 1957.


the photo; (d) Eckford is holding her books close toher body; (e) the people in the mob have theirmouths open; and (f) even the soldiers look likethey are mad at Eckford.

Since the photograph alone could not helpthe seventh graders answer their questions anddilemmas, multiple text types offered possibleanswers. Using excerpts from The Century for YoungPeople (Jennings and Brewster 156) and A Life IsMore Than a Moment (Counts 34–39; 41–44)allowed students to read what Eckford and two ofthe screaming white students, Anne Thompsonand Hazel Bryan, remembered along with Beals.Collectively, multiple text types allowed theteacher and students to slow down and closelyexamine different texts to engage in critical read-ings and interpretations. Deborah and her studentszoomed in and took a critical look at the informa-tion each text presented.

What do different textual features contributeto students’ critical understandings about a politi-cal and social event such as the integration of LittleRock’s Central High School? In a verbal text, find-ing the point of view can seem abstract. With aphotograph, adolescents can literally place a fingeron each character’s face and shift the point of viewwhile critiquing the picture. They can take a stancefrom which they can understand the motivations ofa person.

The photograph does not reveal how the peo-ple in it really feel about the situation. Students canonly read features of a person’s body language (e.g.,angry-looking faces). By reading excerpts frominterviews forty years later, students can see boththe similarities and differences in the memories.For Eckford the mob was frightening. Thompsondescribed the mob in terms of “excitement,” “elec-

tricity and tension,” and a “circus like atmospherearound the school” (Jennings and Brewster 156).Eckford and Thompson agree that there was a mob,but the mob had a different connotation for each ofthem. When students were then asked to writeabout point of view, they understood that while thefacts were the same, the perception and feelingschanged dramatically.

Teaching Students to “Read” a Memoir and a Movie

In a more complicated lesson, students learned howthe facts change with the narrator as they comparedthe depictions of a confrontation that takes place inthe cafeteria where another member of the LittleRock Nine, Minnijean Brown, dumps a bowl ofchili in retaliation for months of abuse.

Deborah: Today we are going to watch clipsfrom the video Eyes on the Prize. . . . We aregoing to be seeing three different clips inthis video, all of which I thought wereimportant. The first clip is kind of unreal. Itis kind of like the typical morning in theMelba Pattillo household. . . . So you have toremember we are probably seeing thecleaned-up version. But I want you to seethis because one of the things Melba keepstelling us is they were getting constantattention from the media. And whathappened every time they were highlightedin this fashion?

Student: They would become the target thenext day.

Deborah: And then finally we are going tohear Ernest and Melba talk about Minnijeanand the chili. The video is going to tell yousomething you haven’t read yet so I am going

65English Journal


FIGURE 3. Photo Analysis Think Sheet

Observation: Describe exactly what you see in the photograph so that someone who has not seen the photo can vi-sualize it. What people and objects do you see? How are they arranged? What other details do you see?

Knowledge: Summarize what you already know about the situation and time period shown. State what you knowabout the people and objects that appear.

Interpretation: What is happening in this picture? What can you conclude about this event or time period?

Additional Questions: What is missing in this photograph? What would you like to see? What would you like tohear?


to go ahead and tell you. Minnijean is expelledfrom the school on February 18. There is noother storyline we are really told. Basicallythese kids are told all along that they are sup-posed to be on their best behavior and theywere not allowed to retaliate and after the sus-pension she was told she must never fightback. And basically there were people thatwere dropping soup on her every day and shecouldn’t take it. And we are not even told whatwords she used or what she did but she wasexpelled.

Student: Wait, wait, wait. In the reading itsaid that somebody put soup on her and theywere suspended.

Deborah: Right. A lot of the white kids weresuspended, but of course most of them didget away with stuff. She was expelled amonth after this happened.

Student: I thought she spilled soup in thekid’s face.

Deborah: There were regular soup eventsafter the chili event as retaliation.

Student: Oh!

Deborah: After she dumped chili on themthere were regular soup dumpings andharassment she is targeted for.

Student: Wasn’t it like an accident though,because she was trying to get through [passby white students]?

Deborah: Well, let’s watch the video thenbecause that’s not what they say onvideotape.

After Deborah stopped the video, a discussionensued about how the movie and the memoir repre-sented the “chili incident” differently. Deborahpointed out that Brown does not speak for herself inthe video, Eyes on the Prize, but Ernest Green,another member of the Little Rock Nine, and Bealsnote that Brown was constantly harassed. “We neverget to hear from Brown. I don’t have any interviewswith her,” noted Deborah, but “If I sat behind youin class and just kept doing this, eventually you willthrow your book at me, right? I mean eventuallyyou are going to lose it. So what else is going on?Beals made it sound like there were some otherdeliberate thoughts going on in her head.”

Deborah posed an important question to herstudents: “Why didn’t she [Brown] just go homeand say, ‘Mom, I don’t want to go to school any-more’?” Students responded by stating that forBrown to quit would be a victory for the segrega-tionists. Students also noted that if Brown gave up,perhaps that would be motivation for the rest of theLittle Rock Nine to quit as well, and their missionwould be lost. But if the nine students stayed andcontinued to fight, they would make a difference.Not only that, but other schools would begin tointegrate as well.

The three text types used to probe the sceneabout Brown and the chili were Warriors Don’t Cry;a clip from the documentary Eyes on the Prize; and adocudrama titled Crisis at Central High, based onthe journal of Elizabeth Huckaby, the Dean of Girlsand an English teacher at Central High in 1957. Inthe memoir, Beals does not relay the extent ofBrown’s frustration and harassment. One textshows one truth, and a different text shows a differ-ent truth. The emotions influence how events areperceived and remembered.

These examples validate the significance ofasking questions, posing dilemmas, and wonderingabout what is not in a text. It is important to teachmiddle school students that asking questions is notan admission that they don’t “get it” but rather apowerful way of reading texts. When students reada text and don’t ask questions, they may not bereading critically.

Conclusions

In reading multiple text types, students learnedabout the complexity involved in integrating onehigh school during the civil rights era after Brown v.Board of Education. They also learned several keypoints about people different from them. We listthem below:

> Many African American parents had thesame desires for their children as their whiteAmerican counterparts: to live and learn in asafe environment.

> Some African Americans wanted theirchildren to have access to an equaleducational opportunity even though therewas resistance among families in the blackcommunity, for fear of consequences.

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> The world has not always been the way thatit is today.

Students usually reveal that they never knewsegregation and racism were as bad as they arerevealed to be in Warriors Don’t Cry. Little Rock isonly a few lines and a photograph in the history text-book used by these seventh graders. Textbooks sur-vey a long span of history, so there is breadth but nodepth of information. Warriors Don’t Cry, along withother texts, gives students depth about one politicaland social event. Deborah has found that more thanany other, this is a book that her seventh-grade stu-dents talk about with their parents. They ask theirparents questions about their schooling experiences,and the parents often read the book, too.

What is most striking are the seventh graders’personal responses to Beals and her experience. Stu-dents always feel Beals is one of the bravest peoplethey have ever read about. Adolescents (and all read-ers) tend to fantasize when they read. If they are read-ing about a shipwreck, they can imagine that in thatsituation, they would be brave, too. Being bullied orteased is not something they have to imagine; most

middle school students have experienced it, albeit notto the degree of the Little Rock Nine. When they hearabout daily, aggressive harassment and physical abusegoing unchecked in school, and when they can visual-ize aspects of that harassment from a film, they knowhow difficult it would be to take it and not retaliate.Each year at least one student, via journal writing,essays, or even the final exam, reveals and discussesissues with bullying that he or she has not sharedbefore. This is one way that students make connec-tions to the experiences of the Little Rock Nine.

The culminating activity that Deborahrequired her seventh-grade students to completewas to make connections to the experiences of theLittle Rock Nine by sharing different types of textsthat would lend support to multiple perspectives ofan event or issue (see fig. 4). The seventh gradersselected movie clips, hip-hop, a classical book,another school integration story, and personal strug-gles (e.g., teasing) to make connections to issuesstudied in Warriors Don’t Cry. Their final presenta-tions and artifacts conveyed critical perspectivesabout obstacles faced when attempting to win thebattles of social justice.

67English Journal


FIGURE 4. Students’ Self-Selected Text Connections

Students Text Type Themes

Mo Movies MoviesTrica • Remember the Titans (2000) • integrating a high school football team

• The Jackie Robinson Story (1974) • integrating major league baseball teams• Save the Last Dance (2001) • interracial dating

Channel Hip-Hop Hip-HopAmanda • “I Can” by Nas • perseverance and achievementsJamal • “Changes” by Tupac • reality of being black and male in the United States

•“Safe and Sound” by DJ Quik

Tyrone Book Book• The Catcher in the Rye • Holden [main character] was isolated and alienated and

suffered emotionally

Matthew Newspaper Article Newspaper article• Harvey B. Gant • first black student to attend Clemson University

• first black to be elected mayor in Charlotte, North Carolina

Jack Personal Stories Personal Stories Lindsey • bullying on hockey team • suburban “outsider” on urban hockey team

• teasing in middle school • exclusion from the “cool girls club”

Alexis US and International News Events US and International News Events• September 11, 2001 • racism and United States against Muslims

• Israel and Palestine• Holocaust


Works Cited

Beals, Melba Pattillo. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoirof the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. NewYork: Pocket, 1994.

Counts, Will. A Life Is More Than a Moment: The Desegrega-tion of Little Rock’s Central High. Bloomington: Indi-ana UP, 1999.

Crisis at Central High. Dir. Lamont Johnson. HBO, 1981.Demi. Gandhi. New York: Simon, 2001.Eyes on the Prize. Dir. Henry Hampton. PBS, 1987.Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster. The Century for Young

People. New York: Doubleday, 1999.Pressley, Michael. “Metacognition and Self-Regulated

Comprehension.” What Research Has to Say aboutReading Instruction. Ed. Alan E. Farstrup and S. JaySamuels. 3rd ed. Newark: IRA, 2002. 291–309.

Tillage, Leon Walter. Leon’s Story. New York: Farrar, 1997.Vasquez, Vivian Maria. Negotiating Critical Literacies with

Young Children. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2004.Williams, Bronwyn T. “What They See Is What We Get:

Television and Middle School Writers.” Journal ofAdolescent and Adult Literacy 46.7 (2003): 546–54.

68 January 2006


Fenice B. Boyd is assistant professor of literacy educationin the Department of Learning and Instruction at the Uni-versity at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research centers on adoles-cents who struggle with literacy learning and schooling,students’ responses to young adult and multicultural litera-ture, issues of diversity and, most recently, using multipletext types to enhance comprehension strategies. email:[email protected]. Deborah Regan Howe has taughtmiddle school English at Nichols School in Buffalo, NewYork, for fifteen years. Although an avid reader of youngadult literature, she also seeks literature that was not origi-nally written for middle school students but that is appropri-ate and engaging. email: [email protected].


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Teaching \"Warriors Don't Cry\" with Other Text Types to Enhance Comprehension