Many recent releases celebrate words and deeds of African-American heroes and heroines. Each offers wise words and strong examples to emulate.
Donna Jo Napoli introduces children to Kenyan Wangari Maathai in Mama Miti (Simon and Schuster, ages 6 and up). The Nobel winning woman grew up hearing stories about how the fig tree nurtured her people in the highlands of Africa. Succeeding pages show how Wangari spreads the idea of planting nourishing trees to those who suffer in other regions. Kadir Nelson’s artwork features patches of pattern as bright as Wangari’s advice, visually representing how she “ changed a country, tree by tree” and became Mama Miti, the mother of trees, a woman “who taught her people the ancient wisdom of peace with nature”.
Phil Bildner, The Hallelujah Flight (the story of aviator James Banning) (Putnam)
Ann Ingals & Maryann Macdonald, The Little Piano Girl: The Story of Mary Lou Williams Jazz Legend (Houghton)
W.D. Myers, Muhammad Ali: The People’s Champion (HarperCollins)
Andrea & Brian Pinkney, Sojouner Truth’s Step-Stomp Stride (Jump at the Sun)
Sharon Robinson, Testing the Ice: A True Story About Jackie Robinson (Scholastic)
Matt Tavares, Henry Aaron’s Dream (Candlewick Press)
Difficult times call for wise and consoling advice as shown in books below that describe darker times in African-American history.
Andrea Pinkney uses an inspiring quotation to open her vibrant Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down (Little Brown, ages 6-10). “These were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words that got them started, ‘We must…meet hate with love’.” Pinkney’s referring to four students that integrated the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. She continues with a wonderful blend of food metaphors, word plays, rhythms and repetition as she tells how David, Joseph, Franklin and Ezell “ were treated like the hole in a doughnut - invisible” during a time when the “law’s recipe for segregation” was “do not combine white people with black people.” Brian Pinkney serves up energetic illustrations that add spice to his wife’s piquant words.
Patricia Polacco, January’s Sparrow (Philomel, ages 8 and up)
Illustrations and text recount the true story of the Crosswhite family in this long picture book. The protagonist, young Sadie, remembers how her family fled their cruel Kentucky slave life to make a home in Marshall, Michigan and how they’ve just begin to feel safe when the threat of slave catchers finds them.
Aaron Reynolds, Back of the Bus (Philomel, ages 5-10)
The author’s lyrical voice and the realistic illustrations by Floyd Cooper place us squarely in the body of a young black boy whose innocent viewpoint give a dramatic response to Rosa Park’s courageous stand as she refused to give up her bus seat.
Paula Young Shelton, Child of the Civil Rights Movement (Schwartz and Wade, ages 7 and up)
Raul Colon links poignant images to free verse poems written by the daughter of Andrew Young. Paula offers her innocent and intimate perspective of the Sixties greatest leaders who coddled her like kind aunts and uncles while she naively witnesses their plans to take on Jim Crow.
There’s a reason songs and poems are passed from generation to generation, as the books below prove.
Ashley Bryan, All Things Bright and Beautiful, based on the hymn by Cecil F. Alexander, (Atheneum, ages 2 and up)
Bright collages match the message of the well-known hymn that proclaims the glory of nature. Bryan’s collages wow the eye as the song’s words speak to the heart. The music and words to all four stanzas are included in the book.
Ntozake Shange, We Troubled the Waters (Amistad, ages 8 and up)
Dialect, viewpoint and lyricism combine in strongly voiced viewpoints of floor-scrubbers, garbage men, as well as those determined to vote, be schooled and escape the KKK. Everyday folk are lauded as eloquently in the odes as historically-recognized figures like Rosa Parks and Malcolm X.
Stuart Stotts, We Shall Overcome: A Song that Changed the World (Clarion, ages 10 and up)
CD, music, lyrics, photographs, and text tell how, as Pete Seeger states in his foreward, “the power of singing together shows us that change is possible”. An extensive text covers the history of the song, how it changed during protests and marches and unified those who sang it.
Carole Boston Weatherford, The Beatitudes: From Slavery to Civil Rights (Eerdmans, ages 7 and up)
The poet writes in the voice of God who tells how he’s been with African-Americans from Middle Passage to Barack Obama’s oath. Full page illustrations describe significant moments in time and at the bottom of every page appears a verse from the Beatitudes. Poems, pictures and verses merge in a book certain to initiate discussion.
First-time author Irene Latham pens Leaving Gee’s Bend (Putnam, ages 8-12). The protagonist is ten-year-old Ludelphia Bennet, who has grown up embraced by her mother’s words of wisdom. Ludelphia’s world is harsh and hard. In 1932 Gee’s Bend, Alabama, her community combats sharecropping sorrows by telling and stitching stories into warm, comforting quilts. Medical treatment is scant, a fact proved early in the novel when Ludelphia describes how her clouded eye has been covered with a patch ever since a woodchip from her father’s axe struck her eye. Still Ludelphia’s home is as warm as a Gee’s Bend quilt until Ludelphia’s mother suffers a difficult childbirth, her cough worsens and she lies close to death. Ludelphia decides she must leave the only home she’s ever known to fetch a doctor from Camden, a town that’s forty miles and a river crossing away. With only her mother’s wisdom and a quilt and needle for company, Ludelphia’s rich voice and strong stitches tells her amazing story. The book powerfully blends history, voice, time and place, and a feisty young heroine who survives charges of witchcraft, prejudice and the forces of nature.