To begin with, Melba Pattillo Beals is highly educated. "The love of George and Carol McCabe helped to heal my wounds and inspired me to launch a new life for myself. It was also their voices echoing the same words of my mother that made me enter and complete college." (308) With a Bachelor's degree from San Francisco State University while writing for a major newspaper since age seventeen, Beals has also earned her Masters degree in journalism from Columbia University as well as her Doctoral degree in education from the University of San Francisco. Beals has written two books based on her personal experience in integration, one being Warrior's Don't Cry and the other entitled White is a State of Mind. She has been awarded the Spingarn Medal and been only one of just over three hundred people to receive the Congressional Gold Medal. Beals has also worked as an NBC news reporter and taught journalism at Dominican University of California. Along with being very accomplished outside of writing, in this novel Beals uses the rhetorical appeal of logos to prove to the reader that she is indeed credible and that the story that she is portraying is extremely factual and accurate. Living within the confines of segregation and then being one of the few to support and act on inegration makes Beals an excellent and credible source for this subject. Because she was denied of an equal education for so many years, her desire for higher education and college degrees rose with every year that she attended school. For someone who was excluded from having resources like current textbooks, learning facilities, extracurricular activities and so much more because of the color of her skin, to have overcome all of those obstacles and defy all odds by becoming a news reporter for NBC, one of the most prestigious news networks of all time says that her warrior mentality stretched past Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. "Yet even as I wince at the terrible risk we all took, I remember thinking at the time that it was the right decision-because it felt as though the hand of fate was ushering us forward." (309)